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+The Project Gutenberg EBook of Memoirs of a Midget, by Walter de la Mare
+
+This eBook is for the use of anyone anywhere at no cost and with
+almost no restrictions whatsoever.  You may copy it, give it away or
+re-use it under the terms of the Project Gutenberg License included
+with this eBook or online at www.gutenberg.org/license
+
+
+Title: Memoirs of a Midget
+
+Author: Walter de la Mare
+
+Release Date: March 26, 2012 [EBook #39122]
+
+Language: English
+
+Character set encoding: ASCII
+
+*** START OF THIS PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK MEMOIRS OF A MIDGET ***
+
+
+
+
+Produced by David Starner, Martin Pettit and the Online
+Distributed Proofreading Team at http://www.pgdp.net (This
+book was produced from scanned images of public domain
+material from the Google Print project.)
+
+
+
+
+
+
+Memoirs of a Midget
+
+
+BY THE SAME AUTHOR
+
+THE THREE MULLA-MULGARS
+
+_Illustrated by Dorothy P. Lathrop._
+
+
+"The story concerns the adventures of three monkeys of royal blood ... a
+tale of strange creatures and strange landscapes, of adventures and
+misadventures in faery forests. One of those rare books that everyone
+will love.
+
+"Miss Lathrop's illustrations have placed her, at a bound, in the first
+rank of American imaginative illustrators."
+
+--_Chicago Evening Post._
+
+_Boxed, $4.00 net at all bookshops_
+
+_NEW YORK: ALFRED A. KNOPF_
+
+
+
+
+MEMOIRS _of a_ MIDGET
+
+_by_ WALTER _de la_ MARE
+
+[Illustration: Logo]
+
+NEW YORK MCMXXI
+ALFRED A. KNOPF
+
+
+COPYRIGHT, 1922, BY
+WALTER DE LA MARE
+
+_Published, January, 1922_
+
+_Set up and printed by the Veil-Ballon Co., Binghamton, N. Y._
+_Paper furnished by W. F. Etherington & Co., New York, N. Y._
+_Bound by the Plimpton Press, Norwood, Mass._
+
+MANUFACTURED IN THE UNITED STATES OF AMERICA
+
+
+TO THE MEMORY OF MY MOTHER
+
+_A wild beast there is in AEgypt, called orix, which the AEgyptians say,
+doth stand full against the dog starre when it riseth, looketh wistly
+upon it, and testifieth after a sort by sneesing, a kind of worship...._
+
+Philemon Holland.
+
+'_Did'st thou ever see a lark in a cage? Such is the soul in the body:
+this world is like her little turf of grass; and the heaven o'er our
+heads, like her looking-glass, only gives us a miserable knowledge of
+the small compass of our prison...._'
+
+John Webster.
+
+'_Provoke them not, fair sir, with tempting words; the heavens are
+gracious...._'
+
+Thomas Kyd.
+
+
+
+
+Contents
+
+
+Introduction         13
+
+Lyndsey              19
+
+Beechwood            71
+
+Wanderslore         155
+
+Lyme Regis          239
+
+London              263
+
+Monks' House        355
+
+Wanderslore         399
+
+Lyndsey             433
+
+
+
+
+Memoirs of a Midget
+
+
+
+
+Introduction
+
+
+A few introductory and explanatory remarks are due, I think, to the
+reader of the following Memoirs. The Memoirs themselves will disclose
+how I became acquainted with Miss M. They also refer here and there to
+the small part I was enabled to take in straightening matters out at
+what was a critical juncture in her affairs, and in securing for her
+that independence which enabled her to live in the privacy she loved,
+without any anxiety as to ways and means. At the time, it is clear that
+she considered me a dilatory intermediary. I had not realized how
+extreme was her need. But she came at last to take a far too generous
+view of these trifling little services--services as generously rewarded,
+since they afforded me the opportunity of frequently seeing her, and so
+of becoming, as I hope, one of her most devoted friends.
+
+One of the duties devolving on me as her sole executor--certain unusual
+legal proceedings having been brought to completion--was the examination
+of her letters and papers. Amongst these were her Memoirs--which I found
+sealed up with her usual scrupulous neatness in numerous small, square,
+brown-paper packages, and laid carefully away in a cupboard in her old
+nursery. They were accompanied by a covering letter addressed to myself.
+
+Miss M.'s handwriting was even more minute than one might naturally,
+though not perhaps justifiably, have anticipated. Her manuscript would
+therefore have been difficult enough for aging eyes to decipher, even if
+it had not been almost inextricably interlined, revised and corrected.
+Literary composition to this little woman-of-letters was certainly no
+"primrose path." The packages were therefore handed over to a
+trustworthy typist; and, at my direction, one complete and accurate copy
+was made of their contents.
+
+After careful consideration, and after disguising the names of certain
+persons and places to preclude every possibility of giving offence--even
+Mrs Percy Maudlen, for instance, if she ever scans these pages, may
+blush unrecognized!--I concluded that though I was under no absolute
+obligation to secure the publication of the Memoirs, this undoubtedly
+had been Miss M.'s intention and wish. At the same time, and for similar
+reasons, I decided that their publication should not take place until
+after my death. Instructions have therefore been left by me to this
+effect. Here then my editorial duties begin and end. Nothing has been
+altered; nothing suppressed.
+
+Even if such a task were within my province, I should not venture to
+make any critical estimate of Miss M.'s work. I am not a writer: and, as
+a reader, have an inveterate preference to be allowed to study and enjoy
+my authors with as little external intervention as possible. The perusal
+of the Memoirs has afforded me the deepest possible pleasure. The
+serious-minded may none the less dismiss a midget's lucubrations as
+trifling; and no doubt--it could hardly be otherwise--a more practised
+taste than mine will discover many faults, crudities, and
+inconsistencies in them, though certain little prejudices on Miss M.'s
+side may not be so easily detectable. Whatever their merits or
+imperfections may be, I should be happy to think that the following
+pages may prove as interesting to other readers--however few--as they
+have been to myself.
+
+My own prejudices, I confess, are in Miss M.'s favour. Indeed, she
+herself assured me in the covering letter to which reference has been
+made, that a chance word of mine had been her actual incentive to
+composition--the remark, in fact, that "the _truth_ about even the least
+of things--_e. g._, your Self, Miss M.!--may be a taper in whose beam
+one may peep at the truth about everything." I cannot recall the
+occasion, or this little apophthegm. Indeed, only with extreme
+reluctance would I have helped to launch my small friend on her gigantic
+ordeal. As a matter-of-fact, she had a little way of carrying off scraps
+of the conversation of the "common-sized," as a bee carries off a drop
+of nectar, and of transforming them into a honey all her own.
+
+As characteristic of her is the fact that during the whole time she was
+engaged on her writing (and there is ample evidence in her manuscript
+that, whether in fatigue, disinclination, or despair, she sometimes left
+it untouched for weeks together) she never made the faintest allusion to
+it. Authors, I believe--if I may take the elder Disraeli for my
+authority--are seldom so secretive concerning their activities. No less
+characteristically, her letter to me was dated February 14th. Her
+Memoirs were to be my Valentine.
+
+"'Little drops of water ...' my dear Sir Walter," she wrote; "you know
+the rest. Nevertheless, if only I had been given but one sharp spark of
+genius, what 'infinite pains' I should have been spared. Yet what is
+here concerns only my early days, and chiefly one long year of them. I
+might have written on--almost _ad infinitum_. But I did not, because I
+feared to weary us both--of myself. The years that have followed my
+'coming of age' have been outwardly uneventful; and other people's
+thoughts, I find, are not so interesting as their experiences. There's
+much to forgive in what I have written--the rawness, the
+self-consciousness, the vanity, the folly. I am older now; but am I
+wiser--or merely not so young?
+
+"Just as it stands, then, I shall leave my story to, and for, you....
+Again and again, as I have pored over the scenes of my memory, I have
+asked myself: What can life be about? What does it mean? What was my
+true course? Where my compass? How many times, too, have I vainly
+speculated what _inward_ difference being a human creature of my
+dimensions really makes. What is--deep, deep in--at variance between Man
+and Midget? _You_ may discover this; even if _I_ never shall. For after
+all, life's beads are all on one string, however loosely threaded they
+may seem to be.
+
+"I have tried to tell nothing but the truth about myself. But I realize
+that it cannot be the whole truth. For while so engaged (just as when
+one peers into a looking-glass in the moonlight) a something has at
+times looked out of some secret den or niche in me, and then has
+vanished. Supposing, then, my dear Sir W., my story convinces you that
+all these years you have unawares been harbouring in your friendship not
+a woman, scarcely a human being, but an ASP! Oh dear, and oh dear! Well,
+there are three and-thirty ingredients (ingrediments as I used to call
+them, when I was a child) in that sovran antidote, Venice Treacle.
+Scatter a pennyweight of it upon my tombstone; and so lay my
+in-fi-ni-te-si-mal ap-pa-ri-ti-on!
+
+"Maybe though, there are not so very many vital differences between
+'midgets' and people of the common size; no more, perhaps, than there
+are between them and 'the Great.' Even then it is possible that after
+reading my small, endless story you may be very thankful that you are
+not a Midget too.
+
+"Whether or not, I have tried to be frank, if not a Warning. Keep or
+destroy what I have written, as you will. But please show it to nobody
+until nobody would mind. And now, good-bye.
+
+"M."
+
+
+There was a tacit compact between Miss M. and myself that I should visit
+her at Lyndsey about once a month. Business, indisposition, advancing
+age, only too frequently made the journey impracticable. But in general,
+I would at such intervals find myself in her company at her old house,
+Stonecote; drinking tea with her, gossiping, or reading to her, while
+she sat in her chair beside my book, embroidering her brilliant tiny
+flowers and beetles and butterflies with her tiny needle, listening or
+day-dreaming or musing out of the high window at the prospect of Chizzel
+Hill.
+
+At times she was an extremely quiet companion. At others she would rain
+questions on me, many of them exceedingly unconventional, on a score of
+subjects at once, scarcely pausing for answers which I was frequently at
+a loss to give. In a mixed company she was, perhaps, exaggeratedly
+conscious of her minute stature.
+
+But in these quiet talks--that shrill-sweet voice, those impulsive
+little gestures--she forgot it altogether. Not so her visitor, who must
+confess to having been continually convicted in her presence of a kind
+of clumsiness and gaucherie--and that, I confess, not merely physical.
+To a stranger this experience, however wholesome, might be a little
+humiliating.
+
+When interested, Miss M. would sit perfectly still, her hands tightly
+clasped in her lap, her eyes fixed with a piercing, yet curiously
+remote, scrutiny. In complete repose, her features lost this keenness,
+and she became an indescribably beautiful little figure, in her
+bright-coloured clothes, in the large quiet room. I can think of no
+comparison that would not seem fanciful. Her self is to some extent in
+her book. And yet that unique volatile presence, so frail, yet so
+vigorous, "so very nearly nothing," in her own whimsical phrase, is only
+fitfully manifest.
+
+Naturally enough, she loved solitude. But I am inclined to think she
+indulged in it to excess. It was, at any rate, in solitude that she
+wrote her book; and in solitude apparently that her unknown visitor
+found her, in the following mysterious circumstances.
+
+The last of our reunions--and one no less happy than the rest--was
+towards the end of the month of March. On the morning of the following
+25th of April I received a telegram summoning me to Lyndsey. I arrived
+there the same afternoon, and was admitted by Mrs Bowater, Miss M.'s
+excellent, but somewhat Dickensian, housekeeper, then already a little
+deaf and elderly. I found her in extreme distress. It appeared that the
+evening before, about seven o'clock, Mrs Bowater had heard voices in the
+house--Miss M.'s and another's. Friendly callers were infrequent;
+unfamiliar ones extremely rare; and Mrs Bowater confessed that she had
+felt some curiosity, if not concern, as to who this stranger might be,
+and how he had gained admission. She blamed herself beyond
+measure--though I endeavoured to reassure the good woman--for not
+instantly setting her misgivings at rest.
+
+Hearing nothing more, except the rain beating at the basement window, at
+half-past seven she went upstairs and knocked at Miss M.'s door. The
+large, pleasant room--her old nursery--at the top of the house, was in
+its usual scrupulous order, but vacant. Nothing was disarranged, nothing
+unusual, except only that a slip of paper had been pinned to the carpet
+a little beyond the threshold, with this message: "I have been called
+away.--M."
+
+This communication, far from soothing, only increased Mrs Bowater's
+anxiety. She searched the minute Sheraton wardrobe, and found that a
+garden hat and cape were missing. She waited a while--unlike her usual
+self--at a loss what to be doing, and peering out of the window. But as
+darkness was coming on, and Miss M. rarely went out in windy or showery
+weather, or indeed descended the staircase without assistance, she
+became so much alarmed that a little before eight she set out to explore
+the garden with a stable lantern, and afterwards hurried off to the
+village for assistance.
+
+As the reader will himself discover, this was not the first occasion on
+which Miss M. had given her friends anxiety. The house, the garden, the
+surrounding district, her old haunts at Wanderslore were repeatedly
+submitted at my direction to the most rigorous and protracted search.
+Watch was kept on the only gipsy encampment in the neighbourhood, near
+the Heath. Advertisement failed to bring me any but false clues. At
+length even hope had to be abandoned.
+
+Miss M. had been "called away." By whom? I ask myself: on what errand?
+for what purpose? So clear and unhurried was the writing of her last
+message as to preclude, I think, the afflicting thought that her visitor
+had been the cause of any apprehension or anxiety. An even more tragic
+eventuality is out of the question. After the events recorded in her
+last chapter not only had she made me a certain promise, but her later
+life at Lyndsey had been, apparently, perfectly serene and happy. Only a
+day or two before she had laughed up at her housekeeper, "Why, Mrs
+Bowater, there's not _room_ enough in me for all that's there!" Nor is
+it to be assumed that some "inward" voice--her own frequent term--had
+summoned her away; for Mrs Bowater immovably maintains that its tones
+reached her ear, though she herself was at the moment engaged in the
+kitchen referred to in the first chapter of the Memoirs.
+
+WALTER DADUS POLLACKE.
+
+BRUNSWICK HOUSE,
+BEECHWOOD.
+
+
+
+
+Lyndsey
+
+
+
+
+Chapter One
+
+
+Some few years ago a brief account of me found its way into one or two
+country newspapers. I have been told, that it reappeared, later, in
+better proportion, in the Metropolitan Press! Fortunately, or
+unfortunately, very little of this account was true. It related, among
+other things, that I am accustomed to wear shoes with leaden soles to
+them to keep me from being blown away like thistledown in the wind, that
+as a child I had narrowly escaped being scalded to death in a soup
+tureen, that one of my ancestors came from Poland, that I am an expert
+painter of miniatures, that I am a changeling and can speak the fairy
+tongue. And so on and so forth.
+
+I think I can guess where my ingenuous biographer borrowed these fables.
+He meant me no harm; he was earning his living; he made judicious use of
+his "no doubts" and "it may be supposed"; and I hope he amused his
+readers. But by far the greater part of his account was concerned with
+mere _physical_ particulars. He had looked at me in fancy through
+spectacles which may or may not have been rosy, but which certainly
+minified. I do not deserve his inches and ounces, however flattering his
+intentions may have been. It is true that my body is among the smaller
+works of God. But I think he paid rather too much attention to this
+fact. He spared any reference not only to my soul (and I am not
+ungrateful for that), but also to my mind and heart. There may be too
+much of all three for some tastes in the following pages, and
+especially, perhaps, of the last. That cannot be helped. Finally, my
+anonymous journalist stated that I was born in Rutlandshire--because, I
+suppose, it is the smallest county in England.
+
+That was truly unkind of him, for, as a matter of fact, and to begin at
+the (apparent) beginning, I was born in the village of Lyndsey in
+_Kent_--the prettiest country spot, as I believe, in all that county's
+million acres. So it remains to this day in spite of the fact that
+since my childhood its little church with its decaying stones and
+unfading twelfth--or is it thirteenth?--century glass has been
+"restored," and the lord of the manor has felled some of its finest
+trees, including a grove of sweet chestnuts on Bitchett Heath whose
+forefathers came over with the Romans. But he has not yet succeeded in
+levelling the barrow on Chizzel Hill. From my window I looked out
+(indeed, look out at this moment) to the wave-like crest of this beloved
+hill across a long straggling orchard, and pastures in the valley, where
+cattle grazed and sheep wandered, and unpolled willows stooped and
+silvered in the breeze. I never wearied of the hill, nor ever shall, and
+when, in my girlhood, my grandfather, aware of this idle, gazing habit
+of mine, sent me from Geneva a diminutive telescope, my day-dreams
+multiplied. His gift, as an old Kentish proverb goes, spread butter on
+bacon. With his spyglass to my eye I could bring a tapping green
+woodpecker as close as if it were actually laughing at me, and could all
+but snuff up the faint rich scent of the cowslips--paggles, as we called
+them, in meadows a good mile away.
+
+My father's house, Stonecote, has a rather ungainly appearance if viewed
+from across the valley. But it is roomy and open and fairly challenges
+the winds of the equinoxes. Its main windows are of a shallow bow shape.
+One of them is among my first remembrances. I am seated in a bright
+tartan frock on a pomatum pot--a coloured picture of Mr Shandy, as I
+remember, on its lid--and around me are the brushes, leather cases,
+knick-knacks, etc., of my father's dressing table. My father is shaving
+himself, his chin and cheeks puffed out with soapsuds. And now I look at
+him, and now at his reflection in the great looking-glass, and every
+time _that_ happens he makes a pleasant grimace at me over his
+spectacles.
+
+This particular moment of my childhood probably fixed itself on my mind
+because just as, with razor uplifted, he was about to attack his upper
+lip, a jackdaw, attracted maybe by my gay clothes, fluttered down on the
+sill outside, and fussing and scrabbling with wing and claw pecked hard
+with its beak against the glass. The sound and sight of this bird with
+its lively grey-blue eyes, so close and ardent, startled me. I leapt up,
+ran across the table, tripped over a hairbrush, and fell sprawling
+beside my father's watch. I hear its ticking, and also the little
+soothing whistle with which he was wont to comfort his daughter at any
+such mishap. Then perhaps I was five or six.
+
+That is a genuine memory. But every family, I suppose, has its little
+pet traditions; and one of ours, relating to those early years, is
+connected with our kitchen cat, Miaou. She had come by a family of
+kittens, and I had crept, so it was said, into her shallow basket with
+them. Having, I suppose, been too frequently meddled with, this old
+mother cat lugged off her kittens one by one to a dark cupboard. The
+last one thus secured, she was discovered in rapt contemplation of
+myself, as if in debate whether or not it was her maternal duty to carry
+me off too. And there was I grinning up into her face. Such was our
+cook's--Mrs Ballard's--story. What I actually remember is different. On
+the morning in question I was turning the corner of the brick-floored,
+dusky passage that led to the kitchen, when Miaou came trotting along
+out of it with her blind, blunt-headed bundle in her mouth. We were
+equally surprised at this encounter, and in brushing past she nearly
+knocked me over where I stood, casting me at the same moment the
+queerest animal look out of her eyes. So truth, in this case, was not so
+strange as Mrs Ballard's fiction.
+
+
+My father was then a rather corpulent man, with a high-coloured face,
+and he wore large spectacles. His time was his own, for we were
+comfortably off on an income derived from a half-share in the small
+fortune amassed by my grandfather and his partner in a paper mill. He
+might have been a more successful, though not perhaps a happier, man if
+he had done more work and planned to do less. But he only so far
+followed his hereditary occupation as to expend large quantities of its
+best "handmade" in the composition of a monograph: _The History of Paper
+Making_. This entailed a vast accumulation of books and much solitude. I
+fancy, too, he believed in the policy of sleeping on one's first
+thoughts.
+
+Since he was engaged at the same time on similar compilations with the
+Hop and the Cherry for theme, he made indifferent progress in all three.
+His papers, alas, were afterwards sold with his books, so I have no
+notion of what became of them or of their value. I can only hope that
+their purchaser has since won an easy distinction. These pursuits, if
+they achieved little else but the keeping of "the man of the house"
+quiet and contented, proved my father, at any rate, to be a loyal and
+enthusiastic Man of Kent; and I have seen to it that a fine Morello
+cherry-tree blossoms, fruits, and flourishes over his grave.
+
+My father was something of a musician too, and could _pizzicato_ so
+softly on his muted fiddle as not to jar even my too sensitive ear. He
+taught me to play chess on a little board with pygmy men, but he was apt
+to lose interest in the game when it went against him. Whereas it was
+then that our old friend, Dr Grose, played his hardest. As my father's
+hands were rather clumsy in make, he took pains to be gentle and adroit
+with me. But even after shaving, his embrace was more of a discipline
+than a pleasure--a fact that may partly account for my own
+undemonstrativeness in this direction.
+
+His voice, if anything, was small for his size, except when he discussed
+politics with Dr Grose; religion or the bringing up of children with my
+godmother, Miss Fenne; or money matters with my mother. At such times,
+his noise--red face and gesticulations--affected one of his listeners,
+as eager as possible to pick up the crumbs, far more than ever thunder
+did, which is up in the clouds. My only other discomfort in his company
+was his habit of taking snuff. The stench of it almost suffocated me,
+and at tap of his finger-nail on the lid of his box, I would scamper off
+for shelter like a hare.
+
+By birth he came of an old English family, though no doubt with the
+usual admixtures. My mother's mother was French. She was a Daundelyon.
+The blood of that "sweet enemy" at times burned in her cheek like a
+flag; and my father needed his heaviest guns when the stormy winds did
+blow, and those colours were flying. At such moments I preferred to hear
+the engagement from a distance, not so much (again) because the mere
+discord grieved me, as to escape the din. But usually--and especially
+after such little displays--they were like two turtle-doves, and I did
+my small best to pipe a decoy.
+
+My father had been a man past forty when he married my mother. She about
+fifteen years younger--a slim, nimble, and lovely being, who could slip
+round and encircle him in person or mind while he was pondering whether
+or not to say Bo to a goose. Seven years afterwards came I. Friends, as
+friends will, professed to see a likeness between us. And if my mother
+could have been dwindled down to be of my height and figure, perhaps
+they would have been justified.
+
+But in hair and complexion, possibly in ways, too, I harked back to an
+aunt of hers, Kitilda, who had died of consumption in her early
+twenties. I loved to hear stories of my great-aunt Kitilda. She sang
+like a bird, twice ran away from her convent school, and was so fond of
+water that an old gentleman (a friend of Mr Landor's, the poet) who fell
+in love with her, called her "the Naiad."
+
+My mother, in her youth at Tunbridge Wells, had been considered "a
+beauty," and had had many admirers--at least so Mrs Ballard, our cook,
+told Pollie: "Yes, and we know who might have turned out different if
+things hadn't been the same," was a cryptic remark she once made which
+filled two "little pitchers" to overflowing. Among these admirers was a
+Mr Wagginhorne who now lived at Maidstone. He had pocketed his passion
+but not his admiration; and being an artist in the same sense that my
+father was an author, he had painted my mother and me and a pot of
+azaleas in oils. How well I remember those interminable sittings, with
+the old gentleman daubing along, and cracking his beloved jokes and
+Kentish cobbs at one and the same time. Whenever he came to see us this
+portrait was taken out of a cupboard and hung up in substitution for
+another picture in the dining-room. What became of it when Mr
+Wagginhorne died I could never discover. My mother would laugh when I
+inquired, and archly eye my father. It was clear, at any rate, that
+author was not jealous of artist!
+
+My mother was gentle with me, and had need to be; and I was happier in
+her company than one might think possible in a world of such
+fleetingness. I would sit beside her workbox and she would softly talk
+to me, and teach me my lessons and small rhymes to say; while my own
+impulse and instinct taught me to sing and dance. What gay hours we
+shared. Sewing was at first difficult, for at that time no proportionate
+needles could be procured for me, and I hated to cobble up only coarse
+work. But she would give me little childish jobs to do, such as
+arranging her silks, or sorting her beads, and would rock me to sleep
+with her finger to a drone so gentle that it might have been a distant
+bee's.
+
+Yet shadows there were, before the darkness came. Child that I was, I
+would watch gather over her face at times a kind of absentness, as if
+she were dreaming of something to which she could give no name, of some
+hope or wish that was now never to be fulfilled. At this I would grow
+anxious and silent, doubting, perhaps, that I had displeased her; while,
+to judge from her look, I might not have been there at all.
+
+Or again, a mischievousness and mockery would steal into her mood. Then
+she would treat me as a mere trivial plaything, talking _small_ things
+to me, as if our alphabet consisted of nothing but "little o"--a letter
+for which I always felt a sort of pity: but small affection. This habit
+saddened my young days, and sometimes enraged me, more than I can say. I
+was _always_ of a serious cast of mind--even a little priggish perhaps;
+and experience had already taught me that I could share my mother's
+thoughts and feelings more easily than she could share mine.
+
+
+
+
+Chapter Two
+
+
+When precisely I began to speculate _why_ I was despatched into this
+world so minute and different I cannot say. Pretty early, I fancy,
+though few opportunities for comparison were afforded me, and for some
+time I supposed that all young children were of my stature. There was
+Adam Waggett, it is true, the bumpkin son of a village friend of Mrs
+Ballard's. But he was some years older than I. He would be invited to
+tea in the kitchen, and was never at rest unless stuffing himself out
+with bread-and-dripping or dough-cake--victuals naturally odious to me;
+or pestering me with his coarse fooling and curiosity. He was to prove
+useful in due season; but in those days I had a distaste for him almost
+as deep-rooted as that for "Hoppy," the village idiot--though I saw poor
+Hoppy only once.
+
+Whatever the reason may be, except in extremely desperate moments, I do
+not remember much regretting that I was not of the common size. Still,
+the realization was gradually borne in on me that I was a disappointment
+and mischance to my parents. Yet I never dared to let fall a question
+which was to be often in my young thoughts: "Tell me, mamma, are you
+_sorry_ that your little daughter is a Midget?" But then, does any one
+ask questions like that until they cannot be answered?
+
+Still, cross-examine her I did occasionally.
+
+"Where did I come from, mamma?"
+
+"Why, my dear, I am your mother."
+
+"Just," I replied, "like Pollie's mother is _her_ mother?"
+
+She cast a glance at me from eyes that appeared to be very small, unless
+for that instant it was mine that I saw reflected there.
+
+"Yes, my dear," she replied at length. "We come and we go." She seemed
+tired with the heat of the day, so I sate quietly, holding her finger,
+until she was recovered.
+
+Only, perhaps, on account of my size was there any occasion for me to
+be thoroughly ashamed of myself. Otherwise I was, if anything, a rather
+precocious child. I could walk a step or two at eleven months, and began
+to talk before the Christmas following the first anniversary of my
+birthday, August 30th. I learned my letters from the big black capitals
+in the Book of Genesis; and to count and cipher from a beautiful little
+Abacus strung with beads of silver and garnets. The usual ailments came
+my way, but were light come, light go. I was remarkably sinewy and
+muscular, strong in the chest, and never suffered from snuffling colds
+or from chilblains, though shoes and gloves have always been a
+difficulty.
+
+I can perfectly recall my childish figure as I stood with endless
+satisfaction surveying my reflection in a looking-glass on the Christmas
+morning after my ninth birthday. My frock was of a fine puffed scarlet,
+my slippers loose at heel, to match. My hair, demurely parted in the
+middle, hung straight on my narrow shoulders (though I had already
+learned to plait it) and so framed my face; the eyebrows faintly arched
+(eyebrows darker and crookeder now); the nose in proportion; the lips
+rather narrow, and of a lively red.
+
+My features wore a penetrating expression in that reflection because my
+keen look was searching them pretty close. But if it was a sharp look,
+it was not, I think, a bold or defiant; and then I smiled, as if to say,
+"So this is to be my companion, then?"
+
+It was winter, and frost was on the window that day. I enjoyed the crisp
+air, for I was packed warm in lamb's-wool underneath. There I stood, my
+father's round red face beaming on one side of the table, my mother's
+smiling but enigmatic, scrutinizing my reflection on the other, and
+myself tippeting this way and that--a veritable miniature of Vanity.
+
+Who should be ushered at this moment into the room, where we were so
+happy, but my godmother, Miss Fenne, come to bring my father and mother
+her Christmas greetings and me a little catechism sewn up in a pink silk
+cover. She was a bent-up old lady and a rapid talker, with a voice
+which, though small, jangled every nerve in my body, like a pencil on a
+slate. Being my godmother, she took great liberties in counselling my
+parents on the proper way of "managing" me. The only time, indeed, I
+ever heard my father utter an oath was when Miss Fenne was just beyond
+hearing. She peered across at me on this Christmas morning like a bird
+at a scorpion: "Caroline, Caroline," she cried, "for shame! The Shrimp!
+You will turn the child's head."
+
+_Shrimp!_ I had seen the loathsome, doubled-up creatures (in their
+boiled state) on a kitchen plate. My blood turned to vinegar; and in
+rage and shame I fell all of a heap on the table, hiding from her sight
+my face and my hands as best I could under my clothes, and wishing that
+I might vanish away from the world altogether.
+
+My father's voice boomed out in protest; my mother took me into her arms
+to soothe and scold me; but long after the ruffled old lady had taken
+her departure I brooded on this affront. "Away, away!" a voice seemed to
+cry within; and I listened to it as if under a spell. All that day I
+nursed my wounded vanity, and the same evening, after candle light, I
+found myself for a moment alone in the kitchen. Pollie had gone to the
+wood-shed to fetch kindling, leaving the door into the garden ajar. The
+night air touched my cheek. Half beside myself with desire of I know not
+what, I sprang out from the doorstep into an inch or so of snow, and
+picking myself up, ran off into the darkness under the huge sky.
+
+It was bitterly cold. Frost had crusted the virgin surface of the snow.
+My light footsteps can hardly have shattered its upper crystals. I ran
+on and on into the ghostly world, into this stiff, marvelous, gloating
+scene of frozen vegetation beneath that immense vacancy. A kind of
+stupor must have spread over my young mind. It seemed I was transported
+out of myself under the stars, in the mute presence of the Watchman of
+Heaven. I stood there lost in wonder in the grey, luminous gloom.
+
+But my escapade was brief and humiliating. The shock of the cold, the
+excitement, quickly exhausted me. I threw myself down and covered my
+face with my hands, trying in vain to stifle my sobs. What was my
+longing? Where its satisfaction? Soft as wool a drowsiness stole over my
+senses that might swiftly have wafted me off on the last voyage of
+discovery. But I had been missed. A few minutes' search, and Pollie
+discovered me lying there by the frozen cabbage stalks. The woeful Maenad
+was carried back into the kitchen again--a hot bath, a hot posset, and a
+few anxious and thankful tears.
+
+The wonder is, that, being an only child, and a sore problem when any
+question of discipline or punishment arose, I was not utterly spoiled.
+One person at least came very near to doing so, my grandfather, Monsieur
+Pierre de Ronvel. To be exact, he was my step-grandfather, for my
+mother's charming mother, with her ringlets and crinoline, after my real
+grandfather's death, had married a second time. He crossed the English
+Channel to visit my parents when I was in my tenth year--a tall, stiff,
+jerky man, with a sallow face, speckled fur-like hair that stood in a
+little wall round his forehead, and the liveliest black eyes. His
+manners were a felicity to watch even at my age. You would have supposed
+he had come _courting_ my mother; and he took a great fancy to me. He
+was extremely fond of salad, I remember: and I very proud of my mustard
+and cress--which I could gather for him myself with one of my own
+table-knives. So copiously he talked, with such a medley of joys and
+zests and surprises on his face, that I vowed soon to be mistress of my
+stepmother tongue. He could also conjure away reels and thimbles, even
+spoons and forks, with a skill that precluded my becoming a materialist
+for ever after. I _worshipped_ my grandfather--and yet without a vestige
+of fear.
+
+To him, indeed--though I think he was himself of a secular turn of
+mind--I owe the story of my birthday saint, St Rosa of Lima in Peru, the
+only saint, I believe, of the New World. With myself pinnacled on his
+angular knee, and devouring like a sweetmeat every broken English word
+as it slipped from his tongue, he told me how pious an infant my Saint
+had been; how, when her mother, to beautify her, had twined flowers in
+her hair, she had _pinned_ them to her skull; how she had rubbed
+quicklime on her fair cheeks to disenchant her lovers ("_ses
+pretendants_"), and how it was only veritable showers of roses from
+heaven that had at last persuaded Pope Clement to make her a saint.
+
+"Perhaps, _bon papa_," said I, "I shall dig and sow too when I am grown
+up, like St Rosa, to support _my_ mamma and papa when _they_ are very
+old. Do you think I shall make enough money? Papa has a very good
+appetite?" He stared at me, as if in consternation.
+
+"_Dieu vous en garde, ma p'tite_," he cried; and violently blew his
+nose.
+
+So closely I took St Rosa's story to heart that, one day, after bidding
+my beauty a wistful farewell in the glass, I rubbed my cheek too, but
+with the blue flowers of the--_brook_lime. It stained them a little,
+but soon washed off. In my case a needless precaution; my _pretendants_
+have been few.
+
+It was a mournful day when my grandfather returned to France never to be
+seen by me again. Yet he was to remember me always; and at last when I
+myself had forgotten even my faith in his fidelity. Nearly all my
+personal furnishings and belongings were gifts of his from France, and
+many of them of his own making. There was my four-post bed, for
+instance; with a flowered silk canopy, a carved tester and half a dozen
+changes of linen and valance. There were chairs to match, a wardrobe,
+silk mats from Persia, a cheval glass, and clothes and finery in
+abundance, china and cutlery, top-boots and sabots. Even a silver-hooped
+bath-tub and a crystal toilet set, and scores of articles besides for
+use or ornament, which it would be tedious to mention. My grandfather
+had my measurements to a nicety, and as the years went by he sagaciously
+allowed for growth.
+
+I learned to tell the time from an eight-day clock which played a sacred
+tune at matins and vespers; and later, he sent me a watch, the least bit
+too large for me to be quite comfortable, but an exquisite piece of
+workmanship. As my birthdays (and his) drew near, I could scarcely sleep
+for thinking what fresh entrancing novelty the festive morning would
+bring. The only one of his gifts--by no means the least ingenious--which
+never, after the first flush of excitement, gave me much pleasure, was a
+two-chambered thatched summer-house, set up on a pole, and reached by a
+wide, shallow ladder. The roof opened, so that on very hot days a block
+of ice could be laid within, the water from its slow melting running out
+by a gutter. But I loved sunshine. This was a plaything that
+ridiculously amused chance visitors; it attracted flies; I felt silly up
+in it: and gladly resigned it to the tits, starlings, and sparrows to
+quarrel over as they pleased.
+
+My really useful furniture--of plain old Sheraton design--was set out in
+my bedroom. In one half of the room slept Pollie, a placid but, before
+her marriage, rather slow-witted creature about six years my senior. The
+other half was mine and had been made proportionate to my needs by a
+cabinet-maker from London. My father had had a low stone balcony built
+on beyond my window. This was fenced with fine trellis work to screen it
+from the colder winds. With its few extremely dwarf trees set along in
+green Nankin tubs, and the view it commanded, I could enjoy this eyrie
+for hours--never wearied of it in my youth, nor shall if I live to be a
+hundred.
+
+
+I linger over these early recollections, simply because they are such
+very happy things to possess. And now for out-of-doors.
+
+Either because my mother was shy of me, or because she thought vulgar
+attention would be bad for me, she seldom took me far abroad. Now and
+then Pollie carried me down to the village to tea with _her_ mother, and
+once or twice I was taken to church. The last occasion, however,
+narrowly escaped being a catastrophe, and the experiment was not
+repeated. Instead, we usually held a short evening service, on Sundays,
+in the house, when my father read the lessons, "like a miner prophet,"
+as I wrote and told Miss Fenne. He certainly dug away at the texts till
+the words glittered for me like lumps of coal. On week-days more people
+were likely to be about, and in general I was secluded. A mistake, I
+think. But fortunately our high, plain house stood up in a delightful
+garden, sloping this way and that towards orchard and wood, with a
+fine-turfed lawn, few "cultivated" flowers, and ample drifts of shade.
+If Kent is the garden of England, then this was the garden of Kent.
+
+I was forbidden to be alone in it. But Pollie would sometimes weary of
+her charge (in which I encouraged her) and when out of sight of the
+windows she would stray off to gossip with the gardener or with some
+friend from the village, leaving me to myself. To judge from the tales
+which I have read or have been told about children, I must have been old
+for my age. But perhaps the workings of the mind and heart of a girl in
+her teens are not of general interest. Let me be brief. A stream of
+water ran on the southern side all the length of the garden, under a
+high, rocky bank (its boundary) which was densely overhung with ash and
+willow, and hedges of brier and bramble looped with bindweed,
+goose-grass, and traveller's joy. On the nearer bank of this stream
+which had been left to its wild, I would sit among the mossy rocks and
+stones and search the green tops of my ambush as if in quest of
+Paradise.
+
+When the sun's rays beat down too fiercely on my head I would make
+myself an umbrella of wild angelica or water parsnip.
+
+Caring little for playthings, and having my smallest books with me
+chiefly for silent company, I would fall into a daydream in a world that
+in my solitude became my own. In this fantastic and still world I forgot
+the misadventure of my birth, which had now really begun to burden me,
+forgot pride, vanity, and chagrin; and was at peace. There I had many
+proportionate friends, few enemies. An old carrion crow, that sulked out
+a black existence in this beauty, now and then alarmed me with his
+attentions; but he was easily scared off. The lesser and least of living
+things seemed to accept me as one of themselves. Nor (perhaps because I
+never killed them) had I any silly distaste for the caterpillars,
+centipedes, and satiny black slugs. Mistress Snail would stoop out at me
+like a foster-mother. Even the midges, which to his frenzy would swarm
+round my father's head like swifts round a steeple, left me entirely
+unmolested. Either I was too dry a prey, or they misliked the flavour of
+my blood.
+
+My eyes dazzled in colours. The smallest of the marvels of flowers and
+flies and beetles and pebbles, and the radiance that washed over them,
+would fill me with a mute, pent-up rapture almost unendurable.
+Butterflies would settle quietly on the hot stones beside me as if to
+match their raiment against mine. If I proffered my hand, with quivering
+wings and horns they would uncoil their delicate tongues and quaff from
+it drops of dew or water. A solemn grasshopper would occasionally
+straddle across my palm, and with patience I made quite an old friend of
+a harvest mouse. They weigh only two to the half-penny. This sharp-nosed
+furry morsel would creep swiftly along to share my crumbs and snuggle
+itself to sleep in my lap. By-and-by, I suppose, it took to itself a
+wife; I saw it no more. Bees would rest there, the panniers of their
+thighs laden with pollen: and now and then a wasp, his jaws full of wood
+or meat. When sunbeetles or ants drew near, they would seem to pause at
+my whisper, as if hearkening. As if in their remote silence pondering
+and sharing the world with me. All childish fancy, no doubt; for I
+proved far less successful with the humans.
+
+But how, it may be asked, seeing that there must have been a shrill
+piping of birds and brawling of water among the stones, how could
+Mademoiselle's delicate ear endure _that_ racket? Perhaps it is because
+the birds being loose in the hollow of space, it carried away into its
+vacancy their cries. It is, too, the harsh, rather than the shrill, that
+frets me. As for the noise of the water, it was so full and limpid, yet
+made up of such infinitely entangled chimings and drummings, that it
+would lull me into a kind of trance, until to a strange eye I must have
+appeared like a lifeless waxen mammet on my stone.
+
+What may wholly have been another childish fancy was that apart from the
+silvery darting flies and the rainbow-coloured motes in the sunbeams,
+fine and airy invisible shapes seemed to haunt and hover around me when
+all was still. Most of my fellow creatures to my young nose had an odour
+a good deal denser than the fainter scented flowers, and I can fancy
+such a fog, if intensified, would be distressing to beings so bodiless
+and rare. Whereas the air I disturbed and infected with my presence can
+have been of but shallow volume.
+
+Fairies I never saw--I had a kind of fear and distaste for them even in
+books. Nor for that matter--perhaps because the stream here was too
+tumbling and opaque--a kingfisher. But whatever other company may have
+been mine, I had the clouds and the water and the insects and the
+stones--while pimpernel, mousetail, tormentil, the wild strawberry, the
+feathery grasses seemed to have been made expressly for my delight.
+Ego-centric Midget that I was!
+
+
+
+
+Chapter Three
+
+
+Not that in an existence so passive riddles never came my way. As one
+morning I brushed past a bush of lads' love (or maidens' ruin, as some
+call it), its fragrance sweeping me from top to toe, I stumbled on the
+carcass of a young mole. Curiosity vanquished the first gulp of horror.
+Holding my breath, with a stick I slowly edged it up in the dust and
+surveyed the white heaving nest of maggots in its belly with a peculiar
+and absorbed recognition. "Ah, ha!" a voice cried within me, "so this is
+what is in wait; this is how things are"; and I stooped with lips drawn
+back over my teeth to examine the stinking mystery more closely. That
+was a lesson I have never unlearned.
+
+One of a rather different kind had another effect. I was sitting in the
+garden one day watching in the distance a jay huffling and sidling and
+preening its feathers on a bit of decrepit fencing. Suddenly there fell
+a sharp crack of sound. In a flash, with a derisive chattering, the jay
+was flown: and then I saw Adam Waggett, half doubled up, stealing along
+towards the place. I lay in wait for him. With catapult dangling in one
+hand, the other fist tight shut, he came along like a thief. And I cried
+hollowly out of my concealment, "Adam, what have you there?"
+
+Such a picture of foolish shame I have never seen. He was compelled none
+the less to exhibit his spoil, an eye-shut, twinkle-tailed,
+needle-billed Jenny Wren crumpled up in his great, dirty paw. Fury burnt
+up in me like a fire. What I said to him I cannot remember, but it was
+nothing sweet; and it was a cowed Adam Waggett that loafed off as
+truculently as he could towards the house, his catapult and victim left
+behind him. But that was his lesson rather than mine, and one which _he_
+never forgot.
+
+When in my serener moods Pollie's voice would be heard slyly hallooing
+for me, I would rouse up with a shock to realize again the little cell
+of my body into which I had been confined. Then she and I would eat our
+luncheon, a few snippets of biscuit, a cherry or two, or slice of apple
+for me, and for her a hunch of bread and bacon about half my size in
+length and thickness. I would turn my back on her, for I could not
+endure to see her gobble her meal, having an abhorrence of cooked flesh,
+and a dainty stomach. Still, like most children I could be greedy, and
+curious of unfamiliar foods. To a few forbidden black currants which I
+reached up and plucked from their rank-smelling bush, and devoured, skin
+and all, I owe lesson Number 3. This one, however, had to be repeated.
+
+Childhood quickly fleets away. Those happy, unhappy, far-away days seem
+like mere glimpses of a dragon-fly shimmering and darting over my garden
+stream, though at the actual time they more closely resembled, perhaps,
+a continuous dream broken into bits of vivid awakening.
+
+As I grew older, my skirts grew longer, my desire for independence
+sharper, and my wits more inquiring. On my seventeenth birthday I put up
+my hair, and was confirmed by a bishop whom my godmother persuaded to
+officiate in the house. It was a solemn occasion; but my mother was a
+good deal concerned about the lunch, and I with the ballooning lawn
+sleeves and the two square episcopal finger-tips disposed upon my head.
+The experience cast a peaceful light into my mind and shook my heart,
+but it made me for a time a little self-conscious of both my virtue and
+my sins. I began to brood not only on the deplorable state of my own
+soul, but also on Pollie's and Mrs Ballard's, and became for a time a
+diminutive Miss Fenne. I suppose innocence is a precarious bliss. On the
+other hand, if one's mind is like a dead mole's belly, it is wise, I
+think, to examine it closely but not too often, and to repeat that
+confirmation for one's self every morning and evening.
+
+As a young child I had been, of course, as naturally religious as a
+savage or an angel. But even then, I think, I never could quite believe
+that Paradise was a mere Fenne-land.
+
+Once I remember in the midst of my multiplication table I had broken out
+unannounced with, "Then _God_ made the world, mamma?"
+
+"Yes, my dear."
+
+"And all things in the forests and the birds in the sky and--and moles,
+and this?" I held down my limp, coral-coloured arithmetic.
+
+"Yes," said she.
+
+I wondered a while, losing myself, as if in wanderings like Ariel's,
+between the clouds. "What, mamma, did He make them of?" my voice
+interrupted me.
+
+"He made them," said my mother steadily, "of His Power and Love."
+
+Rapidly I slid back into her company. "And can we, can I, make things of
+_my_ power and love?"
+
+"I suppose, my dear," replied my mother reflectively and perhaps
+thinking of my father in his study, over his Paper and Hops, "it is only
+_that_ in life that is really worth doing."
+
+"Then," I said sagely, "I _suspects_ that's how Mullings does the
+garden, mamma."
+
+Long before Miss Fenne's and the bishop's visitation my mother had set
+about teaching me in earnest. A governess--a Miss Perry--was our first
+experiment. Alas, apart from her tendency to quinsy, it was I who was
+found wanting. She complained of the strain on her nerves. My mother
+feared that quinsy was catching; and Miss Perry had no successor.
+Reading was always a difficulty. My father bought me as tiny old books
+as could be found, including a dwarf Bible, a midget Pickering
+Shakespeare, and a grammar (with a menagerie for frontispiece) from
+which I learned that "irony is a figure which intends the reverse of
+what it speaks, and under the masque of praise, conceals the most biting
+satyr"; and the following stanza:--
+
+
+     Hail Energeia! hail my native tongue
+     Concisely full, and musically strong;
+     Thou with the pencil hold'st a glorious strife,
+     And paint'st the passions equal to the life.
+
+
+My mother agreed that _strung_ would be preferable to "_strong_," and
+explained that "the passions" did not signify merely ill-temper; while,
+if I pecked over-nicely at my food, my father would cry "Hail Energeia!"
+a challenge which rarely failed to persuade me to set to.
+
+My grandfather sent me other pygmy books from Paris, including a minute
+masterpiece of calligraphy, _Une Anthologie de Chansons pour une
+Minuscule Aimante et Bien-aimee par P. de R_. These I could easily carry
+about with me. I soon learned to accustom my arms and shoulders to
+bulkier and more cumbrous volumes. My usual method with a common-sized
+book was to prop it up towards the middle of the table and then to seat
+myself at the edge. The page finished, I would walk across and turn over
+a fresh leaf. Thus in my solitude I studied my lessons and read again
+and again my nursery favourites, some of them, I gather, now
+undeservedly out of fashion.
+
+Perhaps even better than fiction or folk-tales, I liked books of
+knowledge.
+
+There were two of these in particular, _The Observing Eye; or Lessons to
+Children on the Three Lowest Divisions of Animal Life--The Radiated,
+Articulated, and Molluscous_, and _The Childhood of the World_. Even at
+nine I remarked how nimbly the anonymous author of the former could skip
+from St Paul to the lobster; and I never wearied of brooding on Mr
+Clodd's frontispiece. This depicts a large-headed and seemingly
+one-legged little girl in a flounced frock lying asleep under a wall on
+which ivy is sprawling. For pillow for herself and her staring doll
+there lies on the ground a full-sized human skull, and in the middle
+distance are seen the monoliths of Stonehenge. Beyond these gigantic
+stones, and behind the far mountains, rises with spiky rays an enormous
+Sun.
+
+_I_ was that child; and mine her sun that burned in heaven, and he a
+more obedient luminary than any lamp of man's. I would wonder what she
+would do when she awoke from sleep. The skull, in particular, both
+terrified and entranced me--the secret of all history seemed to lie
+hidden in the shadows beneath its dome. Indeed I needed no reminder from
+Mr Clodd that "Children (and some grown-up people too) are apt to think
+that things are wonderful only when they are big, which is not true."
+
+I knew already, out of nowhere, that "the bee's waxen cell is more
+curious than the chimpanzee's rough hut" (though I should have dearly
+liked to see the latter); and that "an ant is more wonderful than the
+huge and dull rhinoceros." Such is childishness, however: I pitied the
+poor rhinoceros his "dull." Over such small things as a nut, a shell, a
+drop of rain-water in a buttercup, a frond of frost (for there were cold
+winters at Lyndsey in those days), I would pore and pore, imbibing the
+lesson that the eye alone if used in patience will tell its owner far
+more about an object than it can merely see.
+
+Among my few framed pictures I cannot resist mentioning one by a painter
+of the name of Bosch. Below the middle of it kneeled naked Adam and Eve
+with exquisite crimped hair on their shoulders; and between them stood
+God. All above and beneath them, roamed the animals, birds, insects, and
+infinitesimals of Eden, including a long-tailed monkey on an elephant, a
+jerboa, a dancing crocodile, and--who but our cat Miaou, carrying off a
+mouse! An astonishing, inexhaustible piece of thoughtfulness. I loved
+Mynheer Bosch.
+
+Shameful dunce Miss M. may remain, but she did in her childhood
+supremely enjoy any simple book about the things of creation great or
+small. But I preferred my own notions of some of them. When my father of
+a dark, clear night would perch me up at a window to see the
+stars--Charles's Wain and the Chair; and told me that they were huge
+boiling suns, roaring their way through the vast pits of space, I would
+shake my head to myself. I was grateful for the science, but preferred
+to keep them just "stars." And though I loved to lave my hands in a
+trickle of light that had been numberless years on its journey to this
+earth, that of a candle also filled me with admiration, and I was
+unfeignedly grieved that the bleak moon was naught but a sheer hulk,
+sans even air or ice or rain or snow.
+
+How much pleasanter it would be to think that her shine was the
+reflection of our cherry orchards, and that her shadows were just
+Kentish hay-ricks, barns, and oast-houses. It was, too, perhaps rather
+tactless of my father to beguile me with full-grown authors' accounts of
+the Lives of the Little. Accomplished writers they may be, but--well,
+never mind. As for the Lives of the Great, I could easily adjust
+Monsieur Bon Papa's spyglass and reduce them to scale.
+
+
+My father taught me also to swim in his round bath; and on a visit to
+Canterbury purchased for me the nimblest little dun Shetland pony, whom
+we called Mopsa. I learned to become a fearless rider. But hardy though
+her race may be, perhaps I was too light a burden to satisfy Mopsa's
+spirit. In a passing fit of temper she broke a leg. Though I had stopped
+my ears for an hour before the Vet came, I heard the shot.
+
+My mother's lessons were never very burdensome. She taught me little,
+but she taught it well--even a morsel of Latin. I never wearied of the
+sweet oboe-like nasal sound of her French poems, and she instilled in me
+such a delight in words that to this day I firmly believe that things
+are at least twice the better and richer for being called by them. Apart
+from a kind of passionate impatience over what was alien to
+me--arithmetic, for instance, and "analysis"--and occasional fits of the
+sulks, which she allowed to deposit their own sediment at leisure, I was
+a willing, and, at times, even a greedy scholar. Apparently from infancy
+I was of a firm resolve to match my wits with those of the common-sized
+and to be "grown-up" some day.
+
+So much for my education, a thing which it seems to me is likely to
+continue--and specially in respect of human nature--as long as I keep
+alive. With so little childish company, without rivalry, I was inclined
+to swell myself out with conceit and complacency. "It's easy holding
+down the latchet when nobody pulls the string." But whatever size we may
+be, in soul or body, I have found that the world wields a sharp pin, and
+is pitiless to bubbles.
+
+Though inclined to be dreamy and idle when alone, I was, of course, my
+own teacher too. My senses were seven in number, however few my wits. In
+particular I loved to observe the clustering and gathering of plants,
+like families, each of a shape, size, and hue, each in their kind and
+season, though tall and lowly were intermingled. Now and then I would
+come on some small plant self-sown, shining and flourishing, free and
+clear, and even the lovelier for being alone in its kind amid its
+greater neighbours. I prized these discoveries, and if any one of them
+was dwarfed a little by its surroundings I would cosset it up and help
+it against them. How strange, thought I, if men so regarded each other's
+intelligence. If from pitying the dull-witted the sharp-witted slid to
+mere toleration, and from toleration to despising and loathing. What a
+contest would presently begin between the strong-bodied stupid and the
+feeble-bodied clever, and how soon there would be no strong-bodied
+stupid left in the world! They would dwindle away and disappear into
+Time like the mammoth and the woolly bear. And then I began to be sorry
+for the woolly bear and to wish I could go and have a look at him.
+Perhaps this is putting my old head on those young shoulders, but when
+I strive to re-enter the thoughts of those remote days, how like they
+seem to the noisy wasting stream beside which they flowed on, and of
+whose source and destination I was unaware.
+
+All this egotism recalls a remark that Mrs Ballard once made apropos of
+some little smart repartee from Miss M. as she sat beside her pasteboard
+and slapped away at a lump of dough, "Well _I_ know a young lady who's
+been talking to the young man that rubbed his face with a brass
+candlestick."
+
+
+
+
+Chapter Four
+
+
+In the midst of my eighteenth year fortune began to darken. My mother
+had told me little of the world, its chances and changes, cares and
+troubles. What I had learned of these came chiefly from books and my own
+speculations. We had few visitors and from all but the most familiar I
+was quickly packed away. My mother was sensitive of me, for both our
+sakes. But I think in this she was mistaken, for when my time came, Life
+found me raw, and it rubbed in the salt rather vigorously.
+
+My father had other views. He argued for facing the facts, though
+perhaps those relating to fruit and paper are not very intimidating. But
+he seldom made his way against my mother, except in matters that
+concerned his own comfort. He loved me fondly but throughout my
+childhood seems to have regarded me as a kind of animated marionette.
+When he came out from his Mills and Pockets it amused him to find me
+nibbling a raspberry beside his plate. He'd rub his round stubbly head,
+and say, "Well, mamma, and how's Trot done this morning?" or he would
+stoop and draw ever so heedfully his left little finger down my nose to
+its uttermost tip, and whisper: "And so to Land's End, my love." Now and
+then I would find his eyes fixed on me as if in stupefaction that I was
+actually his daughter.
+
+But now that I was getting to be a young woman and had put up my hair,
+and the future frowned near, this domestic problem began seriously to
+concern him. My mother paled at the very mention of it. I remember I had
+climbed up on to his writing desk one morning, in search of a pair of
+high boots which I had taken off in his study the evening before. We had
+been fishing for sticklebacks. Concealed from view, while the wind
+whined at the window, I heard a quarrel between my father and mother
+about me which I will never repeat to mortal ear. It darkened my mind
+for days, and if ... but better not.
+
+At this time anxiety about money matters must have begun its gnawing in
+my poor father's brains. And I know what _that_ means. He had
+recommended to others and speculated himself in some experiment in the
+cultivation of the trees from which the Chinese first made paper, and
+had not only been grossly cheated, but laughed at in the press. _The
+Kentish Courier_--I see his ears burning now--had referred to him as
+"the ingenious Mr Tapa"; and my mother's commiseration had hardly
+solaced him: "But, my dear, you couldn't have gone to Canton by
+yourself. We must just draw in our horns a little." The ingenious Mr
+Tapa patted the hand on his shoulder, but his ears burned on.
+
+"Besides," my mother added, with a long, sighing breath, as she seated
+herself again, "there are the books." He plucked his spectacles off, and
+gazed vaguely in her direction: "Oh, yes, yes, there are the books."
+
+Nor was he long daunted by this attack. He fell in love with some notion
+of so pickling hop-poles that they would last for ever. But the press
+was no kinder to his poles than to his mulberries.
+
+And then befell the blackest misfortune of my life. I had been ill; and
+for a few days had been sleeping in one of the spare bedrooms in a cot
+beside my mother, so that she should be near me if I needed her. This
+particular evening, however, I had gone back to my own room. We cannot
+change the past, or foresee the future. But if only Pollie had not been
+a heavy sleeper; if only I had escaped that trivial ailment--how tangled
+is life's skein! It was the May after my eighteenth birthday and full
+moonlight.
+
+Troubled in mind by my illness and other worries and mortifications, my
+mother, not fully aroused perhaps, got up in the small hours and mounted
+the stone staircase in order to look in on me. I was awake, and heard
+the rustling of her nightdress and the faint touch of her slippered feet
+ascending from stone to stone. I guessed her errand, and in my folly
+thought I would pretend to be asleep and give her a "surprise." I drew
+my curtains and lay motionless on my back as if I were dead. With eyes
+closed, listening, I smilingly waited.
+
+Then suddenly I heard a muffled, gasping cry; and all was utterly,
+icily still. I flung aside the silk curtains and leapt out of bed.
+
+
+The moonlight was streaming in a lean ray across the floor of my room. I
+ran down this luminous pathway into the dusk at the open door. At the
+stair-head beyond, still and silent, I saw my poor dear. On through the
+cold dark air I ran, and stood in her loosened hair beside her head. It
+lay unstirring, her cheek colourless, her hand stretched out, palm
+upward, on the stone. I called into her ear, first gently and
+pleadingly, then loud and shrill. I ran and chafed her fingers, then
+back again, and stooped, listening with my cheek to her lips. She
+exhaled a trembling sigh. I called and called; but my shrillness was
+utterly swallowed up in the vast night-hung house. Then softly in the
+silence her lids unsealed and her eyes, as if wonderful with a remote
+dream, looked up into my face. "My dear," she whispered, wakefulness
+gathering faintly into her gaze, "my dear, is it you?" There was an
+accent in her voice that I had never heard before. Perhaps her tranceful
+eyes had magnified me. Then once more the lids closed down and I was
+alone. I fell on my knees beside her and crouched, praying into her
+heedless ear.
+
+It was my first acquaintance with calamity, and physically powerless to
+aid her, I could think of nothing for a moment but to persuade her to
+speak to me again. Then my senses returned to me. To descend that flight
+of stairs--down which hitherto I had always been carried--would waste
+more precious time than I could spare. There seemed to be but one
+alternative--to waken Pollie. I ran back into my bedroom and tugged
+violently at the slack of her bedclothes. A mouse might as well have
+striven to ring Great Paul. She breathed on with open mouth, flat on her
+back, like a log. Then a thought came to me.
+
+There was a brass-bound box under my bed, a full fifteen inches long,
+though shallow, in which my grandfather had lately sent me some gowns
+and finery from Paris. With some little difficulty I lugged and pushed
+this all across the room, and out on to the staircase. My strength
+seemed to be superhuman. One moment I flew to my mother, but now she lay
+in a profound sleep indeed, her cheek like marble. With a last effort I
+edged my box on its side between the balusters, and at some risk of
+falling after it, shoved it over into the moon-silvered dusk below. The
+house echoed with its resounding brazen clatter as it pitched from stair
+to stair. Then quiet. Clutching with either hand the baluster I leaned
+over, listening. Then a voice cried sleepily: "Hah!" then a call,
+"Caroline!" and a moment afterwards I discerned my father ascending the
+staircase....
+
+
+For weeks I lay desperately ill. The chill, the anguish, and horror of
+that night had come upon a frame already weakened. Life was nothing but
+an evil dream, a world of terrifying shadows and phantoms. But our old
+friend Dr Grose was familiar with my constitution, and at last I began
+to mend. Pollie, stricken with remorse, nursed me night and day, giving
+my small bed every hour she could spare in a house stricken and
+disordered. I was never told in so many words that my mother was dead.
+In my extreme weakness I learned it of the air around me, of every
+secret sound and movement in the house.
+
+Morning and evening appeared my father's great face in the doorway, his
+eyebrows lifted high above his spectacles. To see his misery I almost
+wished that I might die to spare him more. When Dr Grose gave him
+permission, he sat down beside my bed and stooping low, told me that my
+mother had remembered our last speech together on the staircase, and he
+gave me her last message. A thousand and one remembrances of her
+patience and impulsiveness, of our long hours of solitude together, of
+her fits of new life as if she were a tree blossoming in the Spring, of
+her voice, her dignified silence with Miss Fenne, her sallies with my
+grandfather, her absent musings--these all return to me.
+
+Alas, that it was never in my power, except perhaps at that last moment,
+to be to her a true comfort and companion, anything much better, in
+fact, than a familiar and tragic playmate. Worse beyond words; how
+little I had done for her that I might have done!
+
+But regret must not lead me into extremes. That is not the whole truth.
+There were occasions, I think, when she almost forgot my disabilities,
+when we were just two quiet, equal spirits in the world and conversed
+together gravely and simply, not as children, but as fellow-women. It is
+these I treasure dearest, while thanking her for all. Why, in the
+whirligig of time, if my authorities are trustworthy, and my life had
+fallen out differently, the problem might now have been reversed! I
+myself might have had natural-sized children and they a pygmy mother.
+The strangeness of the world.
+
+Out of the listlessness of convalescence my interests began to renew
+themselves. Across the gulf that separated us I could still commune with
+my mother's quiet spirit. Her peace and the peace of her forgiveness
+began to descend on me; and her grave in my imagination has now no more
+sorrow than the anticipation of my own. From my windowsill loggia I
+could command a full "Hundred" of Kent. Up there on the barrowed
+hill-top it was said that on fine days a keen eye could descry the sea
+to north and south; though Dr Grose dismissed it as a piece of local
+presumption. Now that my mother was gone the clouds were stranger, the
+birds more sweetly melancholy, the flowers more fleeting. Something of
+youth had passed away to return no more.
+
+Half my thoughts were wasted in futile resentment at my incapacities.
+Yet it was a helplessness that in part was forced on me from without.
+Still less now could my father take me seriously. We shared our silent
+meals together. He would sit moping, pushing his hand over his whitening
+hair, or staring over his spectacles out of the window to the low
+whistling of some endless, monotonous tune that would haunt him for days
+together and fret me to distraction. Now and again he would favour me
+with a serious speech, and then, with a glance, perhaps hurry away to
+his study before I could answer. To his half-completed dissertations on
+Hop, Cherry, and Paper, I learned he had added another, on the Oyster.
+Many of his letters were now postmarked Whitstable. He even advertised
+in his old enemy, the _Courier_, for information: and would break out
+into furious abuse at the stupidity of his correspondents. Meanwhile his
+appetite increased; he would nod in his chair; his clothes grew shabby;
+his appearance neglected. Poor dear, he missed my mother.
+
+But I made a struggle to take her place. Every morning Pollie would
+carry me off to the kitchen for a discussion with Mrs Ballard over the
+household affairs of the day. With her fat, floury hand, she would hide
+her mouth and gravely nod her head at my instructions. But I knew she
+was concealing her amusement. "Oh, these men!" she once exclaimed at
+some new caprice of "the master's," "they are never happy unless they
+can be where they bain't." With my own hand I printed out for her a list
+of my father's favourite dishes. I left off my black and wore bright
+colours again, so that he might not be constantly reminded of the past.
+But when after long debate I took courage one day to propose myself as
+his housekeeper--I shall never forget the facial expression which he
+quickly rubbed off with his hand.
+
+He fetched out of his trousers pocket a great bunch of keys, and jangled
+them almost ferociously in the air at me for a full minute together with
+tears of amusement in his eyes. Then he tossed down the last gulp or two
+of his port and went off. A moment after he must have realized how cruel
+a blow he had dealt my vanity and my love. He returned, seated himself
+heavily in his chair, and looked at me. Then stretching out his hand he
+dropped his face on to his arm. A horrible quietness spread over the
+room. For the first time I looked with a kind of terror at the hairy
+fingers and whitening head, and could not stir.
+
+How oddly chance repeats itself. The door opened and once more,
+unannounced, Miss Fenne appeared in our midst. My father hastily rose to
+greet her, pretending that nothing was amiss. But when she held out her
+clawlike hand to me to be kissed, I merely stared at her. She screwed up
+her countenance into a smile; mumbled that I was looking pale and peaked
+again; and, with difficulty keeping her eyes from mine, explained that
+she had come for a business talk with my father.
+
+A few days afterwards I was standing up at the window of my mother's
+little sewing-room--always a favourite refuge of mine, for there the
+afternoon sun and the colours of evening used to beat into the corner.
+And I saw a small-sized woman with a large black bonnet come waddling up
+the drive. She was followed by a boy wheeling a square box on a
+two-wheeled trolley. It was Mrs Sheppey come to be housekeeper to the
+widower and his daughter.
+
+Mrs Sheppey proved to be a harassed and muddling woman, and she came to
+a harassed home. My father's affairs had gone from bad to worse. He was
+gloomy and morose. A hunted look sometimes gleamed in his eyes, and the
+spectacled nose seemed to grow the smaller the more solemn its
+surroundings were. He spent most of the day in his dressing-gown now,
+had quarrelled with Dr Grose, and dismissed Mrs Ballard. The rooms were
+dirty and neglected. Pollie would maunder about with a broom, or stand
+idly staring out of the window. She was in love. At least, so I realize
+now. At the time I thought she was merely lumpish and stupid.
+
+Only once in my recollection did Mrs Sheppey pay my own quarters a
+visit. I was kneeling on my balcony and out of sight, and could watch
+her unseen. She stood there--tub-shaped, a knob of dingy hair sticking
+out from her head, her skirts suspended round her boots--passively
+examining my bed, my wardrobe, and my other belongings. Her scrutiny
+over, she threw up her hands and the whites of her eyes as if in
+expostulation to heaven, turned about in her cloth boots, and waddled
+out again. Pollie told me, poor thing, that her children had been thorns
+in her side. I brooded over this. Had I not myself, however
+involuntarily, been a thorn in _my_ mother's side? I despised and yet
+pitied Mrs Sheppey.
+
+She was, if anything, frightened of me, and of my tongue, and would
+address me as "little lady" in a cringing, pursed-up fashion. But I am
+thankful to say she never attempted to touch me or to lift me from the
+floor. Her memory is inextricably bound up with a brown, round pudding
+with a slimy treacle sauce which she used to send to table every
+Tuesday, Thursday, and Saturday. My father would look at it with his
+nose rather than with his eyes; and after perhaps its fiftieth
+appearance, he summoned Mrs Sheppey with a violent tug at the bell. She
+thrust her head in at the door. "Take it away," he said, "take it away.
+Eat it. Devour it. Hide it from God's sight, good woman. Don't gibber.
+Take it away!"
+
+His tone frightened me out of my wits and Mrs Sheppey out of the house.
+Then came the end. At the beginning of August in my twentieth year, my
+father, who had daily become stranger in appearance and habits, though
+steadfastly refusing to call in his old friend, Dr Grose, was found dead
+in his bed. He was like a boy who never can quite succeed in pleasing
+himself or his masters. He had gone to bed and shut his eyes, never in
+this world to open them again.
+
+
+
+
+Chapter Five
+
+
+Am I sorry that almost beside myself with this new affliction, and
+bewildered and frightened by the incessant coming and going of strangers
+in the house, I refused to be carried down to bid that unanswering face
+good-bye? No, I have no regret on that score. The older I grow the more
+closely I seem to understand him. If phantoms of memory have any
+reality--and it is wiser, I think, to remember the face of the living
+rather than the stony peace of the dead--he has not forgotten his only
+daughter.
+
+Double-minded creature I was and ever shall be; now puffed up with
+arrogance at the differences between myself and gross, common-sized
+humanity; now stupidly sensitive to the pangs to which by reason of
+these differences I have to submit. At times I have been tempted to
+blame my parents for my shortcomings. What wicked folly--they did not
+choose their only child. After all, too, fellow creatures of any size
+seem much alike. They rarely have _nothing_ to blame Providence for--the
+length of their noses or the size of their feet, their bones or their
+corpulence, the imbecilities of their minds or their bodies, the
+"accidents" of birth, breeding, station, or circumstance. Yet how secure
+and perhaps wholesome is Man's self-satisfaction. To what ideal does he
+compare himself but to a self-perfected abstraction of his own image?
+Even his Venus and Apollo are mere flattering reflections of his own he-
+or she-shapes. And what of his anthropomorphic soul?
+
+As for myself, Dame Nature may some day take a fancy to the dwarf. "What
+a pretty play it would be"--I have clean forgotten where I chanced on
+this amusing passage--"What a pretty play it would be if, from the next
+generation onwards, the only humans born into the world should be of
+mere pygmy stature. Fifty years hence there would remain but few of the
+normal-sized in the land. Imagine these aged few, miserably stalking
+through the dwarfed streets, picking up a scanty livelihood in city or
+country-side, where their very boots would be a public danger, their
+very tread would set the bells in the steeples ringing, and their
+appetites would be a national incubus. House, shop, church, high road,
+furniture, vehicles abandoned or sunken to the pygmy size; wars and
+ceremonies, ambitions and enterprises, everything but prayers, dwindled
+to the petty. Would great-grandfather be venerated, cherished, admired,
+a welcome guest, a lamented emigrant? Would there be as many mourners as
+sextons at his funeral, as many wreaths as congratulations at his
+grave?" And so on and so forth--like Jonathan Swift.
+
+But I must beware. Partly from fatigue and partly from dislike of the
+version of Miss M. that stared out of his picture at me, I had begun, I
+remember, to be a little fretful when old Mr Wagginhorne was painting my
+portrait. And I complained pertly that I thought there were far too many
+azaleas on the potted bush.
+
+"Ah, little Miss Finical," he said, "take care, if you please. Once
+there was a Diogenes whom the gods shut up in a tub and fed on his own
+spleen. He died.... He died," he repeated, drawing his brush slowly
+along the canvas, "of dyspepsia."
+
+He popped round, "Think of that."
+
+I can think of that to better purpose now, and if there is one thing in
+the world whose company I shall deplore in my coffin, that thing is a
+Cynic. That is why I am trying as fast as I can to put down my
+experiences in black and white before the black predominates.
+
+But I must get back to my story. My poor father had left his affairs in
+the utmost disorder. His chief mourners were his creditors. Apart from
+these, one or two old country friends and distant relatives, I believe,
+attended his funeral, but none even of them can have been profoundly
+interested in the Hop, the Oyster, or the Cherry, at least in the
+abstract. Dr Grose, owing to ill-health, had given up his practice and
+was gone abroad. But though possibly inquiry was made after the small
+creature that had been left behind, I stubbornly shut myself away in my
+room under the roof, listening in a fever of apprehension to every
+sinister movement in the house beneath.
+
+Yet if a friend in need is a friend indeed, then I must confess that my
+treatment of Miss Fenne was the height of ingratitude.
+
+In my grief and desolation, the future seemed to be only a veil beyond
+the immediate present, which I had neither the wish nor the power to
+withdraw. Miss Fenne had no such illusions. I begged Pollie to make any
+excuse she could think of to prevent her from seeing me. But at last she
+pushed her way up, and doubtless, the news and the advice she brought
+were the best tonic that could have been prescribed for me.
+
+As a child I had always associated my godmother with the crocodile
+(though not with Mr Bosch's charming conception of it, in his picture of
+the Creation). Yet there were no tears in her faded eyes when she
+explained that of my father's modest fortune not a pittance remained. In
+a few days the house, with everything in it except my own small sticks
+of furniture, was to be sold by auction. I must keep my door locked
+against intruders. All that would be left to me was a small income of
+about L110 per annum, derived from money bequeathed to me by a relative
+of my mother's whom I had never seen.
+
+"I fancy your father knew nothing about it," she concluded, "at least so
+your dear _mother_ seemed to imply. But there! it's a sad business, a
+sad business. And that Tapa scandal; a lamentable affair." Having thus
+prepared the way, my godmother proposed that I should take up my
+residence in her house, and commit my future entirely to her charge.
+
+"You cannot be an expensive guest," she explained, "and I am sure you
+will try to be a grateful one. No truly _conscientious_ godparent, my
+dear child, _ever_ relinquishes the soul committed to her care. I
+sometimes wonder whether your poor dear mother realized this."
+
+But it was my soul, if that is brother to the spirit and can be
+neighbour to pride, that revolted against her proposition. I had to shut
+my eyes at the very remembrance of Miss Fenne's prim and musty
+drawing-room. Every intimation, every jerk of her trembling head, every
+pounce of her jewelled fingers only hardened my heart. Poor Miss Fenne.
+Her resentment at my refusal seemed to increase her shortness of sight.
+Looking in on her from my balcony, I had the advantage of her, as she
+faced me in the full light in her chair, dressed up in her old lady's
+clothes like a kind of human Alp among my pygmy belongings. I tried to
+be polite, but this only increased her vexation. One smart tap of the
+ivory ball that topped her umbrella would have been my _coup de grace_.
+She eyed me, but never administered it.
+
+At last she drew in her lips and fell silent. Then, as may happen at
+such moments, her ill-temper and chagrin, even the sense of her own
+dignity drooped away, and for a while in the quietness we were simply
+two ill-assorted human beings, helpless in the coils of circumstance.
+She composed her mouth, adjusted her bonnet strings, peered a moment
+from dim old eyes out of the window, then once more looked at me.
+
+"It must be, then, as God wills," she said in a trembling voice. "The
+spirit of your poor dear mother must be judge between us. She has, we
+may trust, gone to a better world."
+
+For a moment my resolution seemed to flow away like water, and I all but
+surrendered. But a rook cawed close overhead, and I bit my lip. Little
+more was said, except that she would consider it her duty to find me a
+comfortable and God-fearing home. But she admonished me of the future,
+warned me that the world was a network of temptations, and assured me of
+her prayers. So we parted. I bowed her out of my domain. It was the last
+time we met. Two days afterwards I received her promised letter:--
+
+
+     "MY DEAR GODCHILD,--Mr Ambrose Pellew, an old _clergyman_ friend of
+     mine, in whose discretion and knowledge of the world I have every
+     confidence, has spoken for you to an old married, respectable
+     servant of his now living a few miles from London--a Mrs Bowater.
+     For the charge of thirty shillings a week she has consented to give
+     you board, lodging, and _reasonable_ attendance. In all the
+     circumstances this seems to me to be a moderate sum. Mr Pellew
+     assures me that Mrs B. is clean, honest, and a _practising_
+     Christian. When this dreadful Sale is over, I have arranged that
+     Pollie shall conduct you safely to what will in future be your
+     _home_. I trust that you will be as happy there as Providence
+     permits, though I cannot doubt that your poor dear mother and your
+     poor father, too, for that matter, would have wished
+     otherwise--that the roof of her old friend who was present at your
+     Baptism and _insisted_ on your Confirmation, should have been your
+     refuge and asylum now that you are absolutely alone in the world.
+
+     "However, you have rejected this proposal, and have _chosen your
+     own path_. I am not your legal guardian, and I am too deeply
+     _pained_ to refer again to your obstinacy and ingratitude. Rest
+     assured that, in spite of all, I shall remember you in my prayers,
+     and I trust, D. V., that you will escape the temptations of this
+     wicked world--a world in which it has pleased God, in spite of
+     self-sacrificing and anxious friends, to place you at so
+     distressing a disadvantage. But in His Sight all men are equal. Let
+     that be your continual consolation. See Amos vii. 2; Prov. xxxi.
+     24-28; Eccles. xii. 1.
+
+     "I remain, your affectionate godmother,
+
+     "EMMA E. FENNE.
+
+     "PS.--I reopen this letter to explain that your _financial_ affairs
+     are in the hands of Messrs Harris, Harris, and Harris, respectable
+     solicitors of Gray's Inn. They will remit you on every quarter
+     day--Christmas Day, Lady Day, June 25th and September 29th--the sum
+     of L28 10s. 0d. Of this you will pay L19 10s. _at once_ to Mrs
+     Bowater, who, I have no doubt, will advise you on the expenditure
+     of what remains on wearing apparel, self-improvement, missions,
+     charity, and so on. It _grieves_ me that from the wreckage of your
+     father's affairs you must not anticipate a further straw of
+     assistance. All his money and property will be swallowed up in the
+     dreadful storm that has broken over what we can only _trust_ is a
+     tranquil resting place. R. I. P.--E. E. F."
+
+
+So sprawling and straggling was my godmother's penmanship that I spelled
+her letter out at last with a minifying glass, though rather for forlorn
+amusement's sake than by necessity. Not that this diminishment of her
+handwriting in any sense lessened the effect upon me of the sentiments
+it conveyed. They at once daunted me and gave me courage. For a little I
+hesitated, then at last I thought _out_ in my heart that God might be
+kinder to me than Miss Fenne wished. Indeed I was so invigorated by the
+anticipation of the "wicked world," that I all but called her a
+crocodile to her phantasmal face. Couldn't I--didn't I--myself "mean
+well" too? What pictures and prospects of the future, of my journey, of
+Mrs Bowater and the "network" pursued each other through my brain. And
+what a darkness oppressed me when a voice kept repeating over in my
+mind--_Harris and Harris and Harris_, as if it were a refrain to one of
+my grandfather's _chansons_. _Messrs Harris and Harris and Harris_--I
+_saw_ all three of them (dark men with whiskers), but trusted profoundly
+they would never come to see _me_.
+
+Nor from that day to this, through all my giddying "ups" and sobering
+"downs" have I ever for a moment regretted my decision--though I might
+have conveyed it with a little better grace. My body, perhaps also my
+soul, would have been safer in the seclusion of my godmother's house.
+But my spirit? I think it would have beaten itself to death there like a
+wasp on a window-pane. Whereas--well, here I am.
+
+
+
+
+Chapter Six
+
+
+Those last few days of August dragged on--days of a burning, windless
+heat. Yet, as days, I enjoyed them. On some upper branch of my family
+tree must have flourished the salamander. Indeed I think I should have
+been a denizen of Venus rather than of this colder, darker planet. I sat
+on my balcony, basking in the hot sunshine, my thoughts darting hither
+and thither like flies under a ceiling--those strange, winged creatures
+that ever seem to be attempting to trace out in their flittings the
+starry "Square of Pegasus." In spite of my troubles and forebodings, and
+fleeting panics, my inward mind was calm. I carefully packed away my few
+little valuables. The very notion of food gave me nausea, but that I
+determined to conquer, since of course to become, at either extreme, a
+slave to one's stomach, is a folly.
+
+The noise and tramplings of the men in the rooms beneath never ceased,
+until Night brought quiet. The Sale lasted for two days. A stale and
+clouded air ascended even into my locked bedroom from the human beings
+(with their dust and tobacco and perfumes and natural presences)
+collected together in the heat of the great dining-room. A hum, a
+murmur, the scuffling of feet toiling downstairs with some heavy and
+cumbrous burden, the cries of the auctioneer, the coarse voices and
+laughter, the tinkle of glass--the stretching hours seemed endless; and
+every minute of them knelled the fate of some beloved and familiar
+object. I was glad my father couldn't hear the bidding, and sorry that
+perhaps he did not know that the most valuable of his curios--_how_
+valuable I was to learn later--was safely hidden away in an upper room.
+So passed my birthday--the twentieth--nor tapped me on the shoulder
+with, "Ah, but, my dear, just you wait till I come again!"
+
+None the less I thought a good deal about birthdays that afternoon, and
+wondered how it was that we human beings can bear even to go on living
+between two such mysteries as the beginning and the end of life. Where
+was my mother now? Where was I but two-and-twenty years ago? What was
+all this "Past," this "History," of which I had heard so much and knew
+so little? Just a story? Better brains than mine have puzzled over these
+questions, and perhaps if I had studied the philosophers I should know
+the answers. In the evenings, wrapped up in a shawl, Pollie carried me
+downstairs, and we took a sober whispering walk in the hush and perfumes
+of the deserted garden. Loud rang the tongues of the water over the
+stones. The moths were fluttering to their trysts, and from some dark
+little coign the cricket strummed me a solo. Standing up there in the
+starry night the great house looked down on me like an elder brother,
+mute but compassionate.
+
+By the second day after the conclusion of the Sale, the removers' vans
+and carts should have gutted the rooms and be gone. It had, therefore,
+been arranged that Pollie should as usual share my bedroom the last
+night, and that next day we should set off on our journey. After
+luncheon--the flavour of its sliced nectarine (or is it of one that came
+later?) is on my tongue at this moment--all the rest of the house being
+now hollow and vacant, Pollie put on her hat, thrust the large door key
+into her pocket, and went off to visit her mother in the village and to
+fetch a clean nightdress. She promised to return before dark. Her shoes
+clattered down the stone stairs, the outer door boomed like a gun. I
+spread out my hands in the air, and as if my four-poster could bear
+witness, cried softly, "I am alone." Marvel of marvels, even as I sit
+here to-day gazing at my inkpot, there in its original corner stands
+that same old four-poster. Pollie is living down in the village with her
+husband and her two babies; and once more: I am alone. Is there anything
+in life so fascinating, so astonishing, as these queer, common little
+repetitions? Perhaps on the Last Day--but I anticipate.
+
+I read a little; wrote on the flyleaf of my diminutive Johnson,
+"September 1st, Lyndsey for the last time.--M."; arranged my morrow's
+clothes on a chair, then sat down in my balcony to do nothing, to be
+nothing, merely to dream. But nature decreed otherwise. Soon after six
+by my grandfather's clock--it struck the hour out of its case, as if out
+of a sepulchre--a storm, which all the afternoon had been steadily
+piling its leaden vapours into space, began to break. Chizzel Hill with
+its prehistoric barrow was sunk to a green mound beneath those lowering
+cloudy heights, pooling so placid and lovely a blue between them. The
+very air seemed to thicken, and every tree stood up as if carved out of
+metal. Of a sudden a great wind, with heavy plashing drops of rain,
+swept roaring round the house, thick with dust and green leaves torn
+from the dishevelled summer trees. There was a hush. The darkness
+intensified, and then a vast sheet of lightning seemed to picture all
+Kent in my eyes, and the air was full of water.
+
+One glance into the obscure vacancy of the room behind me persuaded me
+to remain where I was, though the rain drove me further and further into
+the corner of my balcony. Cold, and a little scared by the glare and
+din, yet not unhappy, I cowered close up against the glass, and, shading
+my eyes as best I could from the flames of the lightning, I watched the
+storm. How long I sat there I cannot say. The clamour lulled and
+benumbed my brain into a kind of trance. My only company was a blackbird
+which had flown or been blown into my refuge, and with draggled feathers
+stared black-eyed out of the greenery at me. It was gathering towards
+dark when the rain and lightning began to abate, and the sullen thunder
+drew away into the distance, echoing hollowly along the furthest
+horizons. At last, with teeth chattering, and stiff to my bones, I made
+my way into the room again, and the benighted blackbird went squawking
+to his nest.
+
+Slipping off my gown and shoes, and huddling myself in the blankets and
+counterpane of my bed, I sat there pondering what next was to be done.
+It would soon be night; and Pollie seemed unlikely to appear until all
+this turmoil was over. I was not only alone, but forsaken and infinitely
+solitary, a mere sentient living speck in the quiet sea of light that
+washed ever and again into the gloomiest recesses of the room. And that
+familiar room itself seemed now almost as cold and inhospitable as a
+neglected church. I could hear the dark, vacant house beneath echoing
+and murmuring at every prolonged reverberation of thunder, and sighing
+through all its crannies and keyholes. My bedhangings softly shook in
+the air. Gone beyond recovery were my father and mother: and I now
+realized how irrevocably. I was no longer a child; and the
+responsibilities of life were now wholly on my own shoulders.
+
+Yet I was not utterly forlorn. The great scene comforted me, and now and
+then I prayed, almost without thinking and without words, just as a
+little tune will keep recurring in the mind. And now, darkness being
+spread over the garden, in the east the moon was rising. Moreover, a
+curious sight met my eyes; for as the storm settled, heavy rain in
+travelling showers was still occasionally skirting the house; and when,
+between the heaped-up masses of cloud, the distant lightning gleamed a
+faint vaporous lilac, I saw motionless in the air, and as if suspended
+in their falling between earth and sky, the multitudinous glass-clear,
+pear-shaped drops of water. At sight of these jewels thus crystalling
+the dark air I was filled with such a rapture that I actually clapped my
+hands. And presently the moon herself appeared, as if to be my
+companion. Serene, remote, she glided at last from cover of an enormous
+bluff of cloud into the faint-starred vault of space, seemed to pause
+for an instant in contemplation of the dark scene, then went musing on
+her way. Beneath her silver all seemed at peace, and it was then that I
+fell asleep.
+
+And while I slept, I dreamed a dream. My dreams often commit me to a
+quiet and radiant life, as if of a reality less strange to me than that
+of waking. Others are a mere uneasiness and folly. In the old days I
+would sometimes tell my dreams to Mrs Ballard; and she would look them
+up in a frowsy book she kept in the dresser drawer, a brown,
+grease-stained volume entitled _Napoleon's Book of Fate_. Then she would
+promise me a prince for a husband, or that I would be a great traveller
+across the sea, or that I must beware of a red-haired woman, and
+nonsense of that kind. But this particular dream remains more vividly in
+my memory than any.
+
+Well, I dreamed that I was walking in a strange garden--an orchard. And,
+as it seemed, I was either of the common human size, or this was a world
+wherein of human beings I was myself of the usual stature. The night was
+still, like the darkest picture, yet there must have been light there,
+since I could see as I walked. The grasses were coarse and deep, but
+they did not encumber my feet, and presently I found myself standing
+beneath a tree whose branches in their towering sombre heaviness seemed
+to be made of iron. Dangling here and there amid the pendulous leaves
+hung enormous fruits--pears stagnant and heavy as shaped lumps of lead
+or of stone. Why the sight of these fruits in the obscure luminosity of
+the air around them laid such a spell upon me, I cannot say. I stood
+there in the dew-cold grass, gazing up and up into those monstrous
+branches as if enchanted, and then of a sudden the ground under my feet
+seemed faintly to tremble as if at a muffled blow. One of the fruits in
+my dream, now come to ripeness, had fallen stone-like from above. Then
+again--thud! Realization of the dreadful danger in which I stood swept
+over me. I turned to escape, and awoke, shivering and in a suffocating
+heat, to discover in the moonlight that now flooded my room where in
+actuality I was.
+
+Yet still, as it seemed, the dying rumour of the sound persisted, and
+surely, I thought, it must be poor, careless Pollie, her key forgotten,
+come back in the darkness after the storm, and hammering with the great
+knocker on the door below. Hardly a minute had passed indeed before the
+whole house resounded again with her thumping. One seldom finds Courage
+keeping tryst on the outskirts of sleep, and there was a vehemence in
+the knocking as if Pollie was in an extremity of fear at finding herself
+under the vacant house alone in the night. The thought of going to her
+rescue set my teeth chattering. I threw back the bedclothes and gazed at
+the moon, and the longer I sat there the more clearly I realized that I
+must somehow descend the stairs, convey to her that I was safe, and, if
+possible, let her in.
+
+Three steep stone flights separated us, stairs which I had very rarely
+ascended or descended except in her arms. I thrust my foot out; all was
+still; I must go at once. But what of light? The moon was on this side
+of the house. It might be pitch dark on the lower landings and in the
+hall. On the stool by her bedside stood Pollie's copper candlestick,
+with an inch or two of candle in it and a box of matches. It was a
+thick-set tallow candle and none too convenient for me to grasp. With
+this alight in my hand, the stick being too cumbersome, I set out on my
+errand. The air was cool; the moon shone lustily. Just waked from sleep
+my mind was curiously exalted. I sallied out into the empty corridor. A
+pace or two beyond the threshold my heart seemed to swell up in my body,
+for it seemed that at the head of the staircase lay stretched the still
+form of my mother as I had found her in the cold midnight hours long
+ago. It was but a play of light, a trick of fantasy. I recovered my
+breath and went on.
+
+To leap from stair to stair was far too formidable a means of
+progression. I should certainly have dashed out my brains. So I must
+sit, and jump sitting, manipulating my candle as best I could. In this
+sidling, undignified fashion, my eyes fixed only on the stair beneath
+me, I mastered the first flight, and paused to rest. What a medley of
+furtive sounds ascended to my ear from the desolate rooms below: the
+heavy plash of raindrop from the eaves, scurry and squeak of mouse,
+rustle of straw, a stirring--light as the settling of dust, crack of
+timber, an infinitely faint whisper; and from without, the whistle of
+bat, the stony murmur of the garden stream, the hunting screech of some
+predatory night-fowl over the soaked and tranquil harvest fields. And
+who, Who?--that shape?... I turned sharply, and the melted tallow of the
+guttering candle welled over and smartly burned the hand that held it.
+The pain gave me confidence. But better than that, a voice from below
+suddenly broke out, not Pollie's but Adam Waggett's, hollaing in the
+porch. Adam--the wren-slaughterer--prove me a coward? No, indeed. All
+misgiving gone, I girded my dressing-gown tighter around me, and
+continued the descent.
+
+It was a jolting and arduous business, and as I paused on the next
+landing, I now looked into the moon-bathed vacancy of my father's
+bedroom. Dismantled, littered with paper and the fragments of wood and
+glass of a picture my mother had given him, a great hole in the plaster,
+a broken chair straddling in the midst--a hideous spectacle it was. An
+immense moth with greenly glowing eyes, lured out of its roosting place,
+came fluttering round my candle, fanning my cheek with its plumy wings.
+I shaded the flame and smiled up at the creature which, not being of a
+kind that is bent on self-slaughter, presently wafted away. The lower I
+descended the filthier grew my journey. My stub of candle was fast
+wasting; and what use should I be to Pollie's messenger? When indeed in
+the muck and refuse left by the Sale, I reached the door, it was too
+late. He was now beating with his fists at the rear of the house; and I
+must needs climb down the last flight of the back wooden staircase used
+by the servants. When at last the great stagnant kitchen came into
+view, it was my whole inward self that cried out in me. Its stone flags
+were swarming with cockroaches.
+
+These shelled, nocturnal, sour-smelling creatures are among the few
+insects that fill me with horror. By comparison the devil's coachman may
+be worse-tempered, but he is a gentleman. The very thought of one of
+them rearing itself against my slippered foot filled me with disgust;
+and the males were winged. They went scurrying away into hiding, infants
+seemingly to their mothers, whisper, whisper--I felt sick at the sight.
+There came a noise at the window. Peering from round my candle flame I
+perceived Adam's dusky face, with its long nose, staring in at me
+through the glass. At sight of the plight I was in, he burst into a
+prolonged guffaw of laughter. This enraged me beyond measure. I stamped
+my foot, and at last he sobered down enough to yell through the glass
+that Pollie's mother had sent him to see that I was safe and had
+forgotten to give him the house-key. Pollie herself would be with me
+next morning.
+
+I waved my candle at him in token that I understood. At this the melted
+grease once more trickled over and ran scalding up my arm. The candle
+fell to the floor, went out; the pale moonshine spread through the air.
+I could see Adam's conical head outlined against the soft light of the
+sky; though he could no longer see me. Horror of the cockroaches
+returned on me. Instantly I turned tail, leaving the lump of tallow for
+their spoil.
+
+How, in that dark, high house, I managed to remount those stairs, I
+cannot conceive. Youth and persistency, I suppose. I doubt if I could do
+it now. Utterly exhausted and bedraggled I regained my bedroom at last
+without further misadventure. I sponged the smoke and grime from face
+and hands in my washbowl, hung my dressing-gown where the morning air
+might refresh it, and was soon in a dead sleep, from which I think even
+the Angel Gabriel would have failed to arouse me.
+
+
+
+
+Chapter Seven
+
+
+When I awoke, the morning sky was gay with sunshine, there was a lisping
+and gurgling of starlings on the roof, the roar of the little river in
+flood after the rains shook the air at my window, and there sat Pollie,
+in her outdoor clothes, the rest of the packing done and she awaiting
+breakfast. Unstirringly from my pillow I scrutinized the plump,
+red-cheeked face with its pale-blue prominent eyes dreaming out of the
+window; and sorrow welled up in me at the thought of the past and of how
+near drew our separation. She heard me move, and kneeling and stooping
+low over my bed, with her work-roughened finger she stroked the hand
+that lay on my coverlet. A pretty sight I must have looked--after my
+night's experiences. We whispered a little together. She was now a
+sedater young woman, but still my Pollie of the apples and novelettes.
+And whether or not it is because early custom is second nature, she is
+still the only person whom my skin does not a little creep against when
+necessity calls for a beast of burden.
+
+Her desertion of me the night before had been caused by the untimely
+death of one of her father's three Alderney cows--a mild, horned
+creature, which I had myself often seen in the meadows cropping among
+the buttercups, and whose rich-breathed nose I had once had the courage
+to ask to stroke with my hand. This ill-fated beast at first threat of
+the storm, had taken shelter with her companions under an oak. Scarcely
+had the lightnings begun to play when she was struck down by a
+"thunderbolt." It was a tragedy after Pollie's heart. She had (she said)
+fainted dead off at news of it--and we bemoaned the event in concert. In
+return I told her my dream of the garden. Nothing would then content her
+but she must fetch from under her mattress _Napoleon's Book of Fate_, a
+legacy from Mrs Ballard.
+
+"But, Pollie," I demurred; "a dream is only a dream."
+
+"Honest, miss," she replied, thumbing over the pages, "there's some of
+'em means what happens and comes true, and they'll tell secrets too if
+they be searched about. More'n a month before Mrs Ballard fell out with
+master she dreamed that one of the speckled hens had laid an egg in the
+kitchen dresser. There it was clucking among the crockery. And to dream
+of eggs, the book says, is to be certain sure of getting the place you
+are after, and which she wrote off to a friend in London and is there
+now!"
+
+What more was there to say? So presently Pollie succeeded in turning to
+"Pears" in the grease-grimed book, and spelled out slowly:--
+
+
+     "PEARS.--To dream of pears is in-di-ca-tive of great wealth (which
+     means riches, miss); and that you will rise to a much higher spear
+     than the one you at present occupy. To a woman they denote that she
+     will marry a person far above her in rank (lords and suchlike,
+     miss, if you please), and that she will live in great state. To
+     persons in trade they denote success and future prosperity and
+     eleviation. They also indi- indicate constancy in love and
+     happiness in the marriage state."
+
+
+Her red cheeks grew redder with this exertion of scholarship, and I
+burst out laughing. "Ah, miss," she cried in confusion, "laugh you may,
+and that's what Sarah said to the Angel. But mark my words if something
+of it don't hap out like what the book says."
+
+"Then, Pollie," said I, "there's nothing for it but to open a butcher's
+shop. For live in great state I can't and won't, not if the Prince of
+Wales himself was to ask me in marriage."
+
+"Lor, miss," retorted Pollie in shocked accents, "and him a married man
+with grown-up sons and all." But she forgave me my mockery. As for the
+Dream Book, doubtless young Bonaparte must often have dreamed of Pears
+in Corsica; and no less indubitably have I lived in "great
+state"--though without much eleviation.
+
+But the day was hasting on. My toilet must be made, and the preparations
+for our journey completed. Now that the dawn of my new fortunes was
+risen, expectancy filled my mind, and the rain-freshened skies and
+leaves of the morning renewed my spirits. Our train--the first in my
+experience--was timed to leave our country railway station at 3.3 p.m.
+By one o'clock, all the personal luggage that I was to take with me had
+been sewn up in a square of canvas, and corded. The rest of my
+belongings--my four-poster, etc.--were to be stowed in a large
+packing-case and sent after me. First impressions endure. No great store
+of sagacity was needed to tell me that. So I had chosen my clothes
+carefully, determined to show my landlady that I meant to have my own
+way and not be trifled with. My dear Mrs Bowater!--she would be amused
+to hear that.
+
+Pollie bustled downstairs. I stood in the midst of the sunlit,
+dismantled room, light and shadow at play upon ceiling and walls, the
+sun-pierced air a silvery haze of dust. A host of memories and thoughts,
+like a procession in a dream, traversed my mind. A strangeness, too--as
+if even this novel experience of farewell was a vague recollection
+beyond defined recall. Pollie returned with the new hat in the paper bag
+in which she had brought it from home: and I was her looking-glass when
+she had put it on. Then from top to basement she carried me through
+every room in the house, and there on the kitchen floor, mute witness of
+the past, lay the beetle-gnawn remnant of my candle-stub. We wandered
+through the garden, glinting green in the cool flocking sunbeams after
+the rain; and already vaunting its escape from Man. Pollie was returning
+to Lyndsey--I not! My heart was too full to let me linger by the water.
+I gazed at the stones and the wild flowers in a sorrowful hunger of
+farewell. Trifles, soon to be dying, how lovely they were. The thought
+of it swallowed me up. What was the future but an emptiness? Would that
+I might vanish away and be but a portion of the sweetness of the
+morning. Even Pollie's imperturbable face wore the appearance of
+make-believe; for an instant I surprised the whole image of me reflected
+in her round blue eye.
+
+The Waggetts' wagonette was at the door, but not--and I was
+thankful--not _my_ Adam, but the old Adam, his father. My luggage was
+pushed under the seat. I was set up, to be screened as far as possible
+from the wind, beside Pollie and behind Mr Waggett--no stranger to me
+with his neat, dark whiskers, for in the old days, at dinner parties, he
+would wait at table. I see him now--as gentlemanlike as a Devil's
+Coachhorse--entering the kitchen with his little black bag. Only once I
+swiftly turned my head over my shoulder toward the house. Then we were
+outside the iron gates, and bumping along through the puddles between
+the bowery hedges towards the station.
+
+I thought of my father and mother lying side by side, beyond the sullen
+drift of nettles, under the churchyard wall. Miss Fenne had taken me
+there many weeks before in her faded barouche with the gaunt white mare.
+Not a word had I breathed to her of my anguish at sight of the
+churchyard. The whole afternoon was a nightmare. She regaled the journey
+with sentiments on death and the grave. Throughout it, I was in danger
+of slipping out of her sight; for the buttons on the sage-green leather
+seat were not only a discomfort but had failed to aid me to sit upright;
+and nothing would have induced me to catch at the trimmings of her
+dolman to save myself from actually falling off into the pit of her
+carriage. There sat her ancient coachman; clutter-clutter plodded the
+hoofs; what a monstrous, monstrous world--and she cackling on and
+on--like a hen over its egg.
+
+But now the novelty of this present experience, the flowery cottages, Mr
+Waggett's square, sorrel nag, the ballooning northwesterly clouds, the
+aromatic rusty hedgerows, the rooks in the cornfields--all these sights
+and sounds called joy into my mind, and far too soon the bright-painted
+railway station at the hill-bottom hove into sight, and our drive was
+over. I was lifted down into Pollie's arms again. Then followed a
+foolish chaffering over the tickets, which Mr Waggett had volunteered to
+purchase for us at the rounded window. The looming face beyond had
+caught sight of me, and the last words I heard bawled through for any to
+hear were: "Lor, Mr Waggett, I'd make it a _quarter_ for 'ee if it was
+within regulations. But 'tain't so, the young lady's full natural size
+in the eye of the law, and I couldn't give in to 'ee not even if 'twas a
+honeymooning you was after." No doubt it was wholesome to learn as
+quickly as possible how easy a butt I was to be for the jests of the
+good-humoured. On that occasion it was a bitter pill. I felt even Pollie
+choke down a laugh into her bosom. My cheek whitened, but I said
+nothing.
+
+An enormous din at the moment shattered around me, ten thousand times
+harsher to my nerves than any mere witticism could be. My first
+"steam-monster" was entering the station. All but stunned by its
+clatter, I barely had the presence of mind to thank Mr Waggett for the
+little straw basket of three greengages, and the nosegay of cherry-pie
+which he had thrust into my arms. My canvas-wrapped package was pushed
+in under the seat, the door was slammed to, the guard waved his green
+flag, Mr Waggett touched his hat: and our journey was begun.
+
+Fortunately Pollie and I found ourselves in an empty carriage. The
+scream of the whistle, the grinding jar of the wheels, the oppressive
+odour of Mr Waggett's bouquet--I leaned back on her to recover my wits.
+But the cool air blowing in on my face and a far-away sniff from a
+little glass bottle with which her mother had fortified her for the
+journey, quickly revived me, and I was free to enjoy the novelties of
+steam-travel. My eyes dizzied at the wide revolving scene that was now
+spread out beneath the feathery vapours. How strange it was to see the
+green country world--meadow and stream and wooded hill--thus wheel
+softly by. If Pollie and I could have shared it alone, it would have
+been among my pleasantest memories.
+
+But at the next stopping places other passengers climbed into the
+carriage; and five complete strangers soon shared the grained wood box
+in which we were enclosed. There was a lady in black, with her hair
+smoothed up under her bonnet, and a long pale nose; and up against her
+sat her little boy, a fine fair, staring child of about five years of
+age. A black-clothed, fat little man with a rusty leather bag, over the
+lock of which he kept clasped his finger and thumb, quietly seated
+himself. He cast but one dark glance about him and immediately shut his
+eyes. In the corner was an older man with a beard under his chin,
+gaiters, and a hard, wide-brimmed hat. Besides these, there was a fat
+countrywoman on the same side as Pollie and I, whom I could hear
+breathing and could not see, and a dried-up, bird-eyed woman opposite in
+a check shawl, with heavy metal ear-rings dangling at her ears. She sat
+staring blankly and bleakly at things close as if they were at a
+distance.
+
+My spirit drank in this company. So rapt was I that I might have been a
+stock of wood. Gathered together in this small space they had the
+appearance of animals, and, if they had not been human, what very
+alarming ones. As long as I merely sat and watched their habits I
+remained unnoticed. But the afternoon sun streamed hot on roof and
+windows: and the confined air was soon so dense with a variety of
+odours, that once more my brain dizzied, and I must clutch at Pollie's
+arm for support. At this movement the little boy, who had more than once
+furtively glanced at me, crouched wriggling back against his mother,
+and, edging his face aside, piped up into her ear, "Mamma, is that
+alive?"
+
+The train now stood motionless, a fine array of hollyhocks and
+sunflowers flared beyond the window, and his voice rang out shrill as a
+bird in the quiet of afternoon. Tiny points of heat broke out all over
+me, as one by one my fellow passengers turned their astonished faces in
+my direction. Even the man with the leather bag heard the question. The
+small, bead-brown eyes wheeled from under their white lids and fixed me
+with their stare.
+
+"Hush, my dear," said the lady, no less intent but less open in her
+survey; "hush, look at the pretty cows!"
+
+"But she _is_, mamma. It moved. I saw that move," he asseverated,
+looking along cornerwise at me out of his uptilted face.
+
+Those blue eyes! a mingling of delight, horror, incredulity, even greed
+swam in their shallow deeps. I stood leaning close to Pollie's bosom,
+breathless and helpless, a fascinating object, no doubt. Never before
+had I been transfixed like this in one congregated stare. I felt myself
+gasp like a fish. It was the old farmer in the corner who at last came
+to my rescue. "Alive! _I_ warrant. Eh, ma'am?" he appealed to poor
+Pollie. "And an uncommon neat-fashioned young lady, too. Off to Whipham
+Fair, I'll be bound."
+
+The bag-man turned with a creeping grin on his tallowy features and
+muttered some inaudible jest out of the corner of his mouth to the
+gipsy. She eyed him fiercely, drawing her lips from her bright teeth in
+a grimace more of contempt than laughter. Once more the engine hooted
+and we glided on our way.
+
+"I _want_ that, mamma," whispered the child. "I _want_ that dear little
+lady. Give that teeny tiny lady a biscuit."
+
+At this new sally universal merriment filled the carriage. We were
+jogging along in fine style. This, then, was Miss Fenne's "network." A
+helpless misery and bitterness swept through me, the heavy air swirled;
+and then--whence, from whom, I know not--self-possession returned to me.
+Why, I had _chosen_ my fate: I must hold my own.
+
+My young admirer, much against his mother's inclination, had managed to
+fetch out a biscuit from her reticule--a star-shaped thing, graced with
+a cone of rose-tinted sugar. Still crouching back like a chick under her
+wing, he stretched his bribe out at arm's length towards me, in a pink,
+sweat-sparked hand. All this while Pollie had sat like a lump beside me,
+clutching her basket, a vacant, flushed smile on her round face. I drew
+myself up, and supporting myself by her wicker basket, advanced with all
+the dignity at my command to the peak of her knees, and, stretching out
+my hand in return, accepted the gift. I even managed to make him an
+indulgent little bow, feigned a nibble at the lump of food, then planted
+it on the dusty ledge beneath the carriage window.
+
+A peculiar silence followed. With a long sigh the child hid his face in
+his mother's sleeve. She drew him closer and smiled carefully into
+nothingness. "There," she murmured, "now mother's treasure must sit
+still and be a good boy. I can't think why papa didn't
+take--second-class tickets."
+
+"But nor did that kind little lady's papa," returned the child stoutly.
+
+The kindly old farmer continued to gloat on me, gnarled hands on knees.
+But I could not bear it. I quietly surveyed him until he was compelled
+to rub his face with his fingers, and so cover its retreat to his own
+window. The gipsy woman kept her ferocious, birdlike stare on me, with
+an occasional stealthy glance at Pollie. The bag-man's lids closed down.
+For the rest of the journey--though passengers came and went--I kept
+well back, and was left in peace. It was my first real taste of the
+world's curiosity, mockery, aversion, and flattery. One practical lesson
+it taught me. From that day forward I never set out on any such journey
+unless thickly veiled. For then, though the inquisitive may see me, they
+cannot tell whether or not I see them, or what my feelings may be. It is
+a real comfort; though, from what I have read, it appears to be the
+condition rather of a ghost than of a normal young lady.
+
+But now the sun had begun to descend and the rays of evening to stain
+the fields. We loitered on from station to station. To my relief Pollie
+had at last munched her way through the pasties and sweetmeats stowed in
+her basket. My nosegay of cherry-pie was fainting for want of water. In
+heavy sleep the bag-man and gipsy sat woodenly nodding and jerking side
+by side. The lady had delicately composed her face and shut her eyes.
+The little boy slumbered serenely with his small red mouth wide open.
+Languid and heavy, I dared not relax my vigilance. But in the desolation
+that gathered over me I almost forgot my human company, and returned to
+the empty house which seemingly I had left for ever--the shadows of yet
+another nightfall already lengthening over its flowers and sward.
+
+Could I not hear the silken rustle of the evening primrose unfolding her
+petals? Soon the cool dews would be falling on the stones where I was
+wont to sit in reverie beside the flowing water. It seemed indeed that
+my self had slipped from my body, and hovered entranced amid the
+thousand jargonings of its tangled lullaby. Was there, in truth, a
+wraith in me that could so steal out; and were the invisible inhabitants
+in their fortresses beside my stream conscious of its presence among
+them, and as happy in my spectral company as I in theirs?
+
+I floated up out of these ruminations to find that my young pasha had
+softly awakened and was gazing at me in utter incredulity from
+sleep-gilded eyes. We exchanged a still, protracted, dwelling smile, and
+for the only time in my life I actually _saw_ a fellow-creature fall in
+love!
+
+"Oh, but mamma, mamma, I do _beseech_ you," he called up at her from the
+platform where he was taking his last look at me through the dingy
+oblong window, "please, please, I want her for mine; I want her for
+mine!"
+
+I held up his biscuit in my hand, laughing and nodding. The whistle
+knelled, our narrow box drew slowly out of the station. As if
+heartbroken, he took his last look at me, petulantly flinging aside his
+mother's hand. He had lost me for ever, and Pollie and I were alone
+again.
+
+
+
+
+Beechwood
+
+
+
+
+Chapter Eight
+
+
+Still the slow train bumped on, loath to drag itself away from the happy
+harvest fields. Darkness was near when we ourselves alighted at our
+destination, mounted into a four-wheeled cab, and once more were in
+motion in the rain-laid dust. On and on rolled Pollie and I and our
+luggage together, in such ease and concealment after the hard wooden
+seats and garish light that our journey began to seem--as indeed I
+wished for the moment it might prove--interminable. One after another
+the high street lamps approached, flung their radiance into our musty
+velvet cabin, and went gliding by. Ever and again the luminous square of
+a window beyond the outspread branches of a tree would float on. Then
+suddenly our narrow solitude was invaded by the bright continuous flare
+flung into it from a row of shops.
+
+Never before had I been out after nightfall. I gazed enthralled at the
+splendours of fruit and cakes, silks and sweetmeats packed high behind
+the glass fronts. Wasn't I myself the heiress of L110 a year? Indeed I
+was drinking in Romance, and never traveller surveyed golden Moscow or
+the steeps of Tibet with keener relish than I the liquid amber, ruby,
+and emerald that summoned its customers to a wayside chemist's shop.
+Twenty--what a child I was! I smile now at these recollections with an
+indulgence not unmixed with envy. It is Moscow survives, not the artless
+traveller.
+
+After climbing a long hill--the wayside houses steadily thinning out as
+we ascended--the cab came to a standstill. The immense, shapeless old
+man who had so miraculously found our way for us, and who on this mild
+August evening was muffled up to his eyes in a thick ulster, climbed
+down backwards from his box and opened the door. At the same moment, as
+if by clockwork, opened another door--that of the last house on the
+hill. I was peering out of the cab, then, at my home; and framed in
+that lighted oblong stood Mrs Bowater. All utterly different from what I
+had foreseen: this much smaller house, this much taller landlady,
+and--dear me, how fondly I had trusted that she would not for the first
+time set eyes on her lodger being _carried_ into her house. I had in
+fancy pictured myself bowing a composed and impressive greeting to her
+from her own hearthrug. But it was not to be.
+
+Pollie lifted me out, settled me on her arm, and my feet did not touch
+_terra firma_ again until she had ascended the five stone steps and we
+were within the passage.
+
+"Lor, miss; then here we are," she sighed breathlessly, then returned to
+the cabman to pay him his fare. Even dwarfed a little perhaps by my
+mourning, there I stood, breathed upon by the warm air of the house, in
+the midst of a prickly doormat, on the edge of the shiny patterned
+oilcloth that glossed away into the obscurity from under the gaslight in
+front of me; and there stood my future landlady. For the first time,
+with head thrown back, I scanned a countenance that was soon to become
+so familiar and so endeared. Mrs Bowater's was a stiff and angular
+figure. She, too, was in black, with a long, springside boot. The bony
+hands hung down in their peculiar fashion from her elbows. A large cameo
+brooch adorned the flat chest. A scanty velvet patch of cap failed to
+conceal the thin hair sleekly parted in the middle over the high narrow
+temples. The long dark face with its black, set eyes, was almost without
+expression, except that of a placid severity. She gazed down at me, as I
+up at her, steadily, silently.
+
+"So this is the young lady," she mused at last, as if addressing a
+hidden and distant listener. "I hope you are not over-fatigued by your
+journey, miss. Please to step in."
+
+
+To my ear, Mrs Bowater's was what I should describe as a low, roaring
+voice, like falling water out of a black cloven rock in a hill-side; but
+what a balm was its sound in my ear, and how solacing this dignified
+address to jaded nerves still smarting a little after my victory on the
+London, Chatham, and Dover Railway. Making my way around a grandfather's
+clock that ticked hollowly beside the door, I followed her into a room
+on the left of the passage, from either wall of which a pair of
+enormous antlers threatened each other under the discoloured ceiling.
+For a moment the glare within and the vista of furniture legs confused
+my eyes. But Mrs Bowater came to my rescue.
+
+"Food was never mentioned," she remarked reflectively, "being as I see
+nothing to be considered except as food so-called. But you will find
+everything clean and comfortable; and I am sure, miss, what with your
+sad bereavements and all, as I have heard from Mr Pellew, I hope it will
+be a home to you. There being nothing else as I suppose that we may
+expect."
+
+My mind ran about in a hasty attempt to explore these sentiments. They
+soothed away many misgivings, though it was clear that Mrs Bowater's
+lodger was even less in dimensions than Mrs Bowater had supposed.
+_Clean_: after so many months of Mrs Sheppey's habits, it was this word
+that sang in my head. Wood, glass, metal flattered the light of gas and
+coal, and for the first time I heard my own voice float up into my new
+"apartment": "It looks _very_ comfortable, thank you, Mrs Bowater; and I
+am quite sure I shall be happy in my new abode." There was nothing
+intentionally affected in this formal little speech.
+
+"Which being so," replied Mrs Bowater, "there seems to be trouble with
+the cabman, and the day's drawing in, perhaps you will take a seat by
+the fire."
+
+A stool nicely to my height stood by the steel fender, the flames played
+in the chimney; and for a moment I was left alone. "Thank God," said I,
+and took off my hat, and pushed back my hair.... Alone. Only for a
+moment, though. Its mistress gone, as fine a black cat as ever I have
+seen appeared in the doorway and stood, green-eyed, regarding me. To
+judge from its countenance, this must have been a remarkable experience.
+
+I cried seductively, "Puss."
+
+But with a blink of one eye and a shake of its forepaw, as if
+inadvertently it had trodden in water, it turned itself about again and
+disappeared. In spite of all my cajoleries, Henry and I were never to be
+friends.
+
+Whatever Pollie's trouble with the cabman may have been, Mrs Bowater
+made short work of it. Pollie was shown to the room in which she was to
+sleep that night. I took off my bodice and bathed face, hands, and arms
+to the elbow in the shallow bowl Mrs Bowater had provided for me. And
+soon, wonderfully refreshed and talkative, Pollie and I were seated over
+the last meal we were to share together for many a long day.
+
+There were snippets of bread and butter for me, a little omelette, two
+sizes too large, a sugared cherry or two sprinkled with "hundreds and
+thousands," and a gay little bumper of milk gilded with the enwreathed
+letters, "A Present from Dover." Alack-a-day for that omelette! I must
+have kept a whole family of bantams steadily engaged for weeks together.
+But I was often at my wits' end to dispose of their produce. Fortunately
+Mrs Bowater kept merry fires burning in the evening--"Ladies of some
+sizes can't warm the air as much as most," as she put it. So at some
+little risk to myself among the steel fire-irons, the boiled became the
+roast. At last I made a clean breast of my horror of eggs, and since by
+that time my landlady and I were the best of friends, no harm came of
+it. She merely bestowed on me a grim smile of unadulterated amusement,
+and the bantams patronized some less fastidious stomach.
+
+My landlady was a heavy thinker, and not a copious--though a
+leisurely--talker. Minutes would pass, while with dish or duster in hand
+she pondered a speech; then perhaps her long thin lips would only shut a
+little tighter, or a slow, convulsive rub of her lean forefinger along
+the side of her nose would indicate the upshot. But I soon learned to
+interpret these mute signs. She was a woman who disapproved of most
+things, for excellent, if nebulous, reasons; and her silences were due
+not to the fact that she had nothing to say, but too much.
+
+Pollie and I talked long and earnestly that first evening at Beechwood.
+She promised to write to me, to send me all the gossip of the village,
+and to come and see me when she could. The next morning, after a
+sorrowful breakfast, we parted. Standing on the table in the parlour
+window, with eyes a little wilder than usual, I watched her pass out of
+sight. A last wave of her handkerchief, and the plump-cheeked,
+fair-skinned face was gone. The strangeness and solitude of my situation
+flooded over me.
+
+For a few days, strive as she might, Mrs Bowater's lodger moped. It was
+not merely that she had become more helpless, but of far less
+importance. This may, in part, be accounted for by the fact that, having
+been accustomed at Lyndsey to live at the top of a high house and to
+look down on the world, when I found myself foot to foot with it, so to
+speak, on Beechwood Hill, it alarmingly intensified the _sense_ of my
+small stature. Use and habit however. The relative merits of myself and
+of the passing scene gradually readjusted themselves with a proper
+respect for the former. Soon, too, as if from heaven, the packing-case
+containing my furniture arrived. Mrs Bowater shared a whole morning over
+its unpacking, ever and again standing in engrossed consideration of
+some of my minute treasures, and, quite unaware of it, heaving a great
+sigh. But how to arrange them there in a room already over-occupied?
+
+
+
+
+Chapter Nine
+
+
+A carpenter of the name of Bates was called in, so distant a relative of
+Mrs Bowater's apparently that she never by nod, word, or look
+acknowledged the bond. Mr Bates held my landlady in almost speechless
+respect. "A woman in a thousand," he repeatedly assured me, when we were
+grown a little accustomed to one another; "a woman in _ten_ thousand.
+And if things hadn't been what they was, you may understand, they might
+have turned out different. Ah, miss, there's one looking down on us
+could tell a tale." I looked up past his oblong head at the ceiling, but
+only a few flies were angling round the chandelier.
+
+Mrs Bowater's compliments were less indirect. "That _Bates_," she would
+say, surveying his day's handiwork after he was gone, "is all thumbs."
+
+He was certainly rather snail-like in his movements, and spent most of
+his time slowly rubbing his hands on the stiff apron that encased him.
+But I minded his thumbs far less than his gluepot.
+
+Many years have passed, yet at the very whisper of his name, that
+inexpressible odour clouds up into my nose. It now occurs to me for the
+first time that he never sent in his bill. Either his memory failed him,
+or he carpentered for love. Level with the wide table in the window
+recess, strewn over with my small Persian mats, whereon I sat, sewed,
+read, and took my meals, Mr Bates constructed a broad shelf, curtained
+off on three sides from the rest of the room. On this wooden stage stood
+my four-poster, wardrobe, and other belongings. It was my bedchamber.
+From table to floor he made a staircase, so that I could easily descend
+and roam the room at large. The latter would have been more commodious
+if I could have persuaded Mrs Bowater to empty it a little. If I had
+_kept on_ looking at the things in it I am sure I should have gone mad.
+Even tact was unavailing. If only there had been the merest tinge of a
+Cromwell in my character, the baubles that would have been removed!
+
+There were two simpering plaster figures--a Shepherd and
+Shepherdess--nearly half my height on the chimney-piece, whom I
+particularly detested; also an enlarged photograph in a discoloured
+frame on the wall--that of a thick-necked, formidable man, with a bush
+of whisker on either cheek, and a high, quarrelsome stare. He made me
+feel intensely self-conscious. It was like a wolf looking all day into a
+sheep-fold. So when I had my meals, I invariably turned my back on his
+portrait.
+
+I went early to bed. But now that the autumnal dusks were shortening, an
+hour or two of artificial light was necessary. The flare of the gas
+dazzled and stupefied me, and gave me a kind of hunted feeling; so Mrs
+Bowater procured for me a couple of fine little glass candlesticks. In
+bed I sometimes burned a wax-light in a saucer, a companionable thing
+for night-thoughts in a strange place. Often enough I sat through the
+evening with no other illumination than that of the smouldering coals,
+so that I could see out of the window. It was an endless source of
+amusement to withdraw the muslin curtains, gaze out over the darkened
+fields beyond the roadway, and let my day-dreams wander at will.
+
+At nine o'clock Mrs Bowater would bring me my supper--some fragments of
+rusk, or of bread, and milk. My food was her constant anxiety. The
+difficulty, as she explained, was to supply me with _little_ enough to
+eat--at least of cooked food: "It dries up in the winking of an eye." So
+her cat, Henry, fared more sumptuously than ever, though the jealous
+creature continued to reject all my advances, and as far as possible
+ignored my existence. "Simple victuals, by all means, miss," Mrs Bowater
+would admit. "But if it don't enjoy, the inside languishes; and you are
+not yet of an age that can fall back on skin and bone."
+
+The question of food presently introduced that of money. She insisted on
+reducing her charges to twenty shillings a week. "There's the lodging,
+and there's the board, the last being as you might say all but
+unmentionable; and honesty the best policy though I have never tried the
+reverse." So, in spite of all my protestations, it was agreed. And I
+thus found myself mistress of a round fifty-eight pounds a year over
+and above what I paid to Mrs Bowater. Messrs Harris, Harris, and Harris
+were punctual as quarter-day: and so was I. I "_at once_" paid over to
+my landlady L13 and whatever other sum was needful. The "charity" my
+godmother had recommended began, and, alas, remained at home. I stowed
+the rest under lock and key in one of my grandfather's boxes which I
+kept under my bed. This was an imprudent habit, perhaps. Mrs Bowater
+advocated the Penny Bank. But the thought of my money being so handy and
+_palpable_ reassured me. I would count it over in my mind, as if it were
+a means to salvation; and became, in consequence, near and parsimonious.
+
+Occasionally when she had "business" to transact, Mrs Bowater would be
+off to London. There she would purchase for me any little trifle
+required for the replenishment of my wardrobe. Needing so little, I
+could afford the finest materials; my sovereign was worth at least sixty
+shillings. Rather than "fine," Mrs Bowater preferred things "good"; and
+for this "goodness," I must confess, she sometimes made rather alarming
+sacrifices of appearance. Still, I was already possessed of a
+serviceable stock of clothes, and by aid of one of my dear mother's last
+presents to me, a shiny Swiss miniature workbox with an inlaid picture
+of the Lake of Geneva on the lid, I soon became a passable needlewoman.
+
+I love bright, pure colours, and, my sweeping and dusting and bedmaking
+over, and my external mourning for my father at an end, a remarkably
+festive figure would confront me in my cheval glass of an afternoon. The
+hours I spent in dressing my hair and matching this bit of colour with
+that. I would talk to myself in the glass, too, for company's sake, and
+make believe I was a dozen different characters. I was young. I pined
+for life and companionship, and having only my own--for Mrs Bowater was
+rather a faithful feature of the landscape than a fellow being--I made
+as much, and as many, of myself as possible.
+
+Another question that deeply engaged my landlady was my health. She
+mistrusted open windows, but strongly recommended "air." What insidious
+maladies she spied around me! Indeed that September was unusually hot. I
+sat on my table in the window like a cricket in an oven, sorely missing
+my high open balcony, the garden, and the stream. Once and again Mrs
+Bowater would take me for a little walk after sunset. Discretion to her
+was much the better part of valour; nor had I quite recovered from my
+experiences in the train. But such walks--though solitary enough at that
+hour of the day--were straggly and irksome. Pollie's arm had been a kind
+of second nature to me; but Mrs Bowater, I think, had almost as
+fastidious a disinclination to carrying me as I have to being carried. I
+languished for liberty. Being a light sleeper, I would often awake at
+daybreak and the first call of the birds. Then the hill--which led to
+Tyddlesdon End and Love (or Loose) Lane--was deserted. Thought of the
+beyond haunted me like a passion. At a convenient moment I intimated to
+Mrs Bowater how secure was the street at this early hour, how fresh the
+meadows, and how thirsty for independent outings her lodger. "Besides,
+Mrs Bowater, I am not a child, and who could see me?"
+
+After anxious and arduous discussion, Mr Bates was once more consulted.
+He wrapped himself in a veritable blanket of reflection, and all but
+became unconscious before he proposed a most ingenious device. With Mrs
+Bowater's consent, she being her own landlady and amused at the idea, he
+cut out of one of the lower panels of her parlour door a round-headed
+opening just of an easy size to suit me. In this aperture he hung a
+delicious little door that precisely fitted it. So also with the door
+into the street--to which he added a Brahmah lock. By cementing a small
+square stone into the corner of each of the steps down from the porch,
+he eased _that_ little difficulty. May Heaven bless Mr Bates! With his
+key round my neck, stoop once, stoop twice, a scamper down his steps,
+and I was free--as completely mistress of my goings-out and of my
+comings-in as every self-respecting person should be.
+
+"That's what my father would have called a good job, Mr Bates," said I
+cordially.
+
+He looked yearningly at me, as if about to impart a profound secret; but
+thought better of it. "Well, miss, what I say is, a job's a _job_; and
+if it _is_ a job, it's a job that should be made a job _of_."
+
+As I dot the i's and cross the t's of this manuscript, I often think--a
+little ruefully--of Mr Bates.
+
+As soon as daybreak was piercing into my region of the sky, and before
+Mrs Bowater or the rest of the world was stirring, I would rise, make my
+candlelit toilet, and hasten out into the forsaken sweet of the morning.
+If it broke wet or windy, I could turn over and go to sleep again. A few
+hundred yards up the hill, the road turned off, as I have said, towards
+Tyddlesdon End and Loose Lane--very stony and steep. On the left, and
+before the fork, a wicket gate led into the woods and the park of empty
+"Wanderslore." To the verge of these deserted woods made a comfortable
+walk for me.
+
+If, as might happen, any other wayfarer was early abroad, I could
+conceal myself in the tussocks of grass and bushes that bordered the
+path. In my thick veil, with my stout green parasol and inconspicuous
+shawl, I made a queer and surprising figure no doubt. Indeed, from what
+I have heard, the ill fame of Wanderslore acquired a still more piquant
+flavour in the town by reports that elf-folk had been descried on its
+outskirts. But if I sometimes skipped and capered in these early
+outings, it was for exercise as well as suppressed high spirits. To be
+prepared, too, for the want of such facilities in the future, I had the
+foresight to accustom myself to Mrs Bowater's steep steps as well as to
+my cemented-in "Bateses," as I called them. My only difficulty was to
+decide whether to practice on them when I was fresh at the outset of my
+walk, or fatigued at the end of it. Naturally people grow "peculiar"
+when much alone: self plays with self, and the mimicry fades.
+
+These little expeditions, of course, had their spice of danger, and it
+made them the more agreeable. A strange dog might give me a fright.
+There was an old vixen which once or twice exchanged glances with me at
+a distance. But with my parasol I was a match for most of the creatures
+which humanity has left unslaughtered. My sudden appearance might
+startle or perplex them. But if few were curious, fewer far were
+unfriendly. Boys I feared most. A hulking booby once stoned me through
+the grass, but fortunately he was both a coward and a poor marksman.
+Until winter came, I doubt if a single sunshine morning was wasted. Many
+a rainy one, too, found me splashing along, though then I must be a
+careful walker to avoid a sousing.
+
+The birds renewed their autumn song, the last flowers were blossoming.
+Concealed by scattered tufts of bracken where an enormous beech forked
+its roots and cast a golden light from its withering leaves, I would
+spend many a solitary hour. Above the eastern tree-tops my Kent
+stretched into the distance beneath the early skies. Far to my left and
+a little behind me rose the chimneys of gloomy Wanderslore. Breathing in
+the gentle air, the dreamer within would stray at will. There I kept the
+anniversary of my mother's birthday; twined a wreath for her of
+ivy-flowers and winter green; and hid it secretly in a forsaken
+blackbird's nest in the woods.
+
+Still I longed for my old home again. Mrs Bowater's was a stuffy and
+meagre little house, and when meals were in preparation, none too sweet
+to the nose. Especially low I felt, when a scrawling letter was now and
+then delivered by the postman from Pollie. Her spelling and grammar
+intensified my homesickness. Miss Fenne, too, had not forgotten me. I
+pored over her spidery epistles till my head ached. Why, if I had been
+so rash and undutiful, was she so uneasy? Even the texts she chose had a
+parched look. The thought of her spectacling my minute handwriting and
+examining the proof that I was still a child of wrath, gave my pride a
+silly qualm. So Mrs Bowater came to my rescue, and between us we
+concocted replies to her which, I am afraid, were not more intelligible
+for a tendency on my landlady's part to express my sentiments in the
+third person.
+
+This little service set her thinking of Sunday and church. She was not,
+she told me, "what you might call a religious woman," having been
+compelled "to keep her head up in the world, and all not being gold that
+glitters." She was none the less a regular attendant at St Peter's--a
+church a mile or so away in the valley, whose five bells of a Sabbath
+evening never failed to recall my thoughts to Lyndsey and to dip me into
+the waters of melancholy. I loved their mellow clanging in the lap of
+the wind, yet it was rather doleful to be left alone with my candles,
+and only Henry sullenly squatting in the passage awaiting his mistress's
+return.
+
+"Not that you need making any _better_, miss," Mrs Bowater assured me.
+"Even a buttercup--or a retriever dog, for that matter--being no fuller
+than it can hold of what it is, in a manner of speaking. But there's the
+next world to be accounted for, and hopes of reunion on another shore,
+where, so I understand, mere size, body or station, will not be
+noticeable in the sight of the Lamb. _Not_ that I hold with the notion
+that only the good so-called will be there."
+
+This speech, I must confess, made me exceedingly uncomfortable.
+
+"Wherever I go, Mrs Bowater," I replied hastily, "I shall not be happy
+unless you are there."
+
+"D. V.," said Mrs Bowater, grimly, "I will."
+
+Still, I remained unconverted to St Peter's. Why, I hardly know: perhaps
+it was her reference to its pew rents, or her description of the vicar's
+daughters (who were now nursing their father at Tunbridge Wells), or
+maybe even it was a stare from her husband which I happened at that
+precise moment to intercept from the wall. Possibly if I myself had
+taken a "sitting," this aura of formality would have faded away. Mrs
+Bowater was a little reassured, however, to hear that my father and
+mother, in spite of Miss Fenne, had seldom taken me to church. They had
+concluded that my absence was best both for me and for the congregation.
+And I told her of our little evening services in the drawing-room, with
+Mrs Ballard, the parlourmaid, Pollie, and the Boy on the sofa, just as
+it happened to be their respective "Sundays in."
+
+This set her mind at rest. Turn and turn about, on one Sunday evening
+she went to St Peter's and brought back with her the text and crucial
+fragments of Mr Crimble's sermon, and on the next we read the lessons
+together and sang a hymn. Once, indeed, I embarked upon a solo, "As
+pants the hart," one of my mother's favourite airs. But I got a little
+shaky at "O for the wings," and there was no rambling, rumbling chorus
+from my father. But Sunday was not my favourite day on Beechwood Hill.
+Mrs Bowater looked a little formal with stiff white "frilling" round her
+neck. She reminded me of a leg of mutton. To judge from the gloom and
+absentmindedness into which they sometimes plunged her, quotations from
+Mr Crimble could be double-edged. My real joy was to hear her views on
+the fashions and manners of her fellow-worshippers.
+
+Well, so the months went by. Winter came with its mists and rains and
+frosts, and a fire in the polished grate was no longer an evening luxury
+but a daily need. As often as possible I went out walking. When the
+weather was too inclement, I danced for an hour or so, for joy and
+exercise, and went swimming on a chair. I would entertain myself also in
+watching through the muslin curtains the few passers-by; sorting out
+their gaits, and noses, and clothes, and acquaintances, and guessing
+their characters, occupations, and circumstances. Certain little looks
+and movements led me to suppose that, even though I was perfectly
+concealed, the more sensitive among them were vaguely uneasy under this
+secret scrutiny. In such cases (though very reluctantly) I always drew
+my eyes away: first because I did not like the thought of encroaching on
+their privacy, and next, because I was afraid their uneasiness might
+prevent them coming again. But this microscopic examination of mankind
+must cease with dusk, and the candle-hours passed rather heavily at
+times. The few books I had brought away from Lyndsey were mine now
+nearly by heart. So my eye would often wander up to a small bookcase
+that hung out of reach on the other side of the chimney-piece.
+
+
+
+
+Chapter Ten
+
+
+One supper-time I ventured to ask Mrs Bowater if she would hand me down
+a tall, thin, dark-green volume, whose appearance had particularly taken
+my fancy. A simple enough request, but surprisingly received. She
+stiffened all over and eyed the bookcase with a singular intensity. "The
+books there," she said, "are what they call the dead past burying its
+dead."
+
+Spoon in hand, I paused, looking now at Mrs Bowater and now at the
+coveted book. "_Mr_ Bowater," she added from deep down in herself,
+"followed the sea." This was, in fact, Mr Bowater's debut in our
+conversation, and her remark, uttered in so hollow yet poignant a tone,
+produced a romantic expectancy in my mind.
+
+"Is----" I managed to whisper at last: "I hope Mr Bowater isn't _dead_?"
+
+Mrs Bowater's eyes were like lead in her long, dark-skinned face. She
+opened her mouth, her gaze travelled slowly until, as I realized, it had
+fixed itself on the large yellowing photograph behind my back.
+
+"Dead, no"; she echoed sepulchrally. "Worse than."
+
+By which I understood that, far from being dead, Mr Bowater was still
+actively alive. And yet, apparently, not much the happier for that.
+Instantaneously I caught sight of a rocky, storm-strewn shore, such as I
+had seen in my _Robinson Crusoe_, and _there_ Mr Bowater, still
+"following the sea."
+
+"Never, never," continued Mrs Bowater in her Bible voice, "never to
+darken these doors again!" I stole an anxious glance over my shoulder.
+There was such a brassy boldness in the responsive stare that I was
+compelled to shut my eyes.
+
+But Mrs Bowater had caught my expression. "He was, as some would say,"
+she explained with gloomy pride, "a handsome man. _Do_ handsome he did
+never. But there, miss, things being as they must be, and you in the
+green of your youth--though hearing the worst may be a wholesome physic
+if taken with care, as I have told Fanny many a time...." She paused to
+breathe. "What I was saying is, there can be no harm in your looking at
+the book if that's all there's to it." With that she withdrew the
+dry-looking volume from the shelf and laid it on the table beside my
+chair.
+
+I got down, opened it in the middle (as my father had taught me, in
+order to spare the binding), opened it on a page inky black as night all
+over, but starred with a design as familiar to me as the lines on the
+palm of my hand.
+
+"But oh! Mrs Bowater!" I cried, all in a breath, running across,
+dragging back the curtain, and pointing out into the night; "look, look,
+it's there! It's Orion!"
+
+There, indeed, in the heavens beyond my window, straddling the dark,
+star for star the same as those in the book, stood the Giant, shaking
+his wondrous fires upon the air. Even Mrs Bowater was moved by my
+enthusiasm. She came to the table, compared at my direction chart with
+sky, and was compelled rather grudgingly to admit that her husband's
+book was at least true to the facts. Stooping low, I read out a brief
+passage. She listened. And it seemed a look of girlhood came into the
+shadowy face uplifted towards the window. So the stars came into my
+life, and faithful friends they have remained to this day.
+
+Mrs Bowater's little house being towards the crest of the hill, with
+sunrise a little to the left across the meadows, my window commanded
+about three-fifths of the southern and eastern skies. By day I would
+kneel down and study for hours the charts, and thus be prepared for the
+dark. Night after night, when the weather was fair, or the windy clouds
+made mock of man's celestial patternings, I would sit in the glow of the
+firelight and summon these magic shiners each by name--Bellatrix, huge
+Betelgeuse, Aldebaran, and the rest. I would look at one, and, while so
+doing, watch another. This not only isolated the smaller stars, but
+gradually I became aware that they were one and all furtively signalling
+to _me_! About a fortnight later my old Lyndsey friend, the Dogstar,
+topped the horizon fringe of woodland. I heard myself shout at him
+across the world. His sudden molten bursts of crimson betwixt his
+emeralds and sapphires filled me with an almost ridiculous delight.
+
+By the middle of December I had mastered all the greater stars in my
+region, and with my spyglass a few even of the Gammas and Deltas. But
+much of the zenith and all the north was closed to me, and--such is
+human greed--I began to pine beyond measure for a sight of Deneb, Vega,
+and the Chair. This desire grew unendurable, and led me into a piece of
+genuine foolhardiness. I determined to await the first clear still night
+and then to sally out and make my way, by hook or crook, up to my
+beech-roots, from which I should be able to command a fair stretch of
+the northern heavens. A quiet spell favoured me.
+
+I waited until Mrs Bowater had gone to her bedroom, then muffled myself
+up in my thickest clothes and stole out into the porch. At my first
+attempt, one glance into the stooping dark was enough. At the second, a
+furtive sighing breath of wind, as I breasted the hill, suddenly flapped
+my mantle and called in my ear. I turned tail and fled. But never faint
+heart won fair constellation. At the third I pressed on.
+
+The road was deserted. No earthly light showed anywhere except from a
+lamp-post this side of the curve of the hill. I frisked along, listening
+and peering, and brimming over with painful delight. The dark waned; and
+my eyes grew accustomed to the thin starlight. I gained the woods
+unharmed. Rich was my reward. There and then I begged the glimmering
+Polestar to be true to Mr Bowater. Fear, indeed, if in a friendly
+humour, is enlivening company. Instead of my parasol I had brought out a
+curved foreign knife (in a sheath at least five inches long) which I had
+discovered on my parlour what-not.
+
+The whisperings of space, the calls of indetectable birds in the wastes
+of the sky, the sudden appearance of menacing or sinister shapes which
+vanished or melted themselves into mere stocks or stones as I drew
+near--my heart gave many an anguished jump. But quiet, and the
+magnificence of night, vanquished all folly at last. It seemed to me
+that a Being whom one may call Silence was brooding in solitude where
+living and human visitants are rare, and that in his company a harmless
+spirit may be at peace. Oblivious of my ungainly knife, yet keeping a
+firm arm on it, self seemed to be the whole scene there, and my body
+being so small I was perhaps less a disturber than were most intruders
+of that solemn repose.
+
+Why I kept these night-walks secret, I cannot say. It was not
+apprehension of Mrs Bowater. She would have questioned my discretion,
+but would not, I think, have attempted to dissuade me from them against
+my will. No. It may be that every true astronomer is a miser at heart,
+and keeps some Lambda or Mu or lost nebula his eternal friend, named
+with his name, but unrecorded on any chart. For my part I hoarded the
+complete north for a while.
+
+A fright I got one night, however, kept me indoors for the better part
+of a week. In my going out the little house door had been carelessly
+left unlatched. Algol and the red planet Mars had been my quarry among
+the floating woolpack clouds. The wind was lightly blowing from the
+north-west after the calm. I drew down my veil and set off briskly and
+lightheartedly for home.
+
+The sight of the dark-looking hole in the door quickly sobered me down.
+All was quiet, however, but on entering my room, there was a strangeness
+in the air, and that not due to my landlady's forlorn trumpetings from
+above. Through the floating vaporous light I trod across to my staircase
+and was soon in bed. Hardly had my eyes closed when there broke out of
+the gloom around me a dismal, appalling cry. I soon realized that the
+creeping horror this caused in me was as nothing compared with that of
+the poor beast, lured, no doubt, into the house by Henry, at finding
+itself beneath a strange roof.
+
+"Puss, puss," I pleaded shakenly; and again broke out that heart-sick
+cry.
+
+Knife in hand, I descended my staircase and edging as far as possible
+from the baleful globes greenly burning beneath a mahogany chair, I
+threw open both doors and besought my unwelcome visitor to take his
+departure. The night wind came fluttering; there was the blur of a
+scuttering, shapeless form, and in the flash of an eye I was sprawling
+on the floor. A good deal shaken, with a nasty scratch on my thigh, but
+otherwise unharmed, I waved my hand after the fugitive and returned to
+bed.
+
+The blood soon ceased to flow. Not daring to send my blood-stained
+nightgown to the wash, I concealed it behind my dresses in the wardrobe,
+and the next fine morning carried it off with me and buried it as deeply
+as I could in a deserted rabbit-burrow in the woods. Such is an evil
+conscience that, first, I had the fancy that during my digging a twig
+had inexplicably snapped in the undergrowth; and next, for "burnt
+offering," I made Mrs Bowater the present of an oval handglass set in
+garnets (one of my grandfather's gifts). This she took down to a local
+jeweller's to be mounted with a pin, and wore it on Sundays in place of
+her usual cameo depicting the Three Graces disporting themselves under a
+Palm-tree beside a Fountain.
+
+Meanwhile I had heard a little more about the "Fanny" whom Mrs Bowater
+had mentioned. My landlady was indeed a slow confider. Fanny, I
+gathered, had a post as mistress at a school some forty miles away. She
+taught the little boys "English." The fleeting Miss Perry returned to
+mind, and with a faint dismay I heard that Fanny would soon be returning
+home for the Christmas holidays. Mrs Bowater's allusions to her were the
+more formidable for being veiled. I dreaded the invasion. Would she not
+come "between us"?
+
+Then by chance I found hidden in my star-book the photograph of an
+infant in arms and of a pensive, ringleted woman, who, in spite of this
+morsel in her lap, seemed in her gaze out of nowhere to be vaguely
+afraid. On the back was scrawled in pencil: "F.: six weeks"--and an
+extremely cross six weeks "F." looked. For some inexplicable reason I
+pushed back this lady's photograph into the book, and said nothing about
+it. The suspicion had entered my mind that Fanny was only a daughter by
+marriage. I sank into a kind of twilight reflection at this. It seemed,
+in an odd fashion, to make Mrs Bowater more admirable, her husband more
+formidable, and the unknown Fanny more mysterious and enigmatical. At
+the first opportunity I crept my way to the subject and asked my
+landlady if she could show me a portrait of her daughter.
+
+The photograph she produced from upstairs had in fading almost become a
+caricature. It had both blackened and greyed. It depicted herself many
+years younger but hardly less grim in appearance in full flounced
+skirts, Fanny as a child of about five or six standing at her knee, and
+Mr Bowater leaning with singular amenity behind her richly-carved chair,
+the fingers of his left hand resting disposedly on her right shoulder. I
+looked anxiously at the child. It was certainly crosspatch "F.", and a
+far from prepossessing little creature with that fixed, level gaze. Mr
+Bowater, on the other hand, had not yet adopted the wild and rigid stare
+which dominated the small parlour.
+
+Mrs Bowater surveyed the group with a lackadaisical detachment.
+"Fractious!--you can see the tears on her cheeks for all what the young
+man could do with his woolly lamb and grimaces. It was the heyday."
+
+_What_ was the heyday, I wondered. "Was Mr Bowater--attached to her?"
+seemed a less intrusive question.
+
+"Doted," she replied, polishing the glass with her apron. "But not to
+much purpose--with an eye for every petticoat."
+
+This seemed a difficult conversation to maintain. "Don't you think, Mrs
+Bowater," I returned zealously, "there is just the faintest tinge of
+_Mr_ Bowater in the _chin_? I don't," I added candidly, "see the
+faintest glimpse of _you_."
+
+Mrs Bowater merely tightened her lips.
+
+"And is she like that now?" I asked presently.
+
+Mrs Bowater re-wrapped frame and photograph in their piece of newspaper.
+"It's _looks_, miss, that are my constant anxiety: and you may be
+thankful for being as you might say preserved from the world. What's
+more, the father will out, I suppose, from now till Day of Judgment."
+
+How strangely her sentiments at times resembled my godmother's, and yet
+how different they were in effect. My thoughts after this often drifted
+to Mrs Bowater's early married life. And so peculiar are the workings of
+the mind that her husband's star-chart, his sleek appearance as a young
+father, the mysterious reference to the petticoats, awoke in me an
+almost romantic interest in him. To such a degree that it gradually
+became my custom to cast his portrait a satirical little bow of greeting
+when I emerged from my bedroom in the morning, and even to kiss my hand
+to his invisible stare when I retired for the night. To all of which
+advances he made no reply.
+
+
+My next bout of star-gazing presaged disaster. I say star-gazing, for it
+is true that I stole out after honest folk are abed only when the
+heavens were swept and garnished. But, as a matter of fact, my real
+tryst was with another Self. Had my lot been different, I might have
+sought that self in Terra del Fuego or Malay, or in a fine marriage.
+Mine was a smaller world. Bo-peep I would play with shadow and dew-bead.
+And if Ulysses, as my father had read me, stopped his ears against the
+Sirens, I contrariwise unsealed mine to the ethereal airs of that bare
+wintry solitude.
+
+The spectral rattle of the parched beechleaves on the saplings, the
+faintest whisper in the skeleton bracken set me peeping, peering,
+tippeting; and the Invisibles, if they heeded me, merely smiled on me
+from their grave, all-seeing eyes. As for the first crystal sparking of
+frost, I remember in my folly I sat down (bunched up, fortunately, in
+honest lamb's-wool) and remained, minute by minute, unstirring,
+unwinking, watching as if in my own mind the exquisite small fires
+kindle and flit from point to point of lichen and bark, until--out of
+this engrossment--little but a burning icicle was left to trudge along
+home.
+
+It was December 23rd. I remember that date, and even now hardly
+understand the meaning or intention of what it brought me. Love for the
+frosty, star-roofed woods, that was easy. And yet what if--though
+easy--it is not enough? I had lingered on, talking in my childish
+fashion--a habit never to leave me--to every sudden lovely morsel in
+turn, when, to my dismay, I heard St Peter's clock toll midnight. Was it
+my fancy that at the stroke, and as peacefully as a mother when she is
+alone with her sleeping children, the giant tree sighed, and the whole
+night stilled as if at the opening of a door? I don't know, for I would
+sometimes pretend to be afraid merely to enjoy the pretending. And even
+my small Bowater astronomy had taught me that as the earth has her poles
+and equator, so these are in relation to the ecliptic and the
+equinoctial. So too, then, each one of us--even a mammet like
+myself--must live in a world of the imagination which is in everlasting
+relation to its heavens. But I must keep my feet.
+
+I waved adieu to the woods and unseen Wanderslore. As if out of the
+duskiness a kind of reflex of me waved back; and I was soon hastening
+along down the hill, the only thing stirring in the cold, white,
+luminous dust. Instinctively, in drawing near, I raised my eyes to the
+upper windows of Mrs Bowater's crouching house. To my utter confusion.
+For one of them was wide open, and seated there, as if in wait for me,
+was a muffled figure--and that not my landlady's--looking out. All my
+fine boldness and excitement died in me. I may have had no apprehension
+of telling Mrs Bowater of my pilgrimages, but, not having told her, I
+had a lively distaste of being "found out."
+
+Stiff as a post, I gazed up through the shadowed air at the vague,
+motionless figure--to all appearance completely unaware of my presence.
+But there is a commerce between minds as well as between eyes. I was
+perfectly certain that I was being _thought_ about, up there.
+
+For a while my mind faltered. The old childish desire gathered in me--to
+fly, to be gone, to pass myself away. There was a door in the woods.
+Better sense, and perhaps a creeping curiosity, prevailed, however. With
+a bold front, and as if my stay in the street had been of my own
+choosing, I entered the gate, ascended my "Bateses," and so into the
+house. Then I listened. Faintly at last sounded a stealthy footfall
+overhead; the window was furtively closed. Doubt vanished. In
+preparation for the night's expedition I had lain down in the early
+evening for a nap. Evidently while I had been asleep, Fanny had come
+home. The English mistress had caught her mother's lodger playing
+truant!
+
+
+
+
+Chapter Eleven
+
+
+If it was the child of wrath in me that hungered at times after the
+night, woods, and solitude to such a degree that my very breast seemed
+empty within me; it was now the child of grace that prevailed. With
+girlish exaggeration I began torturing myself in my bed with remorse at
+the deceit I had been practising. Now Conscience told me that I must
+make a full confession the first thing in the morning; and now that it
+would be more decent to let Fanny "tell on me." At length thought
+tangled with dream, and a grisly night was mine.
+
+What was that? It was day; Mrs Bowater was herself softly calling me
+beyond my curtains, and her eye peeped in. Always before I had been up
+and dressed when she brought in my breakfast. Through a violent headache
+I surveyed the stooping face. Something in my appearance convinced her
+that I was ill, and she insisted on my staying in bed.
+
+"But, Mrs Bowater...." I expostulated.
+
+"No, no, miss; it was in a _butt_ they drowned the sexton. Here you
+stay; and its being Christmas Eve, you must rest and keep quiet. What
+with those old books and all, you have been burning the candle at both
+ends."
+
+Early in the afternoon on finding that her patient was little better, my
+landlady went off to the chemist's to get me some physic; I could bear
+inactivity no longer, and rose and dressed. The fire was low, the room
+sluggish, when in the dusk, as I sat dismally brooding in my chair, the
+door opened, and a stranger came in with my tea. She was dressed in
+black, and was carrying a light. With that raised in one hand, and my
+tea-tray held between finger and thumb of the other, she looked at me
+with face a little sidelong. Her hair was dark above her clear pale
+skin, and drawn, without a fringe, smoothly over her brows. Her eyes
+were almost unnaturally light in colour. I looked at her in
+astonishment; she was new in my world. She put the tray on my table,
+poked the fire into a blaze, blew out her candle at a single puff from
+her pursed lips, and seating herself on the hearthrug, clasped her hands
+round her knees.
+
+"Mother told me you were in bed, _ill_," she said, "I hope you are
+better."
+
+I assured her in a voice scarcely above a whisper that I was quite well
+again.
+
+She nestled her chin down and broke into a little laugh: "My! how you
+startled me!"
+
+"Then it _was_ you," I managed to say.
+
+"Oh, yes; it was me, it was me." The words were uttered as if to
+herself. She stooped her cheek over her knees again, and smiled round at
+me. "I'm not _telling_," she added softly.
+
+Her tone, her expression, filled me with confusion. "But please do not
+suppose," I began angrily, "that I am not my own mistress here. I have
+my own key----"
+
+"Oh, yes, your own mistress," she interrupted suavely, "but you see
+that's just what I'm _not_. And the key! why, it's just envy that's
+gnawing at the roots. I've never, never in my life seen anything so
+queer." She suddenly raised her strange eyes on me. "What were you doing
+out there?"
+
+A lie perched on my lip; but the wide, light eyes searched me through.
+"I went," said I, "to be in the woods--to see the stars"; then added in
+a rather pompous voice, "only the southern and eastern constellations
+are visible from _this_ poky little window."
+
+There was no change in the expression of the two eyes that drank me in.
+"_I_ see; and you want them all. That's odd, now," she went on
+reflectively, stabbing again at the fire; "they have never attracted me
+very much--angels' tin-tacks, as they say in the Sunday Schools. Fanny
+Bowater was looking for the moon."
+
+She turned once more, opened her lips, showing the firm row of teeth
+beneath them, and sang in a low voice the first words, I suppose, of
+some old madrigal: "'_She enchants me._' And if _I_ had my little key,
+and my little secret door.... But never mind. 'Tell-tale Tit, her tongue
+shall be slit.' It's safe with me. I'm no sneak. But you might like to
+know, Miss M., that my mother thinks the very world of you. And so do I,
+for that matter; though perhaps for different reasons."
+
+The calm, insolent words infuriated me, and yet her very accents, with
+a curious sweet rasp in them, like that in a skylark's song when he
+slides his last twenty feet from the clouds, were an enchantment. Ever
+and always there seemed to be two Fannies; one visible, her face; the
+other audible, her voice. But the enchantment was merely fuel for the
+flames.
+
+"Will you please remember," I broke out peremptorily, "that neither
+myself nor what I choose to do is any affair of yours. Mrs Bowater is an
+excellent landlady; you can tell her precisely what you please;
+and--and" (I seemed to be choking) "I am accustomed to take my meals
+alone."
+
+The sidelong face grew hard and solemn in the firelight, then slowly
+turned, and once more the eyes surveyed me under lifted brows--like the
+eyes of an angel, empty of mockery or astonishment or of any meaning but
+that of their beauty. "There you are," she said. "One talks like one
+human being to another, and I should have thought you'd be grateful for
+that; and this is the result. Facts are facts; and I'm not sorry for
+them, good or bad. If you wish to see the last of me, here it is. I
+don't thrust myself on people--there's no need. But still; I'm not
+telling."
+
+She rose, and with one light foot on my fender, surveyed herself for a
+moment with infinite composure in the large looking-glass that spanned
+the chimney-piece.
+
+And I?--I was exceedingly tired. My head was burning like a coal; my
+thoughts in confusion. Suddenly I lost control of myself and broke into
+an angry, ridiculous sobbing. I simply sat there, my face hidden in my
+dry, hot hands, miserable and defeated. And strange Fanny Bowater, what
+did she do?
+
+"Heavens!" she muttered scornfully, "I gave up snivelling when I was a
+baby." Then voice, manner, even attitude suddenly changed--"And there's
+mother!"
+
+When Mrs Bowater knocked at my door, though still in my day-clothes, I
+was in bed again, and my tea lay untasted on a chair beside it.
+
+"Dear, dear," she said, leaning anxiously over me, "your poor cheeks are
+red as a firebrand, miss. Those chemists daren't put a nose outside
+their soaps and tooth powders. It must be Dr Phelps to-morrow if you are
+no better. And as plump a little Christmas pudding boiling for you in
+the pot as ever you could see! Tell me, now; there's no _pain_
+anywhere--throat, limbs, or elsewhere?"
+
+I shook my head. She sprinkled a drop or two of eau de Cologne on my
+sheet and pillow, gently bathed my temples and hands, kindled a
+night-light, and left me once more to my own reflections.
+
+They were none too comfortable. One thing only was in my mind--Fanny
+Bowater, her face, her voice, every glance and intonation, smile, and
+gesture. That few minutes' talk seemed now as remote and incredible as a
+nightmare. The stars, the woods, my solitary delights in learning and
+thinking were all suddenly become empty and meaningless. She despised
+me: and I hated her with a passion I cannot describe.
+
+Yet in the midst of my hatred I longed for her company again,
+distracting myself with the sharp and clever speeches I might have made
+to her, and picturing her confounded by my contempt and indifference.
+But should I ever see her alone again? At every sound and movement in
+the house, which before had so little concerned me, I lay listening,
+with held breath. I might have been a mummy in a Pyramid hearkening
+after the fluttering pinions of its spirit come back to bring it life.
+But no tidings came of the stranger.
+
+When my door opened again, it was only to admit Mrs Bowater with my
+supper--a bowl of infant's gruel, not the customary old lady's rusk and
+milk. I laughed angrily within to think that her daughter must have
+witnessed its preparation. Even at twenty, then, I had not grown used to
+being of so little consequence in other people's eyes. Yet, after all,
+who ever quite succeeds in being that? My real rage was not that Fanny
+had taken me as a midget, but as _such_ a midget. Yet can I honestly say
+that I have _ever_ taken her as mere Fanny, and not as _such_ a Fanny?
+
+The truth is she had wounded my vanity, and vanity may be a more
+fractious nursling even than a wounded heart. Tired and fretful, I had
+hardly realized the flattering candour of her advances. Even her
+promises not to "tell" of my night-wanderings, implied that she trusted
+in my honour not to tell of her promise. I thought and thought of her.
+She remained an enigma. Cold and hard--no one had ever spoken to me like
+that before. Yet her voice--it was as if it had run about in my blood,
+and made my eyes shine. A mere human sound to set me sobbing! More
+dangerous yet, I began to think of what Miss Bowater must be thinking of
+me, until, exhausted, I fell asleep, to dream that I was a child again
+and shut up in one of Mrs Ballard's glass jars, and that a hairy woman
+who was a kind of mixture of Mrs Bowater and Miss Fenne, was tapping
+with a thimbled finger on its side to increase my terror.
+
+Next morning, thank Heaven, admitted me to my right mind again. I got
+out of bed and peered through the window. It was Christmas Day. A thin
+scatter of snow was powdering down out of the grey sky. The fields were
+calm and frozen. I felt, as I might say, the hunger in my face, looking
+out. There was something astonishingly new in my life. Everything
+familiar had become a little strange.
+
+Over night, too, some one--and with mingled feelings I guessed who--must
+have stolen into my room while I lay asleep. Laid out on a bedside chair
+was a crimson padded dressing-jacket, threaded with gold, a delicate
+piece of needlework that would have gladdened my grandfather. Rolled up
+on the floor beside it was a thick woollen mat, lozenged in green and
+scarlet, and just of a size to spread beside my bed. These gifts
+multiplied my self-reproaches and made me acutely homesick.
+
+What should I do? Beneath these thoughts was a quiet fizz of expectation
+and delight, like water under a boat. Pride and common sense fought out
+their battle in my mind. It was pride that lost the day. When Mrs
+Bowater brought in my breakfast, she found her invalid sitting up in
+Fanny's handsome jacket, and the mat laid over the bedrail for my
+constant contemplation. Nor had I forgotten Mrs Bowater. By a little
+ruse I had found out the name and address of a chemist in the town, and
+on the tray beside my breakfast was the fine bottle of lavender water
+which I had myself ordered him to send by the Christmas Eve post.
+
+"Well there, miss, you did take me in that time," she assured me. "And
+more like a Valentine than a Christmas present; and its being the only
+scent so-called that I've any nose for."
+
+Clearly this was no occasion for the confessional, even if I had had a
+mind to it. But I made at least half a vow never to go star-gazing again
+without her knowledge. My looks pleased her better, too, though not so
+much better as to persuade her to countermand Dr Phelps. Her yellowish
+long hand with its worn wedding-ring was smoothing my counterpane. I
+clutched at it, and, shame-stricken, smiled up into her face.
+
+"You have made me very happy," I said. At this small remark, the heavy
+eyelids trembled, but she made no reply.
+
+"Did," I managed to inquire at last, "did she have any breakfast before
+she went for the doctor?"
+
+"A cup of tea," said Mrs Bowater shortly. A curious happiness took
+possession of me.
+
+"She is very young to be teaching; not much older than I am."
+
+"The danger was to keep her back," was the obscure reply. "We don't
+always see eye to eye."
+
+For an instant the dark, cavernous face above me was mated by that other
+of birdlike lightness and beauty. "Isn't it funny?" I observed, "I had
+made quite, quite a different picture of her."
+
+"Looks are looks, and brains are brains; and between them you must tread
+very wary."
+
+
+About eleven o'clock a solemn-looking young man of about thirty, with a
+large pair of reddish leather gloves in his hand, entered the room. For
+a moment he did not see my bed, then, remarking circumspectly in a
+cheerful, hollow voice, "So this is our patient," he bade me
+good-morning, and took a seat beside my bed. A deep blush mounted up
+into the fair, smooth-downed cheeks as he returned my scrutiny and asked
+me to exhibit my tongue. I put it out, and he blushed even deeper.
+
+"And the pulse, please," he murmured, rising. I drew back the crimson
+sleeve of Fanny's jacket, and with extreme nicety he placed the tip of a
+square, icy forefinger on my wrist. Once more his fair-lashed eyelids
+began to blink. He extracted a fine gold watch from his waistcoat
+pocket, compared beat with beat, frowned, and turned to Mrs Bowater.
+
+"You are not, I assume, aware of the--the young lady's _normal_ pulse?"
+
+"There being no cause before to consider it, I am not," Mrs Bowater
+returned.
+
+"Any _pain_?" said Dr Phelps.
+
+"Headache," replied Mrs Bowater on my behalf, "and shoots in the limbs."
+
+At that Dr Phelps took a metal case out of his waistcoat, glanced at
+it, glanced at me, and put it back again. He leaned over so close to
+catch the whisper of my breathing that there seemed a danger of my
+losing myself in the labyrinth of his downy ear.
+
+"H'm, a little fever," he said musingly. "Have we any reason to suppose
+that we can have taken a chill?"
+
+The head on the pillow stirred gently to and fro, and I think its cheek
+was dyed with an even sprightlier red than had coloured his. After one
+or two further questions, and a low colloquy with Mrs Bowater in the
+passage, Dr Phelps withdrew, and his carriage rolled away.
+
+"A painstaking young man," Mrs Bowater summed him up in the doorway,
+"but not the kind I should choose to die under. You are to keep quiet
+and warm, miss; have plenty of light nourishment; and physic to follow.
+Which, except for the last-mentioned, and that mainly water, one don't
+have to ride in a carriage to know for one's self."
+
+But "peace and goodwill": I liked Dr Phelps, and felt so much better for
+his skill that before his wheels had rolled out of hearing I had leapt
+out of bed, dragged out the trunk that lay beneath it, and fetched out
+from it a treasured ivory box. On removal of the lid, this ingenious
+work disclosed an Oriental Temple, with a spreading tree, a pool, a
+long-legged bird, and a mountain. And all these exquisitely tinted in
+their natural colours. It had come from China, and had belonged to my
+mother's brother, Andrew, who was an officer in the Navy and had died at
+sea. This I wrapped up in a square of silk and tied with a green thread.
+During the whole of his visit my head had been so hotly in chase of this
+one stratagem that it is a marvel Dr Phelps had not deciphered it in my
+pulse.
+
+When Mrs Bowater brought in my Christmas dinner--little but bread sauce
+and a sprig of holly!--I dipped in the spoon, and, as innocently as I
+knew how, inquired if her daughter would like to see some really fine
+sewing.
+
+The black eyes stood fast, then the ghost of a smile vanished over her
+features; "I'll be bound she would, miss. I'll give her your message."
+Alone again, I turned over on my pillow and laughed until tears all but
+came into my eyes.
+
+All that afternoon I waited on, the coals of fire that I had prepared
+for my enemy's head the night before now ashes of penitence on my own.
+A dense smell of cooking pervaded the house; and it was not until the
+evening that Fanny Bowater appeared.
+
+She was dressed in a white muslin gown with a wreath of pale green
+leaves in her hair. "I am going to a party," she said, "so I can't waste
+much time."
+
+"Mrs Bowater thought you would like to see some _really_ beautiful
+needlework," I replied suavely.
+
+"Well," she said, "where is it?"
+
+"Won't you come a little closer?"
+
+That figure, as nearly like the silver slip of the new moon as ever I
+have seen, seemed to float in my direction. I held my breath and looked
+up into the light, dwelling eyes. "It is this," I whispered, drawing my
+two hands down the bosom of her crimson dressing-jacket. "It is only,
+Thank you, I wanted to say."
+
+In a flash her lips broke into a low clear laughter. "Why, _that's_
+nothing. Really and truly I hate that kind of work; but mother often
+wrote of you; there was nothing better to do; and the smallness of the
+thing amused me."
+
+I nodded humbly. "Yes, yes," I muttered, "Midget is as Midget wears. I
+know that. And--and here, Miss Bowater, is a little Christmas present
+from me."
+
+Voraciously I watched her smooth face as she untied the thread. "A
+little ivory box!" she exclaimed, pushing back the lid, "and a Buddhist
+temple, how very pretty. Thank you."
+
+"Yes, Miss Bowater, and, do you see, in the corner there? a moon. 'She
+enchants' you."
+
+"So it is," she laughed, closing the box. "I was supposing," she went on
+solemnly, "that I had been put in the corner in positively everlasting
+disgrace."
+
+"Please don't say that," I entreated. "We _may_ be friends, mayn't we? I
+am better now."
+
+Her eyes wandered over my bed, my wardrobe, and all my possessions. "But
+yes," she said, "of course"; and laughed again.
+
+"And you believe me?"
+
+"Believe you?"
+
+"That it was the stars? I thought Mrs Bowater might be anxious if she
+knew. It was quite, quite safe, really; and I'm _going_ to tell her."
+
+"Oh, dear," she replied in a cold, small voice, "so you are still
+worrying about that. I--I envied you." With a glance over her shoulder,
+she leaned closer. "Next time you go," she breathed out to me, "we'll go
+together."
+
+My heart gave a furious leap; my lips closed tight. "I could tell you
+the names of some of the stars now," I said, in a last wrestle with
+conscience.
+
+"No, no," said Fanny Bowater, "it isn't the stars I'm after. The first
+fine night we'll go to the woods. You shall wait for me till everything
+is quiet. It will be good practise in _practical_ astronomy." She
+watched my face, and began silently laughing as if she were reading my
+thoughts. "That's a bargain, then. What is life, Miss M., but
+experience? And what is experience, but knowing thyself? And what's
+knowing thyself but the very apex of wisdom? Anyhow it's a good deal
+more interesting than the Prince of Denmark."
+
+"Yes", I agreed. "And there's still all but a full moon."
+
+"Aha!" said she. "But _what_ a world with only one! Jupiter has scores,
+hasn't he? Just think of _his_ Love Lanes!" She rose to her feet with a
+sigh of boredom, and smoothed out her skirts with her long, narrow
+hands. I stared at her beauty in amazement.
+
+"I hate these parties here," she said. "They are not worth while."
+
+"You look lov--you look all right."
+
+"H'm; but what's that when there's no one to see."
+
+"But you see yourself. You _live_ in it."
+
+The reflected face in the glass, which, craning forward, I could just
+distinguish, knitted its placid brows. "Why, if that were enough, we
+should all be hermits. I rather think, you know, that God made man
+almost solely in the hope of his two-legged appreciation. But perhaps
+you disapprove of incense?"
+
+"Why should I, Miss Bowater? My Aunt Kitilda was a Catholic: and so was
+my mother's family right back."
+
+"_That's_ right," said Miss Bowater. She kissed her hand to
+looking-glass and four-poster, flung me a last fervid smile, and was
+gone. And the little box I had given her lay on the table, beside my
+bed.
+
+I was aroused much later by the sound of voices drawing nearer.
+Instinctively I sat up, my senses fastened on the sound like a vampire.
+The voices seemed to be in argument, then the footsteps ceased and clear
+on the night air came the words:--
+
+"But you made me promise _not_ to write. Oh, Fanny, and you have broken
+your own!"
+
+"Then you must confess," was the cautious reply, "that I am consistent.
+As for the promises, you are quite, quite welcome to the pieces."
+
+"You mean that?" was the muffled retort.
+
+"That," cried the other softly, "depends entirely on what you mean by
+'mean.' Please look happy! You'd soon grow old and uglier if there was
+only that scrap of moon to light your face."
+
+"Oh, Fanny. Will you never be serious?"--the misery in the words seemed
+to creep about in my own mind for shelter. They were answered by a
+sparkling gush of laughter, followed by a crisp, emphatic knock at the
+door. Fanny had returned from her party, and the eavesdropper buried her
+face in her pillow. So she enjoyed hurting people. And yet....
+
+
+
+
+Chapter Twelve
+
+
+The next afternoon Mrs Bowater was out when Dr Phelps made his call. It
+was Fanny who ushered him into the room. He felt my pulse again, held up
+the phial of medicine to the light, left unconsulted my tongue, and
+pronounced that "we are doing very nicely." As indeed I was. While this
+professional inquiry was in progress Fanny stood silently watching us,
+then exclaimed that it was half-past four, and that I must have my tea.
+She was standing behind Dr Phelps, and for a few seconds I watched with
+extreme interest but slow understanding a series of mute little
+movements of brows and lips which she was directing at me while he was
+jotting down a note in a leather pocket-book. At length I found myself
+repeating--as if at her dictation--a polite little invitation to him to
+take tea with me. The startled blue eyes lifted themselves above the
+pocket-book, the square, fair head was bowing a polite refusal, when,
+"But, of course, Dr Phelps," Fanny broke in like one inspired, "how very
+thoughtless of me!"
+
+"Thank you, thank you, Miss Bowater, but----" cried Dr Phelps, with a
+smooth uplifted hand, and almost statuesque in his pose. His refusal was
+too late. Miss Bowater had hastened from the room.
+
+His panic passed. He reseated himself, and remarking that it was a very
+cold afternoon, predicted that if the frost continued, skating might be
+expected. Conversation of this kind is apt so soon to faint away like a
+breeze in hot weather, that I kept wondering what to say next. Besides,
+whenever Dr Phelps seemed impelled to look at me, he far more quickly
+looked away, and the sound of his voice suggested that he was uncertain
+if he was not all but talking to himself. To put him more at his ease I
+inquired boldly if he had many other midgets among his patients.
+
+The long lashes swept his cheeks; he pondered a while on my landlady's
+window curtains. "As a matter of fact perhaps _not_," he replied at
+last, as if giving me the result of a mathematical calculation.
+
+"I suppose, Dr Phelps," I then inquired, "there _might_ be more, at any
+time, might there not?" Our glances this time met. He blinked.
+
+"My father and mother, I mean," I explained in some confusion, "were
+just of the com--of the ordinary size. And what I was wondering is,
+whether you yourself would be sorry--in quite a general way, of
+course--if you found your practice going down like that."
+
+"Going down?"
+
+"I mean the _patients_ coming smaller. I never had the opportunity of
+asking our own doctor, Dr Grose. At Lyndsey, you know. Besides, I was a
+child then. Now, first of all, it is true, isn't it, that giants are
+usually rather dull-witted people? So nobody would deliberately choose
+_that_ kind of change. If, then, quality does vary with quantity,
+mightn't there be an improvement in the other direction? You will think
+I am being extremely ego--egotistical. But one must take Jack's side,
+mustn't one?--even if one's Jill?"
+
+"Jack?"
+
+"The Giant Killer."
+
+He looked at me curiously, and his finger and thumb once more strayed up
+towards the waistcoat pocket in which he kept his thermometer. But
+instead of taking it out, he coughed.
+
+"There is a norm----" he began in a voice not quite his own.
+
+"Ah," I cried, interrupting him, and throwing up my hands, "there is
+indeed. But why, I ask myself, so vast a number of examples of it!"
+
+It was as if a voice within were prompting me. Perhaps the excitement of
+Fanny's homecoming was partly to blame. "I sit at my window here and
+watch the passers-by. Norms, in mere size, Dr Phelps, every one of them,
+if you allow for the few little defects in the--the moulding, you know.
+And just think what London must be like. Why, _nobody_ can be
+noticeable, there."
+
+"But surely," Dr Phelps smiled indulgently, though his eyelashes seemed
+to be in the way, "surely variety is possible, without--er--excess.
+Indeed there must be variety in order to arrive at our norm, mustn't
+there?"
+
+"You'd be astonished," I assured him, "how slight the differences
+really are. A few inches or ounces; red or black or fawn; and age, and
+sex, of course; that's all. Now, isn't it true, Dr Phelps, that almost
+any twenty women--unselected, you know--would weigh about a ton? And
+surely there's no particular reason why just human shells should weigh
+as much as that. We are not lobsters. And yet, do you know, I have
+watched, and they really seem to enjoy being the same as one another.
+One would think they tried to be--manners and habits, knowledge and
+victuals, hats and boots, everything. And if on the outside, I suppose
+on the inside, too. What a mysterious thing it seems. All of them
+_thinking_ pretty much the same: Norm-_Thoughts_, you know; just
+five-foot-fivers. After all, one wouldn't so much mind the monotonous
+packages, if the contents were different. 'Forty feeding like one'--who
+said that? Now, truly, Dr Phelps, don't you feel?---- It would, of
+course, be very serious at first for their mothers and fathers if all
+the little human babies here came midgets, but it would be amusing, too,
+wouldn't it?... And it isn't quite my own idea, either."
+
+Dr Phelps cleared his throat, and looked at his watch. "But surely," he
+said, with a peculiar emphasis which I have noticed men are apt to make
+when my sex asks intelligent or unintelligent questions: "Surely you and
+I are understanding one another. _I_ try to make myself clear to _you_.
+So extremes _can_ meet; at least I hope so." He gave me a charming
+little awkward bow. "Tell me, then, what is this peculiar difference you
+are so anxious about? You wouldn't like a pygmy England, a pygmy
+Universe, now, would you, Miss M.?"
+
+
+It was a great pity. A pygmy England--the thought dazzled me. In a few
+minutes Dr Phelps would perhaps have set all my doubts at rest. But at
+that moment Miss Bowater came in with the tea, and the talk took quite
+another turn. She just made it Fanny's size. Even Dr Phelps looked a
+great deal handsomer in her company. More sociable. Nor were we to
+remain "three's none." She had finished but one slice of toast over my
+fire, and inflamed but one cheek, when a more protracted but far less
+vigorous knock than Dr Phelps's on the door summoned her out of the room
+again. And a minute or two afterwards our tea-party became one of four,
+and its sexes (in number, at any rate) equally matched.
+
+By a happy coincidence, just as Good King Wenceslas had looked out on
+the Feast of Stephen, so Mr Crimble, the curate-in-charge at St Peter's,
+had looked in. By his "Ah, Phelps!" it was evident that our guests were
+well acquainted with one another; and Fanny and I were soon enjoying a
+tea enriched by the cream of local society. Mr Crimble had mild dark
+eyes, gold spectacles, rather full red lips, and a voice that reminded
+me of raspberries. I think he had heard of me, for he was very
+attentive, and handled my small cup and saucer with remarkable, if
+rather conspicuous, ingenuity.
+
+Candles were lit. The talk soon became animated. From the weather of
+this Christmas we passed to the weather of last, to Dr Phelps's
+prospects of skating, and thence to the good old times, to Mr Pickwick,
+to our respective childish beliefs in Santa Claus, stockings, and to
+credulous parents. Fanny repeated some of the naive remarks made by her
+pupils, and Mr Crimble capped them with a collection of biblical _bons
+mots_ culled in his Sunday School. I couldn't glance fast enough from
+one to the other. Dr Phelps steadily munched and watched Mr Crimble. He
+in turn told us of a patient of his, a Mrs Hall, who, poor old creature,
+was 101, and enjoyed nothing better than playing at "Old Soldier" with a
+small grandson.
+
+"Literally, second childhood. Senile decay," he said, passing his cup.
+
+From Mrs Hall we naturally turned to parochial affairs; and then Mr
+Crimble, without more ado, bolted his mouthful of toast, in order to
+explain the inmost purpose of his visit.
+
+He was anxious to persuade Miss Bowater to sing at the annual Parish
+Concert, which was to be given on New Year's Eve. Try as he might, he
+had been unable to persuade his vicar of the efficacy of Watch Night
+Services. So a concert was to be given instead. Now, would Miss Bowater,
+as ever, be ever so kind, and would I add my entreaties to his? As he
+looked at Fanny and I did too--with one of those odd turns of the mind,
+I was conscious that the peculiar leaning angle of his head was exactly
+the same as my own. Whereupon I glanced at Dr Phelps, but he sat fair
+and foursquare, one feeding like forty. Fanny remaining hesitant, appeal
+was made to him. With almost more cordiality than Mr Crimble appeared
+to relish, he agreed that the musical talent available was not so
+abundant as it might be, and he promised to take as many of the
+expensive tickets as Miss Bowater would sing songs.
+
+"I don't pretend to be musical, not like you, Crimble. But I don't mind
+a pleasant voice--in moderation; and I assure you, Miss Bowater, I am an
+excellent listener--given a fair chance, you know."
+
+"But then," said Fanny, "so am I. I believe now really--and one can
+judge from one's speaking voice, can't one, Mr Crimble?--I believe you
+sing yourself."
+
+"Sing, Miss Bowater," interjected Mr Crimble, tipping back his chair.
+"'The wedding guest here beat his chest, for he heard the loud bassoon.'
+Now, conjuring tricks, eh, Phelps? With a stethoscope and a clinical
+thermometer; and I'll hold the hat and make the omelette. It would bring
+down the house."
+
+"It was his _breast_ he beat; not his _chest_," I broke in.
+
+The six eyes slid round, as if at a voice out of the clouds. There was a
+pause.
+
+"Why, exactly," cried Mr Crimble, slapping his leg.
+
+"But I wish Dr Phelps _would_ sing," said Fanny in a small voice,
+passing him the sugar.
+
+"He must, he shall," said Mr Crimble, in extreme jubilation. "So that's
+settled. _Thank_ you, Miss Bowater," his eyes seemed to melt in his head
+at his success, "the programme is complete."
+
+He drew a slip of paper from his inside pocket and brandished a silver
+pencil-case. "Mrs Browning, 'The Better Land'--better and better every
+year. 'Caller Herrin'' to follow--though what kind of herrings caller
+herrings are I've never been able to discover." He beamed on me. "Miss
+Finch--she is sending me the names of her songs this evening. Miss
+Willett and Mr Bangor--'O that we two,' and a queer pair they'd look;
+and 'My luv is like.' Hardy annuals. Mrs Bullace--recitations, 'Abt
+Vogler,' and no doubt a Lord Tennyson. Flute, Mr Piper; 'Cello, Miss
+Oran, a niece of Lady Pollacke's; and for comic relief, Tom Sturgess, of
+course; though I hope he will be a little more--er--eclectic this year.
+And you and I," again he turned his boyish brow on me, "will sit with
+Mrs Bowater in the front row of the gallery--a claque, Phelps, eh?"
+
+He seemed to be in the topmost height of good spirits. Well, thought I,
+if social badinage and _bonhomie_ were as pleasant and easy as this, why
+hadn't my mother----?
+
+"But why in the gallery?" drawled Fanny suddenly from the hearthrug,
+with the little steel poker ready poised; "Miss M. _dances_."
+
+The clear voice rasped on the word. A peculiar silence followed the
+lingering accents. The two gentlemen's faces smoothed themselves out,
+and both, I knew, though I gave them no heed, sat gazing, _not_ at their
+hostess. But Fanny herself was looking at me now, her light eyes quite
+still in the flame of the candles, which, with their reflections in Mrs
+Bowater's pier glass were not two, but four. It was into those eyes I
+gazed, yet not into, only at.
+
+All day my thoughts had remained on her, like bubbles in wine. All day
+hope of the coming night and of our expedition to the woods had been, as
+it were, a palace in which my girlish fancy had wandered, and now,
+though only a few minutes ago I had been cheeping my small extemporary
+philosophy into the ear of Dr Phelps, the fires of self-contempt and
+hatred burned up in me hotter than ever.
+
+I forgot even the dainty dressing-jacket on my back. "Miss Bowater is
+pleased to be satirical," I said, my hand clenched in my lap.
+
+"Now _was_ I?" cried Fanny, appealing to Dr Phelps, "be just to me." Dr
+Phelps opened his mouth, swallowed, and shut it again.
+
+"I really think not, you know," said Mr Crimble persuasively, coming to
+her rescue. "Indeed it would be extremely kind and--er--entertaining;
+though dancing--er--and--unless, perhaps, so many strangers.... We can
+count in any case on your being _present_, can we not, Miss M.?" He
+leaned over seductively, finger and thumb twitching at the plain gold
+cross suspended from his watch-chain on his black waistcoat.
+
+"Oh, yes," I replied, "you can count on me for the claque."
+
+The room had sunk into a stillness. Constraint was in the air. "Then
+that's settled. On New Year's Eve we--we all meet again. Unless, Miss
+Bowater, there is any hope of seeing you meanwhile--just to arrange the
+_titles_ and so on of your songs on the programme."
+
+"No," smiled Fanny, "I see no hope whatever. You forget, Mr Crimble,
+there are dishes to wash. And hadn't you better see Miss Finch first?"
+
+Mr Crimble cast a strange look at her face. He was close to her, and it
+was almost as if he had whispered, "Fanny." But there was no time for
+further discussion. Dr Phelps, gloved and buttoned, was already at the
+door.
+
+Fanny returned into the room when our guests had taken their departure.
+I heard their male voices in vivacious talk as they marched off in the
+cold dark air beneath my window.
+
+"I thought they were never going," said Fanny lightly, twisting up into
+her hair an escaped ringlet. "I think, do you know, we had better say
+nothing to mother about the tea--at least not yet a while. They are dull
+creatures: it's pottering about so dull and sleepy a place, I suppose.
+What _could_ have inspired you to invite Dr Phelps to tea? Really,
+really, Miss M., you are rather astonishing. Aren't you, now?"
+
+What right had she to speak to me like this, as if we had met again
+after another life? She paused in her swift collection of the remnants
+of our feast. "Sulking?" she inquired sweetly.
+
+With an effort I kept my self-possession. "You meant what you said,
+then? You really think I would sink to that?"
+
+"'Sink!' To what? Oh, the dancing, you mean. How funny you should still
+be fretting about that. Still, you look quite entertaining when you are
+cross: 'Diaphenia like the daffadowndilly,' you know. Good Heavens!
+Surely we shouldn't hide any kind of lights under bushels, should we?
+I'm sure the Reverend Harold would agree to that. Isn't it being the
+least bit pedantic?"
+
+"I should think," I retorted, "Mr Crimble would say anything pleasant to
+_any_ young woman."
+
+"I have no doubt he would," she agreed. "The other cheek also, you know.
+But the real question is what the young woman would say in reply. You
+are too sensitive, Miss M."
+
+"Perhaps I am." Oh that I could escape from this horrible net between
+us. "I know this, anyhow--that I lay awake till midnight because you had
+made a kind of promise to come in. Then I--I 'counted the pieces.'"
+
+Her face whitened beneath the clear skin. "Oh, so we list----" she
+began, turning on me, then checked herself. "I tell you this," she said,
+her hand trembling, "I'm sick of it all. Those--those fools! Ph! I
+thought that you, being as you are--snippeting along out of the
+night--might understand. There's such a thing as friendship on false
+pretences, Miss M."
+
+Was she, too, addressing, as she supposed, a confidant hardly more
+external to herself than that inward being whom we engage in such
+endless talk and argument? Her violence shocked me; still more her
+"fools." For the word was still next-door neighbour in my mind to the
+dreadful "_Raca_."
+
+"'Understand,'" I said, "I do, if you would only let me. You just hide
+in your--in your own outside. You think because I am as I am that I'm
+only of that much account. It's you are the--foolish. Oh, don't let us
+quarrel. You just came. I never knew. Every hour, every minute...."
+Inarticulate my tongue might be, but my face told its tale. She must
+have heard many similar confessions, yet an almost childish incredulity
+lightened in hers.
+
+"Keep there," she said; "keep there! I won't be a moment."
+
+She hastened out of the room with the tea things, poising an instant
+like a bird on a branch as she pushed open the door with her foot. The
+slave left behind her listened to her footsteps dying away in a mingling
+of shame, sorrow, and of a happiness beyond words. I know now that it is
+not when we are near people that we reach themselves, not, I mean, in
+their looks and words, but only by following their thoughts to where the
+spirit within plays and has its being. Perhaps if I had realized this
+earlier, I shouldn't have fallen so easy a prey to Fanny Bowater. I
+waited--but that particular exchange of confidences was never to be
+completed. A key sounded in the latch. Fanny had but time to show
+herself with stooping, almost serpent-like head, in the doorway.
+"To-night!" she whispered. "And not a word, not a word!"
+
+
+
+
+Chapter Thirteen
+
+
+Was there suspicion in the face of Mrs Bowater that evening? Our usual
+familiar talk dwindled to a few words this supper-time. The old conflict
+was raging in my mind--hatred of my deceit, horror at betraying an
+accomplice, and longing for the solemn quiet and solitude of the dark. I
+crushed my doubtings down and cast a dismal, hostile look at the long
+face, so yellow of skin and sombre in expression. When would she be gone
+and leave me in peace? The packed little parlour hung stagnant in the
+candlelight. It seemed impossible that Mrs Bowater could not hear the
+thoughts in my mind. Apparently not. She tidied up my few belongings,
+which, contrary to my usual neat habits, I had left scattered over the
+table. She bade me good-night; but paused in the doorway to look back at
+me. But what intimacy she had meant to share with me was put aside.
+"Good-night, miss," she repeated; "and I'm sure, God bless you." It was
+the dark, quiet look that whelmed over me. I gazed mutely, without
+response, and the silence was broken by a clear voice like that of a
+cautious mocking-bird out of a wood.
+
+It called softly on two honeyed notes, "Mo--ther!"
+
+The house draped itself in quiet. Until ten had struck, and footsteps
+had ascended to the rooms overhead, I kept close in my bedchamber. Then
+I hastily put on my outdoor clothes, shivering not with cold, but with
+expectation, and sat down by the fire, prepared for the least sound that
+would prove that Fanny had not forgotten our assignation. But I waited
+in vain. The cold gathered. The vaporous light of the waning moon
+brightened in the room. The cinders fainted to a darker glow. I heard
+the kitchen clock with its cracked, cantankerous stroke beat out eleven.
+Its solemn mate outside, who had seemingly lost his voice, ticked on.
+
+Hope died out in me, leaving an almost physical nausea, a profound
+hatred of myself and even of being alive. "Well," a cold voice said in
+my ear, "that's how we are treated; that comes of those eyes we cannot
+forget. Cheated, cheated again, my friend."
+
+In those young days disappointment set my heart aching with a bitterness
+less easy to bear than it is now. No doubt I was steeped in
+sentimentality and folly. It was the vehemence of this new feeling that
+almost terrified me. But my mind was my world; it is my only excuse. I
+could not get out of _that_ by merely turning a tiny key in a Brahma
+lock. Nor could I betake myself to bed. How sleep in such an inward
+storm of reproaches, humiliation, and despised love?
+
+I drew down my veil, wrapped my shawl closer round my shoulders,
+descended my staircase, and presently stood in the porch in
+confrontation of the night. Low on the horizon, at evens with me across
+space, and burning with a limpid fire, hung my chosen--Sirius. The
+sudden sight of him pouring his brilliance into my eyes brought a
+revulsion of feeling. He was "cutting me dead." I brazened him down. I
+trod with exquisite caution down the steps, daring but one fleeting
+glance, as I turned, at Fanny's window. It was blinded, empty. Toiling
+on heavily up the hill, I sourly comforted myself with the vow that she
+should realize how little I cared, that her room had been sweeter than
+her company. Never more would I put trust in "any child of man."
+
+Gradually, however, the quiet night received me into its peace (just as,
+poor soul, did the Moor Desdemona), and its influence stole into my
+darkened mind. The smooth, columnar boughs of the beeches lifted
+themselves archingly into the sky. Soon I was climbing over the
+moss-bound roots of my customary observatory. But this night the stars
+were left for a while unsignalled and unadmired. The crisped,
+frost-lined leaves scattered between the snake-like roots sparkled
+faintly. Years seemed to have passed away, dwindled in Time's
+hour-glass, since my previous visit. That Miss M. had ghosted herself
+away for ever. In my reverie the vision of Fanny re-arose into my
+imagination--that secret still fountain--of herself. Asleep now.... I
+could no more free myself from her sorcery than I could disclaim the two
+hands that lay in my lap. She was indeed more closely mine than
+they--and nearer in actuality than I had imagined.
+
+A faint stir in the woods suddenly caught my attention. The sound
+neared. I pressed my hand to my breast, torn now between two incentives,
+two desires--to fly, to stay. And on the path by which I had come,
+appeared, some yards distant, in the faint trickling light, the dark
+figure of my dreams.
+
+She was dressed in a black cloak, its peaked old-fashioned hood drawn
+over her head. The moonbeams struck its folds as she moved. Her face was
+bowed down a little, her hand from within clutching her cloak together.
+And I realized instinctively and with joy that the silence and solitude
+of the woods alarmed her. It was I who was calm and self-contained. She
+paused and looked around her--stood listening with lips divided that yet
+could not persuade themselves to call me by name. For my part, I softly
+gathered myself closer together and continued to gloat. And suddenly out
+of the far-away of the woods a nightbird loosed its cry: "A-hoo....
+Ahoo-oo-oo-hooh!"
+
+
+There is a hunter in us all. I laughed inwardly as I watched. A few
+months more and I was to watch a lion-tamer ... but let me keep to one
+thing at a time. I needled myself in, and, almost hooting the sound
+through my mouth, as if in echo of the bird, I heard myself call
+stealthily across the air, "Fanny!--Fanny Bowater!"
+
+The cloaked figure recoiled, with lifted head, like the picture of a
+fawn I have seen, and gazed in my direction. Seeing nothing of me amidst
+the leaves and shadows, she was about to flee, when I called again:--
+
+"It is I, Fanny. Here: here!"
+
+Instantly she woke to herself, came near, and looked down on me. No
+movement welcomed her. "I was tired of waiting," I yawned. "There is
+nothing to be frightened about."
+
+Many of her fellow creatures, I fancy, have in their day wearied of
+waiting for Fanny Bowater, but few have had the courage or sagacity to
+tell her so. She had not recovered her equanimity fully enough to
+refrain from excuses.
+
+"Surely you did not expect me while mother was moving? I am not
+accustomed, Miss M., to midnight wanderings."
+
+"I gave up expecting you, and was glad to be alone."
+
+The barb fell short. She looked stilly around her. The solemn beeches
+were like mute giants overarching with their starry, sky-hung boughs
+the dark, slim figure. What consciousness had they, I wonder, of those
+odd humans at their roots?
+
+"Alone! Here!" she returned. "But no wonder. It's what you are all
+about."
+
+A peculiar elation sprang up in me at this none too intelligible remark.
+
+"I wonder, though," she added, "you are not frozen like--like a pebble,
+sitting there."
+
+"But I am," I said, laughing softly. "It doesn't matter in me, because
+I'm so easy to thaw. You ought to know that. Oh, Miss Bowater, think if
+this were summer time and the dew and the first burning heat! Are you
+wrapped up? And shall we sit here, just--just for one dance of the
+Sisters: thou lost dove, Merope?"
+
+For there on high--and I had murmured the last words all but inaudibly
+to myself--there played the spangling Pleiads, clear above her head in
+the twig-swept sky.
+
+"What sisters?" she inquired, merely humouring me, perhaps.
+
+"The Six, Fanny, look! You cannot see their Seventh--yet she is all that
+_that_ is about." South to north I swept my hand across the powdery
+firmament. "And I myself trudge along down Watling Street; that's the
+Milky Way. I don't think, Fanny, I shall ever, ever be weaned. Please,
+may I call you that?"
+
+She frowned up a moment into the emptiness, hesitated, then--just like a
+white peacock I had once seen when a child from my godmother's ancient
+carriage as we rolled by an old low house with terraces smooth as velvet
+beneath its cedars--she disposed her black draperies upon the ground at
+a little distance, disclosing, in so doing, beneath their folds the
+moon-blanched flounces of her party gown. I gazed spellbound. I looked
+at the white and black, and thought of what there was within their
+folds, and of the heart within that, and of the spirit of man. Such was
+my foolish fashion, following idly like a butterfly the scents of the
+air, flitting on from thought to thought, and so missing the full
+richness of the one blossom on which I might have hovered.
+
+"Tell me some more," broke suddenly the curious voice into the midst of
+this reverie.
+
+"Well, there," I cried, "is fickle Algol; the Demon. And over there
+where the Crab crawls, is the little Beehive between the Roses."
+
+"Praesepe," drawled Fanny.
+
+"Yes," said I, unabashed, "the Beehive. And crane back your neck,
+Fanny--there's little Jack-by-the-Middle-Horse; and far down, oh, far
+down, Berenice's Hair, which would have been Fanny Bowater's Hair, if
+you had been she."
+
+Even as I looked, a remote film of mist blotted out the infinitesimal
+cluster. "And see, beyond the Chair," I went on, laughing, and yet
+exalted with my theme, "that dim in the Girdle is the Great
+Nebula--s-sh! And on, on, that chirruping Invisible, _that_, Fanny, is
+the Midget. Perhaps you cannot even dream of her: but she watches."
+
+"Never even heard of her," said Fanny good-humouredly, withdrawing the
+angle of her chin from the Ecliptic.
+
+"Say not so, Horatia," I mocked, "there are more things...."
+
+"Oh, yes, I know all about that. And these cold, monotonous old things
+really please you? Personally, I'd give the whole meaningless scramble
+of them for another moon."
+
+"But your old glutton has gobbled up half of them already."
+
+"Then my old glutton can gobble up what's left. Who taught you about
+them? And why," she scanned me closely, "why did you pick out the
+faintest; do you see them the best?"
+
+"I picked out the faintest because they were meant especially for me so
+that I could give them to you. My father taught me a little about them;
+and _your_ father the rest."
+
+"_My_ father," echoed Fanny, her face suddenly intent.
+
+"His book. Do you miss him? Mine is dead."
+
+"Oh, yes, I miss him," was the serene retort, "and so, I fancy, does
+mother."
+
+"Oh, Fanny, I am sorry. She told me--something like that."
+
+"You need not be. I suppose God chooses one's parents quite
+deliberately. Praise Him from Whom all blessings flow!" She smoothed out
+her black cloak over her ankles, raised her face again into the
+dwindling moonlight, and gently smiled at me. "I am glad I came,
+Midgetina, though it's suicidally cold. '_Pardi! on sent Dieu bien a son
+aise ici._' We are going to be great friends, aren't we?" Her eyes swept
+over me. "Would you like that?"
+
+"Friends," indeed! and as if she had offered me a lump of sugar.
+
+I gravely nodded. "But I must come to you. You can't come to me. No one
+has; except, perhaps, my mother--a little."
+
+"Oh, yes," she replied cautiously, piercing her eyes at me, "that _is_ a
+riddle. You must tell me about your childhood. Not that I love children,
+or my own childhood either. I had enough of that to last me a lifetime.
+I shan't pass it on; though I promise you, Midgetina, if I ever _do_
+have a baby, I will anoint its little backbone with the grease of moles,
+bats, and dormice, and make it like you. Was your mother----" she began
+again, after a pause of reflection. "Are _you_ sorry, I mean, you
+aren't--you aren't----?"
+
+Her look supplied the missing words. "Sorry that I am a midget, Fanny?
+People think I must be. But why? It is all I am, all I ever was. I am
+myself, inside; like everybody else; and yet, you know, not quite like
+everybody else. I sometimes think"--I laughed at the memory--"I was
+asking Dr Phelps about that. Besides, would _you_ be--alone?"
+
+"Not when I was alone, perhaps. Still, it must be rather odd, Miss
+Needle-in-a-Haystack. As for being alone"--once again our owl, if owl it
+was, much nearer now, screeched its screech in the wintry woods--"I hate
+it!"
+
+"But surely," expostulated the wiseacre in me, "that's what we cannot
+help being. We even die alone, Fanny."
+
+"Oh, but I'm going to help it. I'm not dead yet. Do you ever think of
+the future?"
+
+For an instant its great black hole yawned close, but I shook my head.
+
+"Well, that," replied she, "is what Fanny Bowater is doing all the time.
+There's nothing," she added satirically, "so important, so imperative
+for teachers as learning. And you must learn your lesson, my dear,
+before you are heard it--if you want to escape a slapping. Every little
+donkey knows that."
+
+"I suppose the truth is," said I, as if seized with a bright idea,
+"there are two kinds of ambitions, of wants, I mean. We are all like
+those Chinese boxes; and some of us want to live in the biggest, the
+outsidest we can possibly manage; and some in the inmost one of all. The
+one," I added a little drearily, "no one can share."
+
+"Quite, quite true," said Fanny, mimicking my sententiousness, "the
+teeniest, tiniest, ickiest one, which no mortal ingenuity has ever been
+able to open--and so discover the nothing inside. I know your Chinese
+Boxes!"
+
+"Poor Fanny," I cried, rising up and kneeling beside the ice-cold hand
+that lay on the frosty leaves. "All that I have shall help you."
+
+Infatuated thing; I stooped low as I knelt, and stroked softly with my
+own the outstretched fingers on which she was leaning.
+
+I might have been a pet animal for all the heed she paid to my caress.
+"Fanny," I whispered tragically, "will you please sing to me--if you are
+not frozenly cold? You remember--the Moon Song: I have never forgotten
+it; and only three notes, yet it sometimes wakes me at night. It's
+queer, isn't it, being you and me?"
+
+She laughed, tilting her chin; and her voice began at once to sing, as
+if at the scarcely opened door of her throat, and a tune so plain it
+seemed but the words speaking:--
+
+
+     "Twas a Cuckoo, cried 'cuck-oo'
+     In the youth of the year;
+     And the timid things nesting,
+     Crouched, ruffled in fear;
+     And the Cuckoo cried, 'cuck-oo,'
+     For the honest to hear.
+
+     One--two notes: a bell sound
+     In the blue and the green;
+     'Cuck-oo: cuck-oo: cuck-oo!'
+     And a silence between.
+
+     Ay, mistress, have a care, lest
+     Harsh love, he hie by,
+     And for kindness a monster
+     To nourish you try--
+     In your bosom to lie:
+     'Cuck-oo,' and a 'cuck-oo,'
+     And 'cuck-oo!'"
+
+
+The sounds fell like beads into the quiet--as if a small child had come
+up out of her heart and gone down again; and she callous and unmoved. I
+cannot say why the clear, muted notes saddened and thrilled me so. Was
+_she_ the monster?
+
+I had drawn back, and stayed eyeing her pale face, the high cheek, the
+delicate straight nose, the darkened lips, the slim black eyebrows, the
+light, clear, unfathomable eyes reflecting the solitude and the thin
+brilliance of the wood. Yet the secret of herself remained her own. She
+tried in vain not to be disturbed at my scrutiny.
+
+"Well," she inquired at last, with motionless glance fixed on the
+distance. "Do you think you could honestly give me a testimonial, Miss
+Midget?"
+
+It is strange. The Sphinx had spoken, yet without much enlightenment.
+"Now look at me," I commanded. "If I went away, you couldn't follow.
+When you go away, you cannot escape from me. I can go back and--and _be_
+where I was." My own meaning was half-concealed from me; but a startled
+something that had not been there before peeped out of those eyes so
+close to mine.
+
+"If," she said, "I could care like that too, yet wanted nothing, then I
+should be free too."
+
+"What do you mean?" said I, lifting my hand from the unanswering
+fingers.
+
+"I mean," she exclaimed, leaping to her feet, "that I'm sick to death of
+the stars and am going home to bed. Hateful, listening old woods!"
+
+I turned sharp round, as if in apprehension that some secret hearer
+might have caught her remark. But Fanny stretched out her arms, and,
+laughing a foolish tune, in affected abandonment began softly to dance
+in the crisp leaves, quite lost to me again. So twirling, she set off
+down the path by which she had come trespassing. A physical exhaustion
+came over me. I watched her no more, but stumbled along, with unheeding
+eyes, in her wake. What had I not given, I thought bitterly, and this my
+reward. Thus solitary, I had gone only a little distance, and had
+reached the outskirts of the woods, when a far from indifferent Fanny
+came hastening back to intercept me.
+
+And no wonder. She had remembered to attire herself becomingly for her
+moonlight tryst, but had forgotten the door key. We stood looking at one
+another aghast, as, from eternity, I suppose, have all
+fellow-conspirators in danger of discovery. It was I who first awoke to
+action. There was but one thing to be done, and, warning Fanny that I
+had never before attempted to unlatch the big front door of her mother's
+house, I set off resolutely down the hill.
+
+"You walk so slowly!" she said suddenly, turning back on me. "I will
+carry you."
+
+Again we paused. I looked up at her with an inextricable medley of
+emotions struggling together in my mind, and shook my head.
+
+"But why, why?" she repeated impatiently. "We could get there in half
+the time."
+
+"If you could _fly_, Fanny, I'd walk," I replied stubbornly.
+
+"You mean----" and her cold anger distorted her face. "Oh, pride! What
+childish nonsense! And you said we were to be friends. Do you suppose I
+care whether...?" But the question remained unfinished.
+
+"I _am_ your friend," said I, "and that is why I will not, I _will_ not
+give way to you." It was hardly friendship that gleamed out of the wide
+eyes then. But mine the victory--a victory in which only a tithe of the
+spoils, unrecognized by the vanquished, had fallen to the victor.
+
+Without another word she turned on her heel, and for the rest of our
+dejected journey she might have been mistaken for a cross nurse trailing
+on pace for pace beside a rebellious child. My dignity was less ruffled
+than hers, however, and for a brief while I had earned my freedom.
+
+Arrived at the house, dumbly hostile in the luminous night, Fanny
+concealed herself as best she could behind the gate-post and kept watch
+on the windows. Far away in the stillness we heard a footfall echoing on
+the hill. "There is some one coming," she whispered, "you must hurry."
+She might, I think, have serpented her way in by my own little door.
+Where the _head_ leads, the heart may follow. But she did not suggest
+it. Nor did I.
+
+I tugged and pushed as best I could, but the umbrella with which from a
+chair I at last managed to draw the upper bolt of the door was extremely
+cumbersome. The latch for a while resisted my efforts. And the knowledge
+that Fanny was fretting and fuming behind the gatepost hardly increased
+my skill. The house was sunken in quiet; Mrs Bowater apparently was
+sleeping without her usual accompaniment; only Henry shared my labours,
+and he sat moodily at the foot of the stairs, refusing to draw near
+until at the same moment Fanny entered, and he leapt out.
+
+Once safely within, and the door closed and bolted again, Fanny stood
+for a few moments listening. Then with a sigh and a curious gesture she
+bent herself and kissed the black veil that concealed my fair hair.
+
+"I am sorry, Midgetina," she whispered into its folds, "I was impatient.
+Mother wouldn't have liked the astronomy, you know. That was all. And I
+am truly sorry for--for----"
+
+"My dear," I replied in firm, elderly tones, whose echo is in my ear to
+this very day; "My dear, it was my mind you hurt, not my feelings." With
+that piece of sententiousness I scrambled blindly through my Bates's
+doorway, shut the door behind me, and more disturbed at heart than I can
+tell, soon sank into the thronging slumber of the guilty and the
+obsessed.
+
+
+
+
+Chapter Fourteen
+
+
+When my eyes opened next morning, a strange, still glare lay over the
+ceiling, and I looked out of my window on a world mantled and cold with
+snow. For a while I forgot the fever of the last few days in watching
+the birds hopping and twittering among the crumbs that Mrs Bowater
+scattered out on the windowsill for my pleasure. And yet--their every
+virtue, every grace, Fanny Bowater, all were thine! The very snow, in my
+girlish fantasy, was the fairness beneath which the unknown Self in her
+must, as I fondly believed, lie slumbering; a beauty that hid also from
+me for a while the restless, self-centred mind. How believe that such
+beauty is any the less a gift to its possessor than its bespeckled
+breast and song to a thrush, its sheen to a starling? It is a riddle
+that still baffles me. If we are all shut up in our bodies as the poets
+and the Scriptures say we are, then how is it that many of the loveliest
+seem to be all but uninhabited, or to harbour such dingy tenants; while
+quite plain faces may throng with animated ghosts?
+
+Fanny did not come to share my delight in the snow that morning. And as
+I looked out on it, waiting on in vain, hope flagged, and a sadness
+stole over its beauty. Probably she had not given the fantastic lodger a
+thought. She slid through life, it seemed, as easily as a seal through
+water. But I was not the only friend who survived her caprices. In spite
+of her warning about the dish-washing, Mr Crimble came to see her that
+afternoon. She was out. With a little bundle of papers in his hand he
+paused at the gate-post to push his spectacles more firmly on to his
+nose and cast a kind of homeless look over the fields before turning his
+face towards St Peter's. Next day, Holy Innocents', he came again; but
+this time with more determination, for he asked to see me.
+
+To rid myself, as far as possible, of one piece of duplicity, I at once
+took the bull by the horns, and in the presence of Mrs Bowater boldly
+invited him to stay to tea. With a flurried glance of the eye in her
+direction he accepted my invitation.
+
+"A cold afternoon, Mrs Bowater," he intoned. "The cup that cheers, the
+cup that cheers."
+
+My landlady left the conventions to take care of themselves; and
+presently he and I found ourselves positively _tete-a-tete_ over her
+seed cake and thin bread and butter.
+
+But though we both set to work to make conversation, an absent
+intentness in his manner, a listening turn of his head, hinted that his
+thoughts were not wholly with me.
+
+"Are you long with us?" he inquired, stirring his tea.
+
+"I am quite, quite happy here," I replied, with a sigh.
+
+"Ah!" he replied, a little wistfully, taking a sip, "how few of us have
+the courage to confess that. Perhaps it flatters us to suppose we are
+miserable. It is this pessimism--of a mechanical, a scientific
+age--which we have chiefly to contend against. We don't often see you at
+St Peter's, I think?"
+
+"You wouldn't see _very_ much of me, if I did come," I replied a little
+tartly. Possibly it was his "we" that had fretted me. It seemed
+needlessly egotistical. "On the other hand," I added, "wouldn't there be
+a risk of the congregation seeing nothing else?"
+
+Mr Crimble opened his mouth and laughed. "I wish," he said, with a
+gallant little bow, "there were more like you."
+
+"More like _me_, Mr Crimble?"
+
+"I mean," he explained, darting a glance at the furniture of my bedroom,
+whose curtains, to my annoyance, hung withdrawn, "I mean that--that
+you--that so many of us refuse to see the facts of life. To look them in
+the face, Miss M. There is nothing to fear."
+
+We were getting along famously, and I begged him to take some of Mrs
+Bowater's black currant jam.
+
+"But then, I have plenty of time," I said agreeably. "And the real
+difficulty is to get the facts to face me. Dear me, if only, now, I had
+some of Miss Bowater's brains."
+
+A veil seemed suddenly to lift from his face and as suddenly to descend
+again. So, too, he had for a moment stopped eating, then as suddenly
+begun eating again.
+
+"Ah, Miss Bowater! She is indeed clever; a--a brilliant young lady. The
+very life of a party, I assure you. And, yet, do you know, in parochial
+gatherings, try as I may, I occasionally find it very difficult to get
+people to mix. The little social formulas, the prejudices. Yet, surely,
+Miss M., religion _should_ be the great solvent. At least, that is my
+view."
+
+He munched away more vigorously, and gazed through his spectacles out
+through my window-blinds.
+
+"Mixing people must be very wearisome," I suggested, examining his face.
+
+"'Wearisome,'" he repeated blandly. "I am sometimes at my wits' end. No.
+A curate's life is not a happy one." Yet he confessed it almost with
+joy.
+
+"And the visiting!" I said. And then, alas! my tongue began to run away
+with me. He was falling back again into what I may call his company
+voice, and I pined to talk to the real Mr Crimble, little dreaming how
+soon that want was to be satiated.
+
+"I sometimes wonder, do you know, if religion is made difficult enough."
+
+"But I assure you," he replied, politely but firmly, "a true religion is
+exceedingly difficult. 'The eye of a needle'--we mustn't forget that."
+
+"Ah, yes," said I warmly; "that 'eye' will be narrow enough even for a
+person with my little advantages. I remember my mother's cook telling
+me, when I was a child, that in the old days, really wicked people if
+they wanted to return to the Church, had to do so in a sheet, with ashes
+on their heads, you know, and carrying a long lighted candle. She said
+that if the door was shut against them, they died in torment, and went
+to Hell. But she was a Roman Catholic, like my grandmother."
+
+Mr Crimble peered at me as if over a wall.
+
+"I remember, too," I went on, "one summer's day as a very little girl I
+was taken to the evening service. And the singing--bursting out like
+that, you know, with the panting and the yowling of the organ, made me
+faint and sick; and I jumped right out of the window."
+
+"Jumped out of the window!" cried my visitor in consternation.
+
+"Yes, we were at the back. Pollie, my nursemaid, had put me up in the
+niche, you see; and I dragged her hand away. But I didn't hurt myself.
+The grass was thick in the churchyard; I fell light, and I had plenty
+of clothes on. I rather enjoyed it--the air and the tombstones. And
+though I had my gasps, the 'eye' seemed big enough when I was a child.
+But afterwards--when I was confirmed--I thought of Hell a good deal. I
+can't _see_ it so plainly now. Wide, low, and black, with a few demons.
+_That_ can't be right."
+
+"My dear young lady!" cried Mr Crimble, as if shocked, "is it wise to
+attempt it? It must be admitted, of course, that if we do not take
+advantage of the benefits bestowed upon us by Providence in a Christian
+community, we cannot escape His displeasure. The absence from His Love."
+
+"Yes," I said, looking at him in sudden intimacy, "I believe that." And
+I pondered a while, following up my own thoughts. "Have you ever read Mr
+Clodd's _Childhood of the World_, Mr Crimble?"
+
+By the momentary confusion of his face I gathered that he had not. "Mr
+Clodd?... Ah, yes, the writer on Primitive Man."
+
+"This was only a little book, for the young, you know. But in it Mr
+Clodd says, I remember, that even the most shocking old forms of
+religion were not invented by devils. They were 'Man's struggles from
+darkness to twilight.' What he meant was that no man _loves_ darkness.
+At least," I added, with a sudden gush of remembrances, "not without the
+stars."
+
+"That is exceedingly true," replied Mr Crimble. "And, talking of stars,
+what a wonderful sight it was the night before last, the whole heavens
+one spangle of diamonds! I was returning from visiting a sick
+parishioner, Mr Hubbins." Then it was _his_ foot that Fanny and I had
+heard reverberating on the hill! I hastily hid my face in my cup, but he
+appeared not to have noticed my confusion. He took another slice of
+bread and butter; folded it carefully in two, then peered up out of the
+corner of his round eye at me, and added solemnly: "Sick, I regret to
+say, no longer."
+
+"Dead?" I cried from the bottom of my heart, and again looked at him.
+
+Then my eyes strayed to the silent scene beyond the window, silent, it
+seemed, with the very presence of poor Mr Hubbins. "I should not like to
+go to Hell in the snow," I said ruminatingly. Out of the past welled
+into memory an old ballad my mother had taught me:--
+
+
+     "This ae nighte, this ae nighte
+       --_Every nighte and alle_,
+     Fire and sleet and candle-lighte,
+       _And Christe receive thy saule_!"
+
+
+"Beautiful, beautiful," murmured Mr Crimble, yet not without a trace of
+alarm in his dark eyes. "But believe me, I am not suggesting that Mr
+Hubbins---- His was, I am told, a wonderfully peaceful end."
+
+"Peaceful! Oh, but surely not in his mind, Mr Crimble. Surely one must
+be more alive in that last hour than ever--just when one's going away.
+At any rate," and I couldn't refrain a sigh, almost of envy, "I hope _I_
+shall be. Was Mr Hubbins a good man?"
+
+"He was a most regular church-goer," replied my visitor a little
+unsteadily; "a family-man, one of our Sidesmen, in fact. He will be
+greatly missed. You may remember what Mr Ruskin wrote of his father:
+'Here lies an entirely honest merchant.' Mr Ruskin, senior, was, as a
+matter of fact, in the wine trade. Mr Hubbins, I believe, was in linen,
+though, of course, it amounts to the same thing. But haven't we," and he
+cleared his throat, "haven't we--er--strayed into a rather lugubrious
+subject?"
+
+"We have strayed into a rather lugubrious world," said I.
+
+"Of course, of course; but, believe me, we mustn't always _think_ too
+closely. 'Days and moments quickly flying,' true enough, though hardly
+appropriate, as a matter of fact, at this particular season in the
+Christian year. But, on the other hand, 'we may make our lives sublime.'
+Does not yet another poet tell us that? Although, perhaps, Mr Hub----"
+
+"Yes," I interposed eagerly, the lover of books in me at once rising to
+the bait, "but what do you think Longfellow absolutely _meant_ by his
+'sailor on the main' of life being comforted, you remember, by somebody
+else having been shipwrecked and just leaving _footprints_ in the sand?
+I used to wonder and wonder. Does the poem imply, Mr Crimble, that
+merely to be born is to be shipwrecked? I don't think that can be so,
+because Longfellow was quite a cheerful man, wasn't he?--at least for a
+poet. For my part," I ran on, now thoroughly at home with my visitor,
+and on familiar ground, "I am sure I prefer poor Friday. Do you remember
+how Robinson Crusoe described him soon after the rescue from the
+savages as 'without Passions, Sullenness, or Designs,' even though he
+did, poor thing, 'have a hankering stomach after some of the Flesh'? Not
+that I mean to suggest," I added hastily, "that Mr Hubbins was in any
+sense a cannibal."
+
+"By no means," said Mr Crimble helplessly. "But there," and he brushed
+his knees with his handkerchief, "I fear you are too much of a reader
+for me, and--and critic. For that very reason I do hope, Miss M., you
+will sometimes contrive to pay a visit to St Peter's. Mother Church has
+room for all, you know, in her--about her footstool." He smiled at me
+very kindly. "And our organist, Mr Temple, has been treating us to some
+charmingly quaint old carols--at least the words seem a little quaint to
+a modern ear. But I cannot boast of being a _student_ of poetry.
+Parochial work leaves little time even for the classics:--
+
+
+     "Odi profanum vulgus, et arceo.
+     Favete linguis...."
+
+
+He almost chirped the delightful words in a high, pleasant voice, but
+except for the first three of them, they were too many for my small
+Latin, and I afterwards forgot to test the aptness of his quotation. I
+was just about to ask him (with some little unwillingness) to translate
+the whole ode for me, when I heard Fanny's step at the door. I desisted.
+
+At her entry the whole of our conversation, as it hung about in Mrs
+Bowater's firelit little parlour, seemed to have become threadbare and
+meaningless. My visitor and I turned away from each other almost with
+relief--like Longfellow's shipwrecked sailors, perhaps, at sight of a
+ship.
+
+Fanny's pale cheeks beneath her round beaver hat and veil were bright
+with the cold--for frost had followed the snow. She eyed us slowly, with
+less even than a smile in her eyes, facing my candles softly, as if she
+had come out of a dream. Whatever class of the community Mr Crimble may
+have meant to include in his _Odi_, the celerity with which he rose to
+greet her made it perfectly clear that it was not Miss Bowater's. She
+smiled at the black sleeve, cuff, and signet ring outstretched towards
+her, but made no further advance. She brought him, too, a sad
+disappointment, simply that she would be unable to sing at his concert
+on the last night of the year. At this blow Mr Crimble instinctively
+folded his hands. He looked helpless and distressed.
+
+"But, Miss Bowater," he pleaded, "the printer has been waiting nearly
+two days for the names of your songs. The time is very short now."
+
+"Yes," said Fanny, seating herself on a stool by the fire and slowly
+removing her gloves. "It is annoying. I hadn't a vestige of a cold last
+night."
+
+"But indeed, indeed," he began, "is it wise in this severe weather----?"
+
+"Oh, it isn't the weather I mind," was the serene retort, "it's the
+croaking like a frog in public."
+
+"'A frog!'" cried Mr Crimble beguilingly, "oh, no!"
+
+But all his protestations and cajoleries were unavailing. Even to a
+long, silent glance so private in appearance that it seemed more
+courteous to turn away from it, Fanny made no discernible response. His
+shoulders humped. He caught up his soft hat, made his adieu--a little
+formal, and hasty--and hurried off through the door to the printer.
+
+When his muffled footsteps had passed away, I looked at Fanny.
+
+"Oh, yes," she agreed, shrugging her shoulders, "it was a lie. I said it
+like a lie, so that it shouldn't deceive him. I detest all that
+wheedling. To come here two days running, after.... And why, may I ask,
+if it is beneath your dignity to dance to the parish, is it not beneath
+mine to sing? Let the silly sheep amuse _themselves_ with their
+bleating. I have done with it all."
+
+She rose, folded her gloves into a ball and her veil over her hat, and
+once more faced her reflection in her mother's looking-glass. I had not
+the courage to tell her that the expression she wore on other occasions
+suited her best.
+
+"But surely," I argued uneasily, "things are different. If I were to
+dance, stuck up there on a platform, you know very well it would not be
+the dancing that would amuse them, but--just me. Would you care for that
+if you were--well, what I am?"
+
+"Ah, you don't know," a low voice replied bitterly, "you don't know. The
+snobs they are! I have soaked in it for years, like a pig in brine.
+Boxed up here in your pretty little doll's house, you suppose that all
+that matters is what you think of other people. But to be perfectly
+frank, you are out of the running, my dear. _I_ have to get my own
+living, and all that matters is not what I think of other people but
+what other people think of me. Do you suppose I don't know what _he_, in
+his heart, thinks of me--and all the rest of them? Well, I say, wait!"
+
+And she left me to my doll's house--a more helpless slave than ever.
+
+
+Not only one "star" the fewer, then, dazzled St Peter's parish that New
+Year's Eve, but Fanny and I never again shared an hour's practical
+astronomy. Still, she would often sit and talk to me, and the chain of
+my devotion grew heavy. Perhaps she, on her side, merely basked in the
+flattery of my imagination. It was for her a new variety of a familiar
+experience. Perhaps a curious and condescending fondness for me for a
+while sprang up in her--as far as that was possible, for, apart from her
+instinctive heartlessness, she never really accustomed herself to my
+physical shortcomings. I believe they attracted yet repelled her. To my
+lonely spirit she was a dream that remained a dream in spite of its
+intensifying resemblance to a nightmare.
+
+I realize now that she was desperately capricious, of a cat-like cruelty
+by nature, and so evasive and elusive that frequently I could not
+distinguish her soft, furry pads from her claws. But whatever her mood,
+or her treatment of me, or her lapses into a kind of commonness to which
+I deliberately shut my eyes, her beauty remained. Whomsoever we love
+becomes unique in that love, and I suppose we are responsible for what
+we give as well as for what we accept. The very memory of her beauty,
+when I was alone, haunted me as intensely as if she were present. Yet in
+her actual company, it made her in a sense unreal. So, often, it was
+only the ghost of her with whom I sat and talked. How sharply it would
+have incensed her to know it. When she came to me in my sleep, she was
+both paradise and seraph, and never fiddle entranced a Paganini as did
+her liquid lapsing voice my small fastidious ear. Yet, however much she
+loved to watch herself in looking-glass or in her mind, and to observe
+her effects on others, she was not vain.
+
+But the constant, unbanishable thought of anything wearies the mind and
+weakens the body. In my infatuation, I, too, was scarcely more than a
+ghost--a very childish ghost perhaps. I think if I could call him for
+witness, my small pasha in the train from Lyndsey would bear me out in
+this. As for what is called passion, the only burning of it I ever felt
+was for an outcast with whom I never shared so much as glance or word.
+Alas, Fanny, I suppose, was merely a brazen image.
+
+Long before the dark day of her departure--a day which stood in my
+thoughts like a barrier at the world's end--I had very foolishly poured
+out most of my memories for her profit and amusement, though so immobile
+was she when seated in a chair beside my table, or standing foot on
+fender at the chimney-piece, that it was difficult at times to decide
+whether she was listening to me or not. What is more important, she told
+me in return in her curious tortuous and contradictory fashion, a good
+deal about herself, and of her childhood, which--because of the endless
+violent roarings of her nautical father, and the taciturn discipline of
+poor Mrs Bowater--filled me with compassion and heaped fuel on my love.
+And not least of these bonds was the secret which, in spite of endless
+temptation, I managed to withhold from her in a last instinctive loyalty
+to Mrs Bowater--the discovery that her own mother was long since dead
+and gone.
+
+She possessed more brains than she cared to exhibit to visitors like Dr
+Phelps and Mr Crimble. Even to this day I cannot believe that Mr Crimble
+even so much as guessed how clever she was. It was just part of herself,
+like the bloom on a plum. Hers was not one of those gesticulating minds.
+Her efforts only intensified her Fannyishness. Oh dear, how simple
+things are if only you leave them unexplained. Her very knowledge, too
+(which for the most part she kept to herself) was to me like finding
+chain armour when one is in search of a beating heart. She could shed it
+all, and her cleverness too, as easily as a swan water-drops. What could
+she not shed, and yet remain Fanny? And with all her confidences, she
+was extremely reticent. A lift of the light shoulders, or of the flat
+arched eyebrows, a sarcasm, a far-away smile, at the same time
+illuminated and obscured her talk. These are feminine gifts, and yet
+past my mastery. Perhaps for this reason I admired them the more in
+Fanny--just as, in reading my childhood's beloved volume, _The Observing
+Eye_, I had admired the crab's cuirass and the scorpion's horny
+rings--because, being, after all, myself a woman, I faintly understood
+their purpose.
+
+Thus, when Fanny told me of the school she taught in; and of the
+smooth-haired drawing-master who attended it with his skill, on Mondays,
+Wednesdays, and Fridays; and of the vivacious and saturnine "Monsieur
+Crapaud," who, poked up in a room under the gables, lived in the house;
+or of that other parish curate who was a nephew of the head-mistress's,
+the implacable Miss Stebbings, and who, apparently, preached Sunday
+after Sunday, with peculiar pertinacity, on such texts as "God is
+love"--when Fanny recounted to me these afflictions, graces, and
+mockeries of her daily routine as "literature" mistress, I could as
+easily bestow on her the vivifying particulars she left out, as a
+painter can send his portraits to be framed.
+
+Once and again--just as I have seen a blackbird drop plumb from the
+upper boughs of a tree on a worm disporting itself in the dewy
+mould--once I did ask a question which produced in her one of those
+curious reactions which made her, rather than immaterial, an exceedingly
+vigilant image of her very self. "What will you do, Fanny, when you
+_can't_ mock at him?"
+
+"Him?" she inquired in a breath.
+
+"_The_ him!" I said.
+
+"What him?" she replied.
+
+"Well," I said, stumbling along down what was a rather black and
+unfamiliar alley to me, "my father was not, I suppose, particularly wise
+in anything, but my mother loved him very much."
+
+"And _my_ father," she retorted, in words so carefully pronounced that I
+knew they must be dangerous, "my father was a first mate in the
+mercantile marine when he married your landlady."
+
+"Well," I repeated, "what would you do, if--if _you_ fell in love?"
+
+Fanny sat quite still, all the light at the window gently beating on her
+face, with its half-closed eyes. Her foot stirred, and with an almost
+imperceptible movement of her shoulder, she replied, "I shall go blind."
+
+I looked at her, dumbfounded. All the days of her company were
+shrivelled up in that small sentence. "Oh, Fanny," I whispered
+hopelessly, "then you know?"
+
+"'Know'?" echoed the smooth lips.
+
+"Why, I mean," I expostulated, rushing for shelter fully as rapidly as
+my old friend the lobster must have done when it was time to change his
+shell, "I mean that's what that absurd little Frenchman is--'Monsieur
+Crapaud.'"
+
+"Oh, no," said Fanny calmly, "_he_ is not blind, he only has his eyes
+shut. Mine," she added, as if the whole light of the wintry sky she
+faced were the mirror of her prediction, "mine will be wide open."
+
+How did I know that for once the serene, theatrical creature was being
+mortally serious?
+
+
+
+
+Chapter Fifteen
+
+
+I grew a little weary of the beautiful snow in the days that followed my
+first talk with Mr Crimble, and fretted at the close air of the house.
+The last day of the year the wind was still in the north. It perplexed
+me that the pride which from my seed had sprung up in Fanny, and had
+prevented her from taking part in the parish concert, yet allowed her to
+attend it. She set off thickly veiled. Not even Mr Crimble's spectacles
+were likely to pierce her disguise. I had written a little letter the
+afternoon before and had myself handed it to Mrs Bowater with a large
+fork of mistletoe from my Christmas bunch. It was an invitation to
+herself and Fanny to sit with me and "see in" the New Year. She smiled
+at me over it--still her tranquil, though neglected self--and I was
+half-satisfied.
+
+Her best black dress was donned for the occasion. She had purchased a
+bottle of ginger wine, which she brought in with some glasses and placed
+in the middle of the red and black tablecloth. Its white-lettered,
+dark-green label "haunts me still." The hours drew on. Fanny returned
+from the concert--entering the room like a cloud of beauty. She beguiled
+the dwindling minutes of the year with mocking echoes of it.
+
+In a rich falsetto she repeated Mr Crimble's "few words" of sympathetic
+apology for her absence: "'I must ask your indulgence, ladies and
+gentlemen, for a lamentable hiatus in our programme.'" She gave us Miss
+Willett's and Mr Bangor's spirited rendering of "Oh, that we two"; and
+of the recitation which rather easily, it appeared, Mrs Bullace had been
+prevailed upon to give as an encore after her "Abt Vogler": "The Lady's
+'Yes,'" by Elizabeth Barrett Browning. And what a glance of light and
+fire she cast me when she came to stanza six of the poem:--
+
+
+     "Lead her from the festive boards,
+     Point her to the starry skies!..."
+
+
+And she imitated Lady Pollacke's niece's--Miss Oran's--'cello obligato
+to "The Lost Chord," with a plangency that stirred even the soul of
+Henry as he lay curled up in my landlady's lap. The black head split
+like a pomegranate as he yawned his disgust.
+
+At this Mrs Bowater turned her bony face on me, her hands on her knees,
+and with a lift of her eyes disclosed the fact that she was amused, and
+that she hoped her amusement would remain a confidence between us. She
+got up and put the cat out: and on her return had regained her
+solemnity.
+
+"I suppose," she said stiffly, staring into the sparkling fire that was
+our only illumination, "I suppose, poor creatures, they did their best:
+and it isn't so many years ago, Fanny, since you were as put-about to be
+allowed to sing at one of the church concerts as a bird is to hop out of
+its cage."
+
+"Yes," said Fanny, "but in this world birds merely hop out of one cage
+into another; though I suppose the larger are the more comfortable."
+This retort set Mrs Bowater's countenance in an impassive mask--so
+impassive that every fitfully-lit photograph in the room seemed to have
+imitated her stare. "And, mother," added Fanny seductively, "who
+_taught_ me to sing?"
+
+"The Lord knows," cried Mrs Bowater, with conviction, "_I_ never did."
+
+"Yes," muttered Fanny in a low voice, for my information, "but does He
+care?" I hastily asked Mrs Bowater if she was glad of to-morrow's New
+Year. As if in reply the kitchen clock, always ten minutes fast, began
+to chime twelve, half-choking at every stroke. And once more the soul of
+poor Mr Hubbins sorrowfully took shape in a gaze at me out of vacancy.
+
+"To them going downhill, miss," my landlady was replying to my question,
+"it is not the milestones are the pleasantest company--nor that the
+journey's then of much account until it is over. By which I don't mean
+to suggest there need be _gloom_. But to you and Fanny here--well, I
+expect the little that's the present for you is mostly wasted on the
+future." With that, she rose, and poured out the syrupy brown wine from
+the green bottle, reserving a remarkably little glass which she had
+rummaged out of her years' hoardings for me.
+
+Fanny herself, with musing head--her mockings over--was sitting drawn-up
+on a stool by the fire. I doubt if she was thinking. Whether or not, to
+my enchanted eyes some phantom within her seemed content merely to be
+her beauty. And in rest, there was a grace in her body--the smooth
+shoulder, the poised head that, because, perhaps, it was so transitory,
+seemed to resemble the never-changing--that mimicry of the unknown which
+may be seen in a flower, in a green hill, even in an animal. It is as
+though, I do think, what we love most in this life must of necessity
+share two worlds.
+
+Faintly out of the frosty air was wafted the knelling of midnight. I
+rose, stepped back from the firelight, drew the curtain, and stole a
+look into space. Away on the right flashed Sirius, and to east of him
+came gliding flat-headed Hydra with Alphard, the Red Bird, in his coil.
+So, for a moment in our history, I and the terrestrial globe were alone
+together. It seemed indeed that an intenser silence drew over reality as
+the earth faced yet one more fleeting revolution round her invisible
+lord and master. But no moon was risen yet.
+
+I turned towards the shape by the fire, and without her perceiving it,
+wafted kiss and prayer in her direction. Cold, careless Fanny--further
+than Uranus. We were alone, for at first stroke of St Peter's Mrs
+Bowater had left the room and had opened the front door. She was
+smiling; but _was_ she smiling, or was that vague bewitchingness in her
+face merely an unmeaning guile of which she was unaware? It might have
+been a mermaid sitting there in the firelight.
+
+The bells broke in on our stillness; and fortunately, since there was no
+dark man in the house to bring us luck, Henry, already disgusted with
+the snow and blacker in hue than any whiskered human I have ever seen,
+seized his opportunity, and was the first living creature to cross our
+threshold from one year into another.
+
+This auspicious event renewed our spirits which, in waiting, had begun
+to flag. From far away came a jangling murmur of shouting and
+instruments and bells, which showed that the rest of the parish was
+sharing our solemn vigil; and then, with me on my table between them, a
+hand of each clasping mine, Mrs Bowater, Fanny, and I, after sipping
+each other's health, raised the strains of "Auld Lang Syne." There must
+have been Scottish blood in Mrs Bowater; she certainly made up for some
+little variation from the tune by a heartfelt pronunciation of the
+words. Hardly had we completed this rite than the grandfather's clock in
+the narrow passage staidly protested its own rendering of eternity; and
+we all--even Mrs Bowater--burst out laughing.
+
+"Good-night, Midgetina; an immense happy New Year to you," whispered a
+voice to me about half an hour afterwards. I jumped out of bed, and
+peeped through my curtains. On some little errand Fanny had come down
+from her bedroom, and with a Paisley shawl over her shoulders stood with
+head and candle thrust in at the door. I gazed at her fairness. "Oh,
+Fanny!" I cried. "Oh, Fanny!"
+
+
+New Year's Day brought a change of weather. A slight mist rose over the
+fields, it began to thaw. A kind of listlessness now came over Fanny,
+which I tried in vain to dispel. Yet she seemed to seek my company;
+often to remain silent, and occasionally to ask me curious questions as
+if testing one answer against another. And one discovery I made in my
+efforts to keep her near me: that she liked being read to. Most of the
+volumes in Mrs Bowater's small library were of a nautical character, and
+though one of them, on the winds and tides and seas and coasts of the
+world, was to console me later in Fanny's absence, the majority defied
+even my obstinacy. Fanny hated stories of the sea, seemed to detest
+Crusoe; and smiled her slow, mysterious smile while she examined my own
+small literary treasures. By a flighty stroke of fortune, tacked up by
+an unskilled hand in the stained brown binding of a volume on Disorders
+of the Nerves, we discovered among her father's books a copy of
+_Wuthering Heights_, by Emily Bronte.
+
+The very first sentence of this strange, dwelling book, was a spell:
+"1801.--I have just returned from a visit to my landlord--the solitary
+neighbour that I shall be troubled with."... And when, a few lines
+farther on, I read: "He little imagined how my heart warmed towards him
+when I beheld his black eyes withdraw so suspiciously under their
+brows"--the apparition of who but Mr Crumble blinked at me out of the
+print, and the enchantment was complete. It was not only gaunt enormous
+Yorkshire with its fells and wastes of snow that seized on my
+imagination, not only that vast kitchen with its flagstones, green
+chairs, and firearms, but the mere music and aroma of the words, "I
+beheld his black eyes"; "a range of gaunt thorns"; "a wilderness of
+crumbling griffins"; "a huge, liver-coloured bitch pointer"--they rang
+in my mind, echoed on in my dreams.
+
+And though in the wet and windy afternoons and evenings which Fanny and
+I thus shared, she, much more than poor Mr Crimble, resembled Heathcliff
+in being "rather morose," and in frequently expressing "an aversion to
+showing displays of feeling," she was more attracted by my discovery
+than she condescended to confess. _Jane Eyre_, she said, was a better
+story, "though Jane herself was a fool." What cared I? To me this book
+was like the kindling of a light in a strange house; and that house my
+mind. I gazed, watched, marvelled, and recognized, as I kneeled before
+its pages. But though my heart was torn, and my feelings were a little
+deranged by the scenes of violence, and my fancy was haunted by that
+stalking wolfish spectre, I took no part. I surveyed all with just that
+sense of aloofness and absorption with which as children Cathy and
+Heathcliff, barefoot in the darkness of the garden, had looked in that
+Sunday evening on the Lintons' crimson taper-lit drawing-room.
+
+If, in February, you put a newly gathered sprig of budding thorn into
+the fire; instantaneously, in the influence of the heat, it will break
+into bright-green tiny leaf. That is what Emily Bronte did for me. Not
+so for Fanny. In her "vapid listlessness" she often pretended to yawn
+over _Wuthering Heights_, and would shock me with mocking criticism, or
+cry "Ah!" at the poignant passages. But I believe it was pure
+concealment. She was really playing a part in the story. I have, at any
+rate, never seen her face so transfigured as when once she suddenly
+looked up in the firelight and caught my eye fixed on her over the book.
+
+It was at the passage where Cathy--in her grand plaid silk frock, white
+trousers, and burnished shoes--returns to the dreadful Grange; and,
+"dismally beclouded," Heathcliff stares out at her from his
+hiding-place. "'He might,'" I read on, "'well skulk behind the settle,
+at beholding such a bright, graceful damsel enter the house. "Is
+Heathcliff not here?" she demanded, pulling off her gloves, and
+displaying fingers wonderfully whitened with doing nothing and staying
+indoors.'"
+
+It was at this point that our eyes, as I say, Fanny's and mine, met.
+But she, bright, graceful damsel, was not thinking of me.
+
+"Do you like that kind of character, Fanny?" I inquired.
+
+My candle's flames gleamed lean and tiny in her eyes. "Whose?" she
+asked.
+
+"Why, Heathcliff's."
+
+She turned slowly away. "You take things so seriously, Midgetina. It's
+merely a story. He only wanted taming. You'll see by-and-by." But at
+that moment my ear caught the sound of footsteps, and when Mrs Bowater
+opened the door to contemplate idle Fanny, the book was under my bed.
+
+
+As the day drew near for Fanny's return to her "duties," her mood
+brightened. She displayed before me in all their stages, the new clothes
+which Mrs Bowater lavished on her--to a degree that, amateur though I
+was in domestic economy, filled me with astonishment. I had to feign
+delight in these fineries--"Ah!" whispered I to each, "when she wears
+_you_ she will be far, far away." I envied the very buttons, and indeed
+pestered her with entreaties. I implored her to think of me at certain
+hours; to say good-night to herself for me; to write day by day in the
+first of the evening; to share the moon: "If we both look at her at the
+same moment," I argued, "it will be next to looking at one another. You
+_cannot_ be utterly gone: and if you see even a flower, or hear the
+wind.... Oh, I hope and hope you will be happy."
+
+She promised everything with smiling ease, and would have sealed the
+compact in blood if I had thought to cut my thumb for it. Thursday in
+Holy Week--_then_ she would be home again. I stared at the blessed day
+across the centuries as a condemned man stares in fancy at the scaffold
+awaiting him; but on mine hung all my hopes. Long evenings I never saw
+her at all; and voices in the kitchen, when she came in late, suggested
+that my landlady had also missed her. But Fanny never lost her
+self-control even when she lost her temper; and I dared not tax her with
+neglecting me. Her cold looks almost suffocated me. I besought her to
+spend one last hour of the eve of her departure alone with me and with
+the stars in the woods. She promised. At eleven she came home, and went
+straight up into her bedroom. I heard her footsteps. She was packing.
+Then silence.
+
+I waited on until sick at heart I flung myself on my knees beside my bed
+and prayed that God would comfort her. Heathcliff had acquired a feeble
+pupil. The next afternoon she was gone.
+
+
+
+
+Chapter Sixteen
+
+
+For many days my mind was an empty husk, yet in a constant torment of
+longing, daydream, despair, and self-reproaches. Everything I looked at
+had but one meaning--that she was not there. I did not dare to admit
+into my heart a hope of the future, since it would be treason to the
+absent. There was an ecstatic mournfulness even in the sight of the
+January sun, the greening fields, the first scarcely perceptible signals
+of a new year. And when one morning I awoke early and heard, still half
+in dream, a thrush in all but darkness singing of spring, it seemed it
+was a voice pealing in the empty courts of paradise. What ridiculous
+care I took to conceal my misery from Mrs Bowater. Hardly a morning
+passed but that I carried out in a bag the food I couldn't eat the day
+before, to hide it away or bury it. But such journeys were brief.
+
+I have read somewhere that love is a disease. Or is it that Life piles
+up the fuel, a chance stranger darts a spark, and the whole world goes
+up in smoke? Was I happier in that fever than I am in this literary
+calm? Why did love for things without jealousy or envy fill me with
+delight, pour happiness into me, and love for Fanny parch me up, suck
+every other interest from my mind, and all but blind my eyes? Is that
+true? I cannot be sure: for to remember her ravages is as difficult as
+to re-assemble the dismal phantoms that flock into a delirious brain.
+And still to be honest--there's another chance: Was she to blame? Would
+my mind have been at peace even in its solitary woe if she had dealt
+truly with me? Would any one believe it?--it never occurred to me to
+remind myself that it might be a question merely of size. Simply because
+I loved, I deemed myself lovable. Yet in my heart of hearts that
+afternoon I had been twitting Mr Crimble for saying his prayers!
+
+But even the heart is Phoenix-like. The outer world began to break into
+my desolation, not least successfully when after a week or two of
+absence there came a post card from Fanny to her mother with a mere
+"love to M." scrawled in its top right-hand corner. It was as if a
+wine-glass of cold water had been poured down my back. It was followed
+by yet another little "shock." One evening, when she had carefully set
+down my bowl of rusk and milk, Mrs Bowater took up her stand opposite to
+me, black as an image in wood. "You haven't been after your stars, miss,
+of late. It's moping you are. I suffered myself from the same greensick
+fantasticalities, when _I_ was a girl. Not that a good result's any the
+better for a poor cause; but it was courting danger with your frail
+frame; it was indeed."
+
+I smile in remembrance of the picture presented by that
+conscience-stricken face of mine upturned to that stark monitor--a
+monitor no less stark at this very moment though we are both many years
+older.
+
+"Yes, yes," she continued, and even the dun, fading photograph over her
+head might have paled at her accents. "I'm soliciting no divulgements;
+she wouldn't have gone alone, and if she did, would have heard of it
+from me. But you must please remember, miss, I am her mother. And you
+will remember, miss, also," she added, with upper lip drawn even
+tighter, "that your care is my care, and always will be while you are
+under my roof--and after, please God."
+
+She soundlessly closed the door behind her, as if in so doing she were
+shutting up the whole matter in her mind for ever, as indeed she was,
+for she never referred to it again. Thunderbolts fall quietly at times.
+I sat stupefied. But as I examine that distant conscience, I am aware,
+first, of a faint flitting of the problem through my mind as to why a
+freedom which Mrs Bowater would have denied to Fanny should have held no
+dangers for me, and next, I realize that of all the emotions in conflict
+within me, humiliation stood head and shoulders above the rest. Indeed I
+flushed all over, at the thought that never for one moment--then or
+since--had I paused to consider how, on that fateful midnight, Fanny
+could have left the house-door _bolted_ behind her. My utter stupidity:
+and Fanny's! All these weeks my landlady had known, and said nothing.
+The green gooseberries of my childhood were a far less effective tonic.
+But I lost no love for Mrs Bowater in this prodigious increase of
+respect.
+
+A far pleasanter interruption of my sick longings for the absent one
+occurred the next morning. At a loss what to be reading (for Fanny had
+abstracted my _Wuthering Heights_ and taken it away with her), once more
+shudderingly pushing aside my breakfast, I turned over the dusty, faded
+pile of Bowater books. And in one of them I discovered a chapter on
+knots. Our minds are cleverer than we think them, and not only cats have
+an instinct for physicking themselves. I took out a piece of silk twine
+from my drawer and--with Fanny's phantom sulking a while in neglect--set
+myself to the mastery of "the ship boy's" science. I had learned for
+ever to distinguish between the granny and the reef (such is fate, this
+knot was also called the true lover's!), and was setting about the
+fisherman's bend, when there came a knock on the door--and then a head.
+
+It was Pollie. Until I saw her round, red, country cheek, and stiff
+Sunday hat, thus unexpectedly appear, I had almost forgotten how much I
+loved and had missed her. No doubt my landlady had been the _dea ex
+machina_ that had produced her on this fine sunshine morning. Anyhow she
+was from heaven. Besides butter, a posy of winter jasmine, a crochet
+bedspread, and a varnished arbour chair made especially for me during
+the winter evenings by her father, Mr Muggeridge, she brought startling
+news. There suddenly fell a pause in our excited talk. She drew out her
+handkerchief and a slow crimson mounted up over neck, cheek, ears, and
+brow. I couldn't look quite away from this delicious sight, so my eyes
+wandered up in admiration of the artificial cornflowers and daisies in
+her hat.
+
+Whereupon she softly blew her nose and, with a gliding glance at the
+shut door, she breathed out her secret. She was engaged to be married. A
+trying, romantic vapour seemed instantly to gather about us, in whose
+hush I was curiously aware not only of Pollie thus suffused, sitting
+with her hands loosely folded in her lap, but of myself also, perched
+opposite to her with eyes in which curiosity, incredulity, and even a
+remote consternation played upon her homely features. Time melted away,
+and there once more sat the old Pollie--a gawk of a girl in a pinafore,
+munching up green apples and re-plaiting her dull brown hair.
+
+Then, of course, I was bashfully challenged to name the happy man. I
+guessed and guessed to Pollie's ever-increasing gusto, and at last I
+dared my first unuttered choice: "Well, then, it _must_ be Adam
+Waggett!"
+
+"Adam Waggett! Oh, miss, him! a nose like a winebottle."
+
+It was undeniable. I apologized, and Pollie surrendered her future into
+my hands. "It's Bob Halibut, miss," she whispered hoarsely.
+
+And instantaneously Bob Halibut's red head loomed louringly out at me.
+But I know little about husbands; and premonitions only impress us when
+they come true. Time was to prove that Pollie and her mother had made a
+prudent choice. Am I not now Mr Halibut's god-sister, so to speak?
+
+The wedding, said Pollie, was to be in the summer. "And oh, miss"--would
+I come?
+
+The scheming that followed! The sensitive draping of difficulties on
+either side, the old homesick longing on mine--to flee away now, at
+once, from this scene of my afflicted adoration. I almost hated Fanny
+for giving me so much pain. Mrs Bowater was summoned to our council; my
+promise was given; and it was she who suggested that its being "a nice
+bright afternoon," Pollie should take me for a walk.
+
+But whither? It seemed a sheer waste of Pollie to take her to the woods.
+Thoughts of St Peter's, the nocturnal splendour in the cab, a hunger for
+novelty, the itch to spend money, and maybe a tinge of
+dare-devilry--without a moment's hesitation I chose the shops and the
+"town." Once more in my black, with two thicknesses of veil canopying my
+head, as if I were a joint of meat in the Dog Days, I settled myself on
+Pollie's arm, and--in the full publicity of three o'clock in the
+afternoon--off we went.
+
+We chattered; we laughed; we sniggled together like schoolgirls in
+amusement at the passers-by, in the strange, busy High Street. I
+devoured the entrancing wares in the shop windows--milliner, hairdresser
+and perfumer, confectioner; even the pyramids of jam jars and
+sugar-cones in the grocer's, and the soaps, syrups, and sponges of Mr
+Simpkins--Beechwood's pharmaceutical chemist. Out of the sovereign which
+I had brought with me from my treasure-chest Pollie made purchases on my
+behalf. For Mrs Bowater, a muslin tie for the neck; for herself--after
+heated controversy--a pair of kid gloves and a bottle of frangipani; and
+for me a novel.
+
+This last necessitated a visit to Mrs Stocks's Circulating Library. My
+hopes had been set on _Jane Eyre_. Mrs Stocks regretted that the demand
+for this novel had always exceeded her supply: "What may be called the
+sensational style of fiction" (or was it friction?) "never lays much on
+our hands." She produced, instead, and very tactfully, a comparatively
+diminutive copy of Miss Austen's _Sense and Sensibility_. It was a
+little shop-soiled; "But books keep, miss"; and she let me have it at a
+reduced price. Her great shears severed the string. Pollie and I once
+more set clanging the sonorous bell at the door, and emerged into the
+sunlight. "Oh, Pollie," I whispered, "if only you could stay with me for
+ever!"
+
+This taste of "life" had so elated me that after fevered and silent
+debate I at last laughed out, and explained to Pollie that I wished to
+be "put down." Her breathless arguments against this foolhardy
+experiment only increased my obstinacy. She was compelled to obey.
+Bidding her keep some little distance behind me, I settled my veil,
+clasped tight my Miss Austen in my arms and set my face in the direction
+from which we had come. One after another the wide paving-stones
+stretched out in front of me. It was an extraordinary experience. I was
+openly alone now, not with the skulking, deceitful shades and
+appearances of night, or the quiet flowers and trees in the enormous
+vacancy of nature; but in the midst of a town of men in their
+height--and walking along there: by myself. It was as if I had suddenly
+realized what astonishingly active and domineering and multitudinous
+creatures we humans are. I can't explain. The High Street, to use a good
+old phrase, "got up into my head." My mind was in such a whirl of
+excitement that full consciousness of what followed eludes me.
+
+
+The sun poured wintry bright into the house-walled gulf of a street that
+in my isolation seemed immeasurably vast and empty. I think my senses
+distorted the scene. There was the terrific glitter of glass, the
+clatter of traffic. A puff of wind whirled dust and grit and particles
+of straw into the air. The shapes of advancing pedestrians towered close
+above me, then, stiff with sudden attention, passed me by. My legs grew
+a little numb and my brain confused. The strident whistling of a
+butcher's boy, with an empty, blood-stained tray over his shoulder,
+suddenly ceased. Saucer-eyed, he stood stock still, gulped and gaped. I
+kept on my course. A yelp of astonishment rent the air. Whereupon, as it
+seemed, from divers angles, similar boys seemed to leap out of the
+ground and came whooping and revolving across the street in my
+direction. And now the blood so hummed in my head that it was rather my
+nerves than my ears which informed me of a steadily increasing murmur
+and trampling behind me.
+
+With extraordinary vividness I recall the vision of a gigantic barouche
+gliding along towards me in the shine and the dust; and seated up in it
+a high, pompous lady who at one moment with rigid urbanity inclined her
+head apparently in my direction, and at the next, her face displeased as
+if at an offensive odour, had sunk back into her cushions, oblivious not
+only of Beechwood but of the whole habitable globe. Simultaneously, I
+was aware, even as I hastened on, first that the acquaintance whose
+salute she had acknowledged was Mr Crimble, and next, that with
+incredible rapidity he had wheeled himself about and had instantaneously
+transfixed his entire attention on some object in the window of a
+hatter's.
+
+Until this moment, as I say, a confused but blackening elation had
+filled my mind. But at sight of Mr Crimble's rook-like stooping
+shoulders I began to be afraid. My shoe stumbled against a jutting
+paving-stone. I almost fell. Whereupon the mute concourse at my
+heels--spreading tail of me, the Comet--burst into a prolonged squealing
+roar of delight. The next moment Pollie was at my side, stooping to my
+rescue. It was too late. One glance over my shoulder--and terror and
+hatred of the whole human race engulfed me like a sea. I struck savagely
+at Pollie's cotton-gloved hand. Shivering, with clenched, sticky teeth,
+I began to run.
+
+Why this panic? Who would have harmed me? And yet on the thronging faces
+which I had flyingly caught sight of through my veil there lay an
+expression that was not solely curiosity--a kind of hunger, a dog-like
+gleam. I remember one thin-legged, ferrety, red-haired lad in
+particular. Well, no matter. The comedy was brief, and it was Mrs Stocks
+who lowered the curtain. Attracted by all this racket and hubbub in the
+street, she was protruding her round head out of her precincts. Like fox
+to its hole, I scrambled over her wooden doorstep, whisked round her
+person, and fled for sanctuary into her shop. She hustled poor Pollie in
+after me, wheeled round on my pursuers, slammed the door in their faces,
+slipped its bolt, and drew down its dark blue blind.
+
+In the sudden quiet and torpor of this musty gloom I turned my hunted
+eyes and stared at the dark strip of holland that hid me from my
+pursuers. So too did Mrs Stocks. The round creature stood like a stone
+out of reach of the surf. Then she snorted.
+
+"Them!" said she, with a flick of her duster. "A parcel of idle herrand
+boys. _I_ know them: and no more decency than if you was Royalty, my
+dear, or a pickpocket, or a corpse run over in the street. You rest a
+bit, pore young thing, and compose yourself. They'll soon grow tired of
+themselves."
+
+She retired into the back part of her shop beyond the muslined door and
+returned with a tumbler of water. I shook my head. My sight pulsed with
+my heartbeats. As if congealed into a drop of poison, I stared and
+stared at the blind.
+
+"Open the door," I said. "I'd like to go out again."
+
+"Oh, miss! oh, miss!" cried Pollie.
+
+But Mrs Stocks was of a more practical turn. After surveying my enemies
+from an upper window she had sent a neighbour's little girl for a cab.
+By the time this vehicle arrived, with a half-hearted "Boo!" of
+disappointment, the concourse in the street had all but melted away, and
+Mrs Stocks's check duster scattered the rest. The cab-door slammed, the
+wheels ground on the kerbstone, my debut was over. I had been but a nine
+minutes' wonder.
+
+
+
+
+Chapter Seventeen
+
+
+We jogged on sluggishly up the hill, and at last, in our velvety quiet,
+as if at a preconcerted signal, Pollie and I turned and looked at one
+another, and broke into a long, mirthless peal of laughter--a laughter
+that on her side presently threatened to end in tears. I left her to
+recover herself, fixing my festering attention on her engagement
+ring--two hearts in silver encircled by six sky-blue turquoises. And in
+the silly, helpless fashion of one against the world, I plotted revenge.
+
+The cab stopped. There stood the little brick house, wholly unaffected
+by the tragic hours which had passed since we had so gaily set out from
+it. I eyed it with malice and disgust as I reascended my Bateses and
+preceded Pollie into the passage. Once safely within, I shrugged my
+shoulders and explained to Mrs Bowater the phenomenon of the cab with
+such success that I verily believe she was for the moment convinced that
+her lodger was one of those persons who prosper in the attentions of the
+mob--Royalty, that is, rather than pickpockets or corpses run over in
+the street.
+
+With my new muslin tie adorning her neck, Mrs Bowater took tea with us
+that afternoon, but even Pollie's imaginative version of our adventures
+made no reference to the lady in the carriage, nor did she share my
+intense conjecture on what Mr Crimble can have found of such engrossing
+interest in the hatter's. _Was_ it that the lady had feigned not to have
+seen me entirely for my sake; and that Mr Crimble had feigned not to
+have seen me entirely for _his_? I was still poring over this problem in
+bed that night when there came a tap at my door. It was Pollie. She had
+made her way downstairs to assure herself that I was safe and
+comfortable. "And oh, miss," she whispered, as she bade me a final
+good-night, "you never see such a lovely little bedroom as Mrs Bowater
+have put me into--fit for a princess, and yet just quite plain! Bob's
+been thinking about furniture too."
+
+So I was left alone again with forgotten Fanny, and that night I
+dreamed of her. Nothing to be seen but black boiling waves flinging
+their yeasty, curdling crests into the clouds, and every crest the face
+of my ferrety "herrand-boy." And afloat in the midst of the welter
+beneath, a beloved shape whiter than the foam, with shut eyes, under the
+gigantic stoop of the water. Who hangs these tragic veils in the
+sleeping mind? Who was this I that looked out on them? I awoke,
+shuddering, breathed a blessing--disjointed, nameless; turned over, and
+soon was once more asleep.
+
+My day's experiences in the High Street had added at least twenty-four
+hours to my life. So much a woman of the world was I becoming that when,
+after Pollie's departure, a knock announced Mr Crimble, I greeted him
+with a countenance guileless and self-possessed. With spectacles fixed
+on me, he stood nervously twitching a small bunch of snowdrops which he
+assured me were the first of the New Year. I thanked him, remarked that
+our Lyndsey snowdrops were shorter in the stalk than these, and had he
+noticed the pale green hieroglyphs on the petals?
+
+"In the white, dead nettle you have to look underneath for them: tiny
+black oblongs; you can't think how secret it looks!"
+
+But Mr Crimble had not come to botanize. After answering my inquiry
+after the health of Mrs Hubbins, he suddenly sat down and announced that
+the object of his visit was to cast himself on my generosity. The
+proposal made me uncomfortable, but my timid attempt to return to Mrs
+Hubbins was unavailing.
+
+"I speak," he said, "of yesterday's atrocity. There is no other word for
+it, and inasmuch as it occurred within two hundred yards of my own
+church, indeed of my mother's house, I cannot disclaim all
+responsibility for it."
+
+Nor could I. But I wished very heartily that he had not come to talk
+about _his_ share. "Oh," said I, as airily as I could, "you mean, Mr
+Crimble, my little experience in the High Street. That was nothing. My
+attention was so much taken up with other things that I did not get even
+so much as a glimpse of St Peter's. So you see----"
+
+"You are kindness itself," he interrupted, with a rapid insertion of his
+forefinger between his neck and his clerical collar, "but the fact is,"
+and he cast a glance at me as if with the whites of his eyes, "the fact
+is, I was myself a scandalized witness of the occurrence. Believe me, it
+cannot have hurt your sensitive feelings more than--than it hurt mine."
+
+"But honestly, Mr Crimble," I replied, glancing rather helplessly round
+the room, "it didn't hurt my feelings at all. You don't feel much, you
+know, when you are angry. It was just as I should have foreseen. It is
+important to know where we are, isn't it; and where other people are?
+And boys will be boys, as Mrs Bowater says, and particularly, I suppose,
+errand boys. What else could I expect? It has just taught me a very
+useful lesson--even though I didn't much enjoy learning it. If I am ever
+to get used to the world (and that _is_ a kind of duty, Mr Crimble,
+isn't it?), the world must get used to me. Perhaps if we all knew each
+other's insides--our thoughts and feelings, I mean--everybody would be
+as peculiar there--inside, you know--as I am, outside. I'm afraid this
+is not making myself very clear."
+
+And only a few weeks ago I had been bombarding Dr Phelps with precisely
+the opposite argument. That, I suppose, is what is meant by being
+"deceitful on the weights."
+
+Mr Crimble opened his mouth, but I continued rapidly, "You see, I must
+be candid about such things to myself and try not to--to be silly. And
+you were merely going to be very kind, weren't you? I am a midget, and
+it's no good denying it. The people that hooted me were not. That's all;
+and if there hadn't been so many of them, perhaps I might have been just
+as much amused, if not even shocked at them, as they at me. We _think_
+our own size, that's all, and I'm perfectly certain," I nodded at him
+emphatically, "I'm perfectly certain if poor Mr Hubbins were here now,
+he'd--he'd bear me out."
+
+Bear me out--the words lingered on in my mind so distinctly, and
+conveyed so peculiar a picture of Mr Hubbins's spirit and myself, that I
+missed the beginning of my visitor's reply.
+
+"But I assure you," he was saying, "it is not merely that." The glint of
+perspiration was on his forehead. "In the Almighty's sight all men are
+equal. Appearances are nothing. And some of us perhaps are far more
+precious by very reason of--of passing afflictions, and----"
+
+"My godmother," I interposed, "said exactly that in a letter to me a few
+months ago. Not that I accept the _word_, Mr Crimble, the
+'afflictions,' I mean. And as for appearances, why they are
+_everything_, aren't they?" I gave him as cordial an imitation of a
+smile as I could.
+
+"No, no, no; yes, yes, yes," said Mr Crimble rapidly. "But it was not of
+that, not of that in a sense that I was speaking. What I came to say
+this afternoon is this. I grant it; I freely confess it; I played the
+coward; morally rather than physically, perhaps, but still the coward.
+The--the hideous barbarity of the proceeding." He had forgotten me. His
+eyes were fixed on the scene in his memory. He was once more at the
+hatter's window. There fell a painful pause.
+
+I rose and sat down again. "But quite, quite honestly," I interposed
+faintly, "they did me no harm. They were only inquisitive. What could
+you have done? Why, really and truly," I laughed feebly, "they might
+have had to pay, you know. It was getting--getting me cheap!"
+
+His head was thrown back, so that he looked _under_ his spectacles at
+me, as he cried hollowly: "They might have stoned you."
+
+"Not with those pavements."
+
+"But I was there. I turned aside. You _saw_ me?"
+
+What persuaded me to be guilty of such a ridiculous quibble, I cannot
+think. Anything, perhaps, to ease his agitation: "But honestly,
+honestly, Mr Crimble," I murmured out at him, "I didn't _see_ you see
+me."
+
+"Oh, ah! a woman's way!" he adjured me desperately, turning his head
+from one side to the other. "But you must have known that I knew you
+knew I had seen you, you _must_ confess _that_. And, well ... as I say,
+I can only appeal to your generosity."
+
+"But what can I _do_? I'm not hurt. If it had been the other way
+round--_you_ scuttling along, I mean; I really do believe _I_ might have
+looked into the hatter's. Besides, when we were safe in the cab.... I
+mean, I'm glad! It was experience: oh, and past. I loved it and the
+streets, and the shops, and all those grinning, gnashing faces, and even
+you.... It was wildly _exciting_, Mr Crimble, can't you _see_? And
+now"--I ended triumphantly--"and now I have another novel!"
+
+At this, suddenly overcome, I jumped up from my chair and ran off into
+my bedroom as if in search of the book. The curtains composed
+themselves behind me. In this inner quietness, this momentary release, I
+stood there, erect beside the bed--without a thought in my head. And I
+began slowly, silently--to laugh. Handkerchief to my lips, I laughed and
+laughed--not exactly like Pollie in the cab, but because apparently some
+infinitely minute being within me had risen up at remembrance of the
+strange human creature beyond the curtains who had suddenly before my
+very eyes seemed to have expanded and swollen out to double his size.
+Oh, what extraordinary things life was doing to me. How can I express
+myself? For that pip of a moment I was just an exquisite icicle of
+solitude--as if I had never been born. Yet there, under my very nose,
+was my bed, my glass, my hair-brushes and bottles--"Here we all are,
+Miss M."--and on the other side of the curtains.... And how contemptuous
+I had been of Pollie's little lapse into the hysterical! I brushed my
+handkerchief over my eyes, tranquillized my features, and sallied out
+once more into the world.
+
+"Ah, here it is," I exclaimed ingenuously, and lifting my _Sense and
+Sensibility_ from where it lay on the floor beside my table, I placed it
+almost ceremoniously in Mr Crimble's hands. A visible mist of
+disconcertion gathered over his face. He looked at the book, he opened
+it, his eye strayed down the title-page.
+
+"Yes, yes," he murmured, "Jane Austen--a pocket edition. Macaulay, I
+remember...." He closed-to the covers again, drew finger and thumb
+slowly down the margin, and then leaned forward. "But you were asking me
+a question. What could I have _done_? Frankly I don't quite know. But I
+might have protected you, driven the rabble off, taken you---- The Good
+Shepherd. But there, in short," and the sun of relief peered through the
+glooms of conscience, "I did nothing. That was my failure. And absurd
+though it may seem, I could not rest until, as a matter of fact, I had
+unbosomed myself, confessed, knowing you would understand." His tongue
+came to a standstill. "And when," he continued in a small, constrained
+voice, and with a searching, almost appealing glance, "when Miss
+_Bowater_ returns, you will, I hope, allow me to make amends, to
+prove---- She would never--for--forgive...."
+
+The fog that had been his became mine. In an extravagance of attention
+to every syllable of his speech as it died away uncompleted in the
+little listening room I mutely surveyed him. Then I began to
+understand, to realize where my poor little "generosity" was to come in.
+
+"Ah," I replied at last, forlornly, our eyes in close communion, "she
+won't be back for months and months. And anyhow, she wouldn't, I am
+sure, much _mind_, Mr Crimble."
+
+"Easter," he whispered. "Well, you will write, I suppose," and his eye
+wandered off as if in search of the inkpot, "and no doubt you will share
+our--your secret." There was no vestige of interrogation in his voice,
+and yet it was clear that what he was suggesting I should do was only
+and exactly what he had come that afternoon to ask me not to do. Why,
+surely, I thought, examining him none too complimentarily, I am afraid,
+he was merely playing for a kind of stalemate. What funny, blind alleys
+love leads us into.
+
+"No," I said solemnly. "I shall say nothing. But that, I suppose, is
+because I am not so brave as you are. Really and truly, I think she
+would only be amused. Everything amuses her."
+
+It seemed that we had suddenly reassumed our natural dimensions, for at
+that he looked at me _tinily_ again, and with the suggestion, to which I
+was long accustomed, that he would rather not be observed while so
+looking.
+
+On the whole, ours had been a gloomy talk. Nevertheless, _there_, not on
+my generosity, but I hope on my understanding, he reposed himself, and
+so reposes to this day. When the door had closed behind him, I felt far
+more friendly towards Mr Crimble than I had felt before. Even apart from
+the Almighty, he had made us as nearly as he could--equals. I tossed a
+pleasant little bow to his snowdrops, and, catching sight of Mr
+Bowater's fixed stare on me, hastily included _him_ within its range.
+
+Mr Crimble, Mrs Bowater informed me the following Sunday evening, lived
+with an aged mother, and in spite of his sociability and his "fun," was
+a lonely young man. He hadn't, my landlady thought, yet seen enough of
+the world to be of much service to those who had. "They," and I think
+she meant clergymen in general, as well as Mr Crimble in particular,
+"live a shut-in, complimentary life, and people treat them according.
+Though, of course, there's those who have seen a bit of trouble and
+cheeseparing themselves, and the Church is the Church when all's said
+and done."
+
+And all in a moment I caught my first real glimpse of the Church--no
+more just a number of St Peterses than I was so many "organs," or
+Beechwood was so many errand boys, or, for that matter, England so many
+counties. It was an idea; my attention wandered.
+
+"But he was very anxious about the concert," I ventured to protest.
+
+"I've no doubt," said Mrs Bowater shortly.
+
+"But then," I remarked with a sigh, "Fanny seems to make friends
+wherever she goes."
+
+"It isn't the making," replied her mother, "but the keeping."
+
+The heavy weeks dragged slowly by, and a one-sided correspondence is
+like posting letters into a dream. My progress with Miss Austen was
+slow, because she made me think and argue with her. Apart from her, I
+devoured every fragment of print I could lay hands on. For when fiction
+palled I turned to facts, mastered the _sheepshank_, the _running
+bowline_, and the _figure-of-eight_; and wrestled on with my sea-craft.
+It was a hard task, and I thought it fair progress if in _that_ I
+covered half a knot a day.
+
+Besides which, Mrs Bowater sometimes played with me at solitaire,
+draughts, or cards. In these she was a martinet, and would appropriate a
+fat pack at _Beggar-my-neighbour_ with infinite gusto. How silent stood
+the little room, with just the click of the cards, the simmering of the
+kettle on the hob, and Mrs Bowater's occasional gruff "Four to pay." We
+might have been on a desert island. I must confess this particular game
+soon grew a little wearisome; but I played on, thinking to please my
+partner, and that she had chosen it for her own sake. Until one evening,
+with a stifled sigh, she murmured the word, Cribbage! I was shuffling my
+own small pack at the moment, and paused, my eyes on their backs, in a
+rather wry amusement. But Fate has pretty frequently so turned the
+tables on me; and after that, "One for his nob," sepulchrally broke the
+night-silence of Beechwood far more often than "Four to pay."
+
+Not all my letters to Fanny went into the post. My landlady looked a
+little askance at them, and many of the unposted ones were scrawled, if
+possible in moonlight, after she had gone to bed. To judge from my
+recollection of other letters written in my young days, I may be
+thankful that Fanny was one of those practical people who do not hoard
+the valueless. I can still recall the poignancy of my postscripts. On
+the one hand: "I beseech you to write to me, Fanny, I live to hear. Last
+night was full moon again. I saw you--you only in her glass." On the
+other: "Henry has been fighting. There is a chip out of his ear. Nine
+centuries nearer now! And how is 'Monsieur Crapaud'?"
+
+
+
+
+Wanderslore
+
+
+
+
+Chapter Eighteen
+
+
+At last there came a post which brought me, not a sermon from Miss
+Fenne, nor gossip from Pollie, but a message from the Islands of the
+Blest. All that evening and night it lay unopened under my pillow. I was
+saving it up. And never have I passed hours so studious yet so barren of
+result. It was the end of February. A sudden burst of light and sunshine
+had fallen on the world. There were green shining grass and new-fallen
+lambs in the meadows, and the almond tree beyond my window was in full,
+leafless bloom. As for the larks, they were singing of Fanny. The next
+morning early, about seven o'clock, her letter folded up in its small
+envelope in the bosom of my cloak, I was out of the house and making my
+way to the woods. It was the clear air of daybreak and only the large
+stars shook faint and silvery in the brightening sky.
+
+Frost powdered the ground and edged the grasses. But now tufts of
+primroses were in blow among the withered mist of leaves. I came to my
+"observatory" just as the first beams of sunrise smote on its upper
+boughs. Yet even now I deferred the longed-for moment and hastened on
+between the trees, beech and brooding yew, by what seemed a faint
+foot-track, and at last came out on a kind of rising on the edge of the
+woods. From this green eminence for the first time I looked straight
+across its desolate garden to Wanderslore.
+
+It was a long, dark, many-windowed house. It gloomed sullenly back at me
+beneath the last of night. From the alarm calls of the blackbirds it
+seemed that even so harmless a trespasser as I was a rare spectacle. A
+tangle of brier and bramble bushed frostily over its grey stone
+terraces. Nearer at hand in the hollow stood an angled house, also of
+stone--and as small compared with Wanderslore as a little child compared
+with its mother. It had been shattered at one corner by a falling tree,
+whose bole still lay among the undergrowth. The faint track I was
+following led on, and apparently past it. Breathless and triumphant, I
+presently found myself seated on a low mossy stone beside it, monarch of
+all I surveyed. With a profound sigh I opened my letter:--
+
+
+     "BURN THIS LETTER, AND SHOW THE OTHER TO M.
+
+     "DEAR MIDGETINA,--Don't suppose, because I have not written, that
+     Fanny is a monster, though, in fact, she is. I have often thought
+     of you--with your stars and knick-knacks. And of course your
+     letters have come. My thanks. I can't really answer them now
+     because I am trying at the same time to scribble this note and to
+     correct 'composition' papers under the very eyes of Miss
+     Stebbings--the abhorred daughter of Argus and the eldest Gorgon.
+     Dear me, I almost envy you, Midgetina. It _must_ be fun to be like
+     a tiny, round-headed pin in a pin-cushion and just mock at the
+     Workbox. But all things in moderation.
+
+     "When the full moon came last I remembered our _vow_. She was so
+     dazzling, poor old wreck. And I wondered, as I blinked up at her,
+     if you would not some day vanish away altogether--unless you make a
+     fortune by being looked at. I wish I could. Only would they pay
+     enough? That is the question.
+
+     "What I am writing about now is not the moon, but--don't be
+     amused!--a Man. Not Monsieur Crapaud, who is more absurd than ever;
+     but some one you know, Mr Crimble. He has sent me the most alarming
+     letter and wants me to marry him. It is not for the first time of
+     asking, but still a solemn occasion. Mother once said that he was
+     like a coquette--all attention and no intention. Sad to say, it is
+     the other way round. M., you see, always judges by what she fears.
+     _I_ by what this Heart tells me.
+
+     "Now I daren't write back to him direct (_a_) because I wish just
+     now to say neither Yes nor No; (_b_) because a little delay will
+     benefit his family pride; (_c_) because it is safer not to--he's
+     very careless and I might soon want to change my mind; (_d_)
+     because that's how my fancy takes me; and (_e_) because I love you
+     exceedingly and know you will help me.
+
+     "When no answer comes to his letter, he will probably dare another
+     pilgrimage to Beechwood Hill, if only to make sure that I am not in
+     my grave. So I want you to tell him _secretly_ that _I have
+     received his letter and that I am giving it my earnest
+     attention_--let alone my prayers. Tell me exactly how he takes this
+     answer; then I will write to you again. I am sure, Midgetina, in
+     some previous life you must have lived in the tiny rooms in the
+     Palace at Mantua--you are a born _intrigante_.
+
+
+     "_In my bedroom, 11 p.m._--A scheme is in my mind, but it is not
+     yet in bloom, and you may infer from all this that I don't _care_.
+     Often I wish this were so. I sat in front of my eight inches of
+     grained looking-glass last night till it seemed some god(dess)
+     _must_ intervene. But no. My head was dark and empty. I could hear
+     Mr Oliphant cajoling with his violin in the distance--as if music
+     had charms. Oh, dear, they give you life, and leave you to ask,
+     Why. You seem to be perfectly contented in your queer little prim
+     way with merely asking. But Fanny Bowater wants an answer, or she
+     will make one up. Meanwhile, search for a scrap of magic mushroom,
+     little sister, and come nearer! Some day I will tell you even more
+     about myself! Meanwhile, believe me, petitissimost M., your
+     affec.--F.
+
+     "PS.--_Burn this._
+
+     "PPS.--What I mean is, that he must be _made_ to realize that I
+     will not and cannot give him an answer before I come home--unless
+     he hears meanwhile.
+
+     "Burn this: the _other_ letter is for show purposes."
+
+
+Fanny's "other" was more brief:--
+
+
+     "DEAR MIDGETINA,--It is delightful to have your letters, and I am
+     ashamed of myself for not answering them before. But I will do so
+     the very moment there is a free hour. Would you please ask mother
+     with my love to send me some handkerchiefs, some stockings, and
+     some soap? My first are worn with weeping, my second with sitting
+     still, and my third is mottled--and similarly affects the
+     complexion. But Easter draws near, and I am sure I must long to be
+     home. Did you tell mother by any chance of your midnight astronomy
+     lesson? It has been most useful when all other baits and threats
+     have failed to teach the young idea how to shoot. Truly a poet's
+     way of putting it. Is Mr Crimble still visiting his charming
+     parishioner?
+
+     "I remain,
+
+     "Yours affec'ly,
+
+     "FANNY BOWATER."
+
+
+Slowly, self-conscious word by word, lingering here and there, I read
+these letters through--then through again. Then I lifted my eyes and
+stared for a while over my left shoulder at empty Wanderslore. A medley
+of emotions strove for mastery, and as if to reassure herself the "tiny,
+round-headed pin" kissed the signature, whispering languishingly to
+herself in the great garden: "I love you exceedingly. Oh, Fanny, I love
+you exceedingly," and hid her eyes in her hands. The note-paper was very
+faintly scented. My imagination wandered off I know not where; and
+returned, elated and dejected. Which the more I know not. Then I folded
+up the secret letter into as small a compass as I could, dragged back a
+loose, flat stone, hid it away in the dry crevice beneath, and replaced
+the stone. The other I put into my silk bag.
+
+I emerged from these labours to see in my mind Mrs Bowater steadfastly
+regarding me, and behind her the shadowy shape of Mr Crimble, with I
+know not what of entreaty in his magnified dark eyes. I smiled a little
+ruefully to myself to think that my life was become like a pool of deep
+water in which I was slowly sinking down and down. As if, in sober fact,
+there were stones in my pocket, or leaden soles to my shoes. It was more
+like reading a story about myself, than _being_ myself, and what was to
+be the end of it all? I thought of Fanny married to Mr Crimble, as my
+mother was married to my father. How dark and uncomfortable a creature
+he looked beside Fanny's grace and fairness. And would Mrs Crimble sit
+in an arm-chair and watch Fanny as Fanny had watched me? And should I be
+asked to tea? I was surprised into a shudder. Yet I don't think there
+would have been any _wild_ jealousy in my heart--even if Fanny should
+say, Yes. I could love her better, perhaps, if she would give me a
+little time. And what was really keeping her back? Why did every word
+she said or wrote only hide what she truly meant?
+
+So, far from mocking at the Workbox, I was only helplessly examining its
+tangled skeins. Nor was I criticizing Fanny. To help her--that was my
+one burning desire, to give all I had, take nothing. In a vague, and
+possibly priggish, fashion, I knew, too, that I wanted to help her
+against herself. Her letter (and perhaps the long waiting for it) had
+smoothed out my old excitements. In the midst of these musings memory
+suddenly alighted on the question in the letter which was to be shown to
+Mrs Bowater: about the star-gazing. There was no need for that now. But
+the point was, had not Fanny extorted a promise from me _not_ to tell
+her mother of our midnight adventure? It seemed as though without a
+shred of warning the fair face had drawn close in my consciousness and
+was looking at me low and fixedly, like a snake in a picture. Why, it
+was like cheating at cards! Fascinated and repelled, I sank again into
+reverie.
+
+"No, no, it's cowardly, Fanny," cried aloud a voice in the midst of this
+inward argument, as startling as if a stranger had addressed me. The
+morning was intensely still. Sunbeams out of the sky now silvered the
+clustered chimney shafts of Wanderslore. Where shadow lay, the frost
+gloomed wondrously blue on the dishevelled terraces; where sun, a thin
+smoke of vapour was ascending into the air. The plants and bushes around
+me were knobbed all over with wax-green buds. The enormous trees were
+faintly coloured in their twigs. A sun-beetle staggered, out among the
+pebbles at my feet. I glanced at my hands; they were coral pink with the
+cold. "I love you exceedingly--exceedingly," I repeated, though this
+time I knew not to whom.
+
+
+So saying, and, even as I said it, realizing that the _exceedingly_ was
+not my own, and that I must be intelligent even if I was sentimental, I
+rose from my stone, and turned to go back. I thus faced the worn, small,
+stone house again. Instantly I was all attention. A curious feeling came
+over me, familiar, yet eluding remembrance. It meant that I must be
+vigilant. Cautiously I edged round to the other side of the angled wall,
+where lay the fallen tree. Hard, dark buds showed on its yet living
+fringes. Rather than clamber over its sodden bole, I skirted it until I
+could walk beneath a lank, upthrust bough. At every few steps I shrank
+in and glanced around me, then fixed my eyes--as I had learned to do by
+my stream-side or when star-gazing--on a single object, in order to mark
+what was passing on the outskirts of my field of vision. Nothing. I was
+alone in the garden. A robin, with a light flutter of wing, perched to
+eye me. A string of rooks cawed across the sky. Wanderslore emptily
+stared. If, indeed, I was being watched, then my watcher was no less
+circumspect than I. Soon I was skirting the woods again, and had climbed
+the green knoll by which I had descended into the garden. I wheeled
+sharply, searching the whole course of my retreat. Nothing.
+
+When I opened my door, Mrs Bowater and Henry seemed to be awaiting me.
+Was it my fancy that both of them looked censorious? Absently she stood
+aside to let me pass to my room, then followed me in.
+
+"Such a lovely morning, Mrs Bowater," I called pleasantly down from my
+bedroom, as I stood taking off my cloak in front of the glass, "and not
+a soul to be seen--though" (and my voice was better under command with a
+hairpin between my teeth); "I wouldn't have minded if there had been.
+Not now."
+
+"Ah," came the reply, "but you must be cautious, miss. Boys will be
+boys; and," the sound tailed away, "men, men." I heard the door open and
+close, and paused, with hands still lifted to my hair, prickling cold
+all over at this strange behaviour. What could I have been found out in
+now?
+
+Then a voice sounded seemingly out of nowhere. "What I was going to say,
+miss, is--A letter's come."
+
+With that I drew aside the curtain. The explanation was simple. Having
+let Henry out of my room, in which he was never at ease, Mrs Bowater was
+still standing, like a figure in waxwork, in front of her chiffonier,
+her eyes fixed on the window. They then wheeled on me. "_Mr_ Bowater,"
+she said.
+
+I was conscious of an inexpressible relief and of the profoundest
+interest. I glanced at the great portrait. "Mr Bowater?" I repeated.
+
+"Yes," she replied. "Buenos Ayres. He's broken a leg; and so's fixed
+there for the time being."
+
+"Oh, Mrs Bowater," I said, "I _am_ sorry. And how terribly sudden."
+
+"Believe me, my young friend," she replied musingly, "it's never in my
+experience what's unprepared for that finds us least expecting it. Not
+that it was actually his _leg_ was in my mind."
+
+What was chiefly in _my_ selfish mind was the happy conviction that I
+had better not give her Fanny's letter just then.
+
+"I do hope he's not in great pain," was all I found to say.
+
+She continued to muse at me in her queer, sightless fashion, almost as
+if she were looking for help.
+
+"Oh, dear me, miss," the poor thing cried brokenly, "how should your
+young mind feel what an old woman feels: just grovelling in the past?"
+
+She was gone; and, feeling very uncomfortable in my humiliation, I sat
+down and stared--at "the workbox." Why, why indeed, I thought angrily,
+why should I be responsible? Well, I suppose it's only when the poor
+fish--sturgeon or stickleback--struggles, that he really knows he's in
+the net.
+
+
+
+
+Chapter Nineteen
+
+
+One of the many perplexing problems that now hemmed me in was brushed
+away by Fortune that afternoon. Between gloomy bursts of reflection on
+Fanny's, Mr Crimble's, Mrs Bowater's, and my own account, I had been
+reading Miss Austen; and at about four o'clock was sharing Chapter
+XXIII. with poor Elinor:--
+
+
+     "The youthful infatuation of nineteen would naturally blind her to
+     everything but her beauty and good nature, but the four succeeding
+     years--years which, if rationally spent, give such improvements to
+     the understanding--must have opened her eyes to her defects of
+     Education, which the same period of time, spent on her side in
+     inferior society and more frivolous pursuits...."
+
+
+I say I was reading this passage, and had come to the words--"and more
+frivolous pursuits," when an unusually imperative _rat-tat-tat_ fell
+upon the outer door, and I emerged from my book to discover that an
+impressive white-horsed barouche was drawn up in the street beyond my
+window. The horse tossed its head and chawed its frothy bit; and the
+coachman sat up beside his whip in the sparkling frosty afternoon air.
+My heart gave a thump, and I was still seeking vaguely to connect this
+event with myself or with Mr Bowater in Buenos Ayres, when the door
+opened and a lady entered whose plumed and purple bonnet was as much too
+small for her head as she herself was too large for the room. Yet in
+sheer dimensions this was not a very large lady. It was her "presence"
+that augmented her.
+
+She seemed, too, to be perfectly accustomed to these special
+proportions, and with a rather haughty, "Thank you," to Mrs Bowater,
+winningly announced that she was Lady Pollacke, "a friend, a mutual
+friend, as I understand, of dear Mr Crimble's."
+
+Though a mauvish pink in complexion, Lady Pollacke was so like her own
+white horse that _whinnyingly_ rather than _winningly_ would perhaps
+have been the apter word. I have read somewhere that this human
+resemblance to horses sometimes accompanies unusual intelligence. The
+poet, William Wordsworth, was like a horse; I have seen his portrait.
+And I should like to see Dean Swift's. Whether or not, the unexpected
+arrival of this visitor betrayed me into some little gaucherie, and for
+a moment I still sat on, as she had discovered me, literally "floored"
+by my novel. Then I scrambled with what dignity I could to my feet, and
+chased after my manners.
+
+"And not merely that," continued my visitor, seating herself on a
+horsehair easy-chair, "but among my still older friends is Mr Pellew. So
+you see--you see," she repeated, apparently a little dazzled by the
+light of my window, "that we need no introduction, and that I know
+all--all the circumstances." She lowered a plump, white-kidded hand to
+her lap, as if, providentially, _there_ all the circumstances lay.
+
+Unlike Mr Crimble, Lady Pollacke had not come to make excuses, but to
+bring me an invitation--nothing less than to take tea with her on the
+following Thursday afternoon. But first she hoped--she was sure, in
+fact, and she satisfied herself with a candid gaze round my
+apartment--that I was comfortable with Mrs Bowater; "a thoroughly
+trustworthy and sagacious woman, though, perhaps, a little eccentric in
+address."
+
+I assured her that I was so comfortable that some of my happiest hours
+were spent gossiping with my landlady over my supper.
+
+"Ah, yes," she said, "that class of person tells us such very
+interesting things occasionally, do they not? Yet I am convinced that
+the crying need in these days is for discrimination. Uplift, by all
+means, but we mustn't confuse. What does the old proverb say: _Festina
+lente_: there's still truth in that. Now, had I known your father--but
+there; we must not rake in old ashes. We are clean, I see; and quiet and
+secluded."
+
+Her equine glance made a rapid circuit of the photographs and ornaments
+that diversified the walls, and I simply couldn't help thinking what a
+queer little cage they adorned for so large and handsome a bird, the
+kind of bird, as one might say, that is less weight than magnitude.
+
+I was still casting my eye up and down her silk and laces when she
+abruptly turned upon me with a direct question: "You seldom, I suppose,
+go _out_?"
+
+Possibly if Lady Pollacke had not at this so composedly turned her full
+face on me--with its exceedingly handsome nose--her bonnet might have
+remained only vaguely familiar. Now as I looked at her, it was as if the
+full moon had risen. She was, without the least doubt in the world, the
+lady who had bowed to Mr Crimble from her carriage that fateful
+afternoon. A little countenance is not, perhaps, so tell-tale as a large
+one. (I remember, at any rate, the horrid shock I once experienced when
+my father set me up on his hand one day to show me my own face, many
+times magnified, in his dressing-room shaving-glass.) But my eyes must
+have narrowed a little, for Lady Pollacke's at once seemed to set a
+little harder. And she was still awaiting an answer to her question.
+
+"'Go out'!" I repeated meditatively, "not very much, Lady Pollacke; at
+least not in crowded places. The boys, you know."
+
+"Ah, yes, the boys." It was Mr Crimble's little dilemma all over again:
+Lady Pollacke was evidently wondering whether I knew she knew I knew.
+
+"But still," I continued cheerfully, "it is the looker-on that sees most
+of the game, isn't it?"
+
+Her eyelids descended, though her face was still lifted up. "Well, so
+the proverb says," she agreed, with the utmost cordiality. It was at
+this moment--as I have said--that she invited me to tea.
+
+She would come for me herself, she promised. "Now wouldn't that be very
+nice for us both--quite a little adventure?"
+
+I was not perfectly certain of the niceness, but might not Mr Crimble be
+a fellow-guest; and hadn't I an urgent and anxious mission with him? I
+smiled and murmured; and, as if her life had been a series of such
+little social triumphs, my visitor immediately rose; and, I must
+confess, in so doing seemed rather a waste of space.
+
+"Then _that's_ settled: Thursday afternoon. We must wrap up," she called
+gaily through her descending veil. "This treacherous month! It has come
+in like a lamb, but"--and she tugged at her gloves, still scrutinizing
+me fixedly beneath her eyelids, "but it will probably go out like a
+lion." As if to illustrate this prediction, she swept away to the door,
+leaving Mrs Bowater's little parlour and myself to gather our scattered
+wits together as best we could, while her carriage rolled away.
+
+Alas, though I love talking and watching and exploring, how could I be,
+even at that age, a really social creature? Though Lady Pollacke had
+been politeness itself, the remembrance of her bonnet in less
+favourable surroundings was still in my mind's eye. If anything, then,
+her invitation slightly depressed me. Besides, Thursday never was a
+favourite day of mine. It is said to have only one lucky hour--the last
+before dawn. But this is not tea-time. Worse still, the coming Thursday
+seemed to have sucked all the virtue out of the Wednesday in between. I
+prefer to see the future stretching out boundless and empty in front of
+me--like the savannas of Robinson Crusoe's island. Visitors, and I am
+quite sure _he_ would have agreed with me, are hardly at times to be
+distinguished from visitations.
+
+All this merely means that I was a rather green and backward young
+woman, and, far worse, unashamed of being so. Here was one of the
+greatest ladies of Beechwood lavishing attentions upon me, and all I was
+thinking was how splendid an appearance she would have made a few days
+before if she had borrowed his whip from her coachman and dispersed my
+little mob with it, as had Mrs Stocks with her duster. But _noblesse
+oblige_; Mr Crimble had been compelled to consider my feelings, and no
+doubt Lady Pollacke had been compelled to consider his.
+
+The next day was fine, but I overslept myself and was robbed of my
+morning walk. For many hours I was alone. Mrs Bowater had departed on
+one of her shopping bouts. So, whoever knocked, knocked in vain; and I
+listened to such efforts in secret and unmannerly amusement. I wonder if
+ever ghosts come knocking like that on the doors of the mind; and it
+isn't that one won't hear, but can't. My afternoon was spent in an
+anxious examination of my wardrobe. Four o'clock punctually arrived,
+and, almost as punctually, Lady Pollacke. Soon, under Mrs Bowater's
+contemplative gaze, I was mounted up on a pile of cushions, and we were
+bowling along in most inspiriting fashion through the fresh March air.
+Strangely enough, when during our progress, eyes were now bent in my
+direction, Lady Pollacke seemed copiously to enjoy their interest. This
+was especially the case when she was acquainted with their owners; and
+bowed her bow in return.
+
+"Quite a little reception for you," she beamed at me, after a
+particularly respectable carriage had cast its occupants' scarcely
+modulated glances in my direction. How strange is human character! To an
+intelligent onlooker, my other little reception must have been
+infinitely more inspiring; and yet she had almost wantonly refused to
+take any part in it. Now, supposing I _had_ been Royalty or a corpse run
+over in the street.... But we were come to our journey's end.
+
+Brunswick House was a fine, square, stone-edged edifice, dominating its
+own "grounds." Regiments of crocuses stood with mouths wide open in its
+rich loam. Its gateposts were surmounted by white balls of stone; and
+the gravel was of so lively a colour that it must have been new laid.
+Wherever I looked, my eyes were impressed by the best things in the best
+order. This was as true of Lady Pollacke's clothes, as of her features,
+of her gateposts, and her drawing-room. And the next most important
+thing in the last was its light.
+
+Light simply _poured_ in upon its gilt and brass and pale maroon from
+two high wide windows staring each other down from between their rich
+silk damask curtains. It was like entering an enormous bath, and it made
+me timid. In the midst of a large animal's skin, beneath a fine white
+marble chimney-piece, and under an ormolu clock, the parlour-maid was
+directed to place a cherry-coloured stool for me. Here I seated myself.
+With a fine, encouraging smile my hostess left me for a few minutes to
+myself. Maybe because an embroidered fire-screen that stood near
+reminded me of Miss Fenne, I pulled myself together. "Don't be a ninny,"
+I heard myself murmur. My one hope and desire in this luxurious solitude
+was for the opportunity to deliver my message to Mr Crimble. This was
+not only a visit, it was an adventure. I looked about the flashing room;
+and it rather stared back at me.
+
+The first visitor to appear was none but Miss Bullace, whose recitation
+of "The Lady's 'Yes'" had so peculiarly inspirited Fanny. She sat square
+and dark with her broad lap in front of her, and scrutinized me as if
+_no_ emergency ever daunted her. And Lady Pollacke recounted the
+complexity of ties that had brought us together. Miss Bullace, alas,
+knew neither Mr Ambrose Pellew, nor my godmother, nor even my
+godmother's sister, Augusta Fenne. Indeed I seemed to have no claim at
+all on her recognition until she inquired whether it was not Augusta
+Fenne's cousin, Dr Julius Fenne, who had died suddenly while on a visit
+to the Bermudas. Apparently it was. We all at once fell into better
+spirits, which were still more refreshed when Lady Pollacke remarked
+that Augusta had also "gone off like that," and that Fennes were a
+doomed family.
+
+But merely to smile and smile is not to partake; so I ventured to
+suggest that to judge from my last letter from my godmother she, at any
+rate, was in her usual health; and I added, rather more cheerfully
+perhaps than the fact warranted, that my family seemed to be doomed too,
+since, so far as I was aware, I myself was the last of it left alive.
+
+At this a sudden gush of shame welled up in me at the thought that
+through all my troubles I had never once remembered the kindnesses of my
+step-grandfather; that he, too, might be dead. I was so rapt away by the
+thought that I caught only the last three words of Miss Bullace's
+murmured aside to Lady Pollacke, _viz._, "not blush unseen."
+
+Lady Pollacke raised her eyebrows and nodded vigorously; and then to my
+joy Mr Crimble and a venerable old lady with silver curls clustering out
+of her bonnet were shown into the room. He looked pale and absent as he
+bent himself down to take my hand. It was almost as if in secret
+collusion we had breathed the word Fanny together. Mrs Crimble was
+supplied with a tea-cup, and her front teeth were soon unusually busy
+with a slice of thin bread and butter. Eating or drinking, her intense
+old eyes dwelt distantly but assiduously on my small shape; and she at
+last entered into a long story of how, as a girl, she had been taken to
+a circus--a circus: and there had seen.... But _what_ she had seen Mr
+Crimble refused to let her divulge. He jerked forward so hastily that
+his fragment of toasted scone rolled off his plate into the wild beast's
+skin, and while, with some little difficulty, he was retrieving it, he
+assured us that his mother's memory was little short of miraculous, and
+particularly in relation to the past.
+
+"I have noticed," he remarked, in what I thought a rather hollow voice,
+"that the more advanced in years we--er--happily become, the more
+closely we return to childhood."
+
+"Senile...." I began timidly, remembering Dr Phelps's phrase.
+
+But Mr Crimble hastened on. "Why, mother," he appealed to her, with an
+indulgent laugh, "I suppose to you I am still nothing but a small boy
+about that height?" He stretched out a ringless left hand about
+twenty-four inches above the rose-patterned carpet.
+
+The old lady was not to be so easily smoothed over. "You interrupted me,
+Harold," she retorted, with some little show of indignation, "in what I
+was telling Lady Pollacke. Even a child of that size would have been a
+perfect monstrosity."
+
+A lightning grimace swept over Miss Bullace's square features.
+
+"Ah, ah, ah!" laughed Mr Crimble, "I am rebuked, I am in the corner!
+Another scone, Lady Pollacke?" Mrs Crimble was a beautiful old lady; but
+it was with a rather unfriendly and feline eye that she continued to
+regard me; and I wondered earnestly if Fanny had ever noticed this
+characteristic.
+
+"The fact of the matter is," said Lady Pollacke, with conviction, "our
+memories _rust_ for want of exercise. Where, physically speaking, would
+you be, Mr Crimble, if you hadn't the parish to tramp over? Precisely
+the same with the mind. Every day I make a personal effort to commit
+some salient fact to memory--such a fact, for a _trivial_ example, as
+the date of the Norman Conquest. The consequence is, my husband tells
+me, I am a veritable encyclopaedia. My father took after me. Alexander
+the Great, I have read somewhere, could address by name--though one may
+assume _not_ Christian name--every soldier in his army. Thomas Babington
+Macaulay, a great genius, poor man, knew by heart every book he had ever
+read. A veritable _mine_ of memory. On the other hand, I once had a
+parlour-maid, Sarah Jakes, who couldn't remember even the simplest of
+her duties, and if it hadn't been for my constant supervision would have
+given us port with the soup."
+
+"Perfectly, perfectly true," assented Miss Bullace. "Now mine is a
+verbal memory. My mind is a positive magnet for _words_. Method, of
+course, is everything. I weld. Let us say that a line of a poem
+terminates with the word _bower_, and the next line commences with
+_she_, I commit these to memory as one word--_Bowershee_--and so master
+the sequence. My old friend, Lady Bovill Porter--we were
+schoolfellows--recommended this method. It was Edmund Kean's, I fancy,
+or some other well-known actor's. How else indeed, could a great actor
+_realize_ what he was doing? Word-perfect, you see, he is free."
+
+"Exactly, exactly," sagely nodded Mr Crimble, but with a countenance so
+colourless and sad that it called back to my remembrance the picture of
+a martyr--of St Sebastian, I think--that used to hang up in my mother's
+room.
+
+"And you?"--I discovered Lady Pollacke was rather shrilly inquiring of
+me. "Is yours a verbal memory like Miss Bullace's; or are you in my
+camp?"
+
+"Ah, there," cried Mr Crimble, tilting back his chair in sudden
+enthusiasm. "Miss M. positively puts me to shame. And poetry, Miss
+Bullace; even your wonderful repertory!"
+
+"You mean Miss M. _recites_?" inquired Miss Bullace, leaning forward
+over her lap. "But how entrancing! It is we, then, who are birds of a
+feather. And how I should adore to hear a fellow-enthusiast. Now, won't
+you, Lady Pollacke, join your entreaties to mine? Just a _stanza_ or
+two!"
+
+A chill crept through my bones. I had accepted Lady Pollacke's
+invitation, thinking my mere presence would be entertainment enough, and
+because I knew it was important to see life, and immensely important to
+see Mr Crimble. In actual fact it seemed I had hopped for a moment not
+_out_ of my cage, but merely, as Fanny had said, into another
+compartment of it.
+
+"But Mr Crimble and I were only talking," I managed to utter.
+
+"Oh, now, but do! Delicious!" pleaded a trio of voices.
+
+Their faces had suddenly become a little strained and unnatural. The
+threat of further persuasion lifted me almost automatically to my feet.
+With hunted eyes fixed at last on a small marble bust with stooping head
+and winged brow that stood on a narrow table under the window, I recited
+the first thing that sprang to remembrance--an old poem my mother had
+taught me, _Tom o' Bedlam_.
+
+
+     "The moon's my constant mistress,
+       And the lovely owl my marrow;
+         The flaming drake,
+         And the night-crow, make
+       Me music to my sorrow.
+
+     I know more than Apollo;
+       For oft when he lies sleeping,
+         I behold the stars
+         At mortal wars,
+       And the rounded welkin weeping.
+
+     The moon embraces her shepherd,
+       And the Queen of Love her warrior;
+         While the first does horn
+         The stars of the morn,
+       And the next the heavenly farrier...."
+
+
+Throughout these first three stanzas all went well. So rapt was my
+audience that I seemed to be breaking the silence of the seas beyond
+their furthest Hebrides. But at the first line of the fourth--at "With a
+heart"--my glance unfortunately wandered off from the unheeding face of
+the image and swam through the air, to be caught, as it were, like fly
+by spider, by Miss Bullace's dark, fixed gaze, that lay on me from under
+her flat hat.
+
+"'With a heart,'" I began; and failed. Some ghost within had risen in
+rebellion, sealed my tongue. It seemed to my irrational heart that I
+had--how shall I say it?--betrayed my "stars," betrayed Fanny, that she
+and they and I could never be of the same far, quiet company again. So
+the "furious fancies" were never shared. The blood ran out of my cheek;
+I stuck fast; and shook my head.
+
+At which quite a little tempest of applause spent itself against the
+walls of Lady Pollacke's drawing-room, an applause reinforced by that of
+a little round old gentleman, who, unnoticed, had entered the room by a
+farther door, and was now advancing to greet his guest. He was promptly
+presented to me on the beast-skin, and with the gentlest courtesy begged
+me to continue.
+
+"'With a heart,' now; 'with a heart ...'" he prompted me, "a most
+important organ, though less in use nowadays than when _I_ was a boy."
+
+But it was in vain. Even if he had asked me only to whisper the rest of
+the poem into his long, pink ear, for his sake alone, I could not have
+done so. Moreover, Mr Crimble was still nodding his head at his mother
+in confirmation of his applause; and Miss Bullace was assuring me that
+mine was a poem entirely unknown to her, that, "with a few little
+_excisions_," it should be instantly enshrined in her repertory--"though
+perhaps a little bizarre!" and that if I made trial of Lady Bovill
+Porter's _Bowershee_ method, my memory would never again play me false.
+
+"The enunciation--am I not right, Sir Walter?--as distinct from the
+elocution--was flawless. And really, quite remarkable vocal power!"
+
+Amidst these smiles and delights, and what with the brassy heat of the
+fire and the scent of the skin, I thought I should presently faint, and
+caught, as if at a straw, at the bust in the window.
+
+"How lovely!" I cried, with pointing finger....
+
+At that, silence fell, but only for a moment. Lady Pollacke managed to
+follow the unexpected allusion, and led me off for a closer inspection.
+In the hushed course of our progress thither I caught out of the
+distance two quavering words uttered as if in expostulation, "apparent
+intelligence." It was Mrs Crimble addressing Sir Walter Pollacke.
+
+"Classical, you know," Lady Pollacke was sonorously informing me, as we
+stood together before the marble head. "Charming pose, don't you think?
+Though, as we see, only a fragment--one of Sir Walter's little hobbies."
+
+I looked up at the serene, winged, sightless face, and a whisper sounded
+on and on in my mind in its mute presence, "I know more than Apollo; I
+know more than Apollo." How strange that this mere deaf-and-dumbness
+should seem more real, more human even, than anything or any one else in
+Lady Pollacke's elegant drawing-room. But self-possession was creeping
+back. "Who," I asked, "_is_ he? And who sculped him?"
+
+"Scalped him?" cried Lady Pollacke, poring down on me in dismay.
+
+"Cut him out?"
+
+"Ah, my dear young lady," said a quiet voice, "that I cannot tell you.
+It is the head of Hypnos, Sleep, you know, the son of Night and brother
+of Death. One wing, as you see, has been broken away in preparation for
+this more active age, and yet ... only a replica, of course"; the voice
+trembled into richness, "but an exceedingly pleasant example. It gives
+me rare pleasure, rare pleasure," he stood softly rocking, hands under
+coat-tails, eyes drinking me in, "to--to have your companionship."
+
+What pleasure his words gave _me_, I could not--can never--express. Then
+and there I was his slave for ever.
+
+"Walter," murmured Lady Pollacke, as if fondly, smiling down on the
+rotund old gentleman, "you are a positive peacock over your little toys;
+is he not, Mr Crimble? Did you ever hear of a _woman_ wasting her
+affections on the inanimate? Even a doll, I am told, is an infant in
+disguise."
+
+But Mr Crimble had approached us not to discuss infants or woman, but
+to tell Lady Pollacke that her carriage was awaiting me.
+
+"Then pity 'tis, 'tis true," cried she, as if in Miss Bullace's words.
+"But _please_, Miss M., it must be the briefest of adieus. There are so
+many of my friends who would enjoy your company--and those delightful
+recitations. Walter, will you see that everything's
+quite--er--convenient?"
+
+I am sure Lady Pollacke's was a flawless _savoir faire_, yet, when I
+held out my hand in farewell, her cheek crimsoned, it seemed, from some
+other cause than stooping. The crucial moment had arrived. If one
+private word was to be mine with Mr Crimble, it must be now or never. To
+my relief both gentlemen accompanied me out of the room, addressing
+their steps to mine. Urgency gave me initiative. I came to a standstill
+on the tesselated marble of the hall, and this time proffered my hand to
+Sir Walter. He stooped himself double over it; and I tried in vain to
+dismiss from remembrance a favourite reference of Pollie's to the
+guinea-pig held up by its tail.
+
+I wonder now what Sir W. would have said of _me_ in _his_ autobiography:
+"And _there_ stood a flaxen spelican in the midst of the hearthrug;
+blushing, poor tiny thing, over her little piece like some little
+bread-and-butter miss fresh from school." Something to that effect? I
+wonder still more who taught him so lovable a skill in handling that
+spelican?
+
+"There; good-bye," said he, "and the blessing, my dear young lady, of a
+fellow fanatic."
+
+He turned about and ascended the staircase. Except for the parlour-maid
+who was awaiting me in the porch, Mr Crimble and I were alone.
+
+
+
+
+Chapter Twenty
+
+
+"Mr Crimble," I whispered, "I have a message."
+
+A tense excitement seized him. His face turned a dusky yellow. How
+curious it is to see others as they must sometimes see ourselves. Should
+_I_ have gasped like that, if Mr Crimble had been Fanny's Mercury?
+
+"A letter from Miss Bowater," I whispered, "and I am to say," the
+cadaverous face was close above me, its sombre melting eyes almost
+bulging behind their glasses, "I am to say that she is giving yours
+'_her earnest attention, let alone her prayers_.'"
+
+I remember once, when Adam Waggett as a noisy little boy was playing in
+the garden at home, the string of his toy bow suddenly snapped: Mr
+Crimble drew back as straight and as swiftly as that. His eyes rained
+unanswerable questions. But the parlourmaid had turned to meet me, and
+the next moment she and I were side by side in Lady Pollacke's springy
+carriage _en route_ for my lodgings. I had given my message, but never
+for an instant had I anticipated it would have so overwhelming an
+effect.
+
+There must have been something inebriating in Lady Pollacke's tea. My
+mind was still simmering with excitement. And yet, during the whole of
+that journey, I spent not a moment on Mr Crimble's or Fanny's affairs,
+or even on Brunswick House, but on the dreadful problem whether or not I
+ought to "tip" the parlourmaid, and if so, with how much. Where had I
+picked this enigma up? Possibly from some chance reference of my
+father's. It made me absent and harassed. I saw not a face or a flower;
+and even when the parlourmaid was actually waiting at my request in Mrs
+Bowater's passage, I stood over my money-chest, still incapable of
+coming to a decision.
+
+Instinct prevailed. Just as I could not bring myself to complete _Tom o'
+Bedlam_ with Miss Bullace looking out of her eyes at me, so I could not
+bring myself to offer money to Lady Pollacke's nice prim parlourmaid.
+Instead I hastily scrabbled up in tissue paper a large flat brooch--a
+bloodstone set in pinchbeck--a thing of no intrinsic value, alas, but
+precious to me because it had been the gift of an old servant of my
+mother's. I hastened out and lifting it over my head, pushed it into her
+hand.
+
+Dear me, how ashamed of this impulsive action I felt when I had regained
+my solitude. Should I not now be the jest of the Pollacke kitchen and
+drawing-room alike?--for even in my anxiety to attain Mr Crimble's
+private ear, I had half-consciously noticed what a cascade of talk had
+gushed forth when Mr Crimble had closed the door of the latter behind
+him.
+
+That evening I shared with Mrs Bowater my experiences at Brunswick
+House. So absorbed was I in my own affairs that I deliberately evaded
+any reference to hers. Yet her pallid face, seemingly an inch longer and
+many shades more austere these last two days, touched my heart.
+
+"You won't think," I pleaded at last, "that I don't infinitely prefer
+being here, with you? Isn't it, Mrs Bowater, that you and I haven't
+quite so many things to _pretend_ about? It is easy thinking of others
+when there are only one or two of them. But whole drawing-roomsful!
+While here; well, there is only just you and me."
+
+"Why, miss," she replied, "as for pretending, the world's full of
+shadows, though substantial enough when it comes to close quarters. If
+we were all to look at things just bare in a manner of speaking, it
+would have to be the Garden of Eden over again. It can't be done. And
+it's just that that what's called the gentry know so well. We must make
+the best use of the mess we can."
+
+I was tired. The thin, sweet air of spring, wafted in at my window after
+the precocious heat of the day, breathed a faint, reviving fragrance. A
+curious excitement was in me. Yet her words, or perhaps the tone of her
+voice, coloured my fancy with vague forebodings. I pushed aside my
+supper, slipped off my fine visiting clothes, and put on my
+dressing-gown. With lights extinguished, I drew the blind, and strove
+for a while to puzzle out life's riddle for myself. Not for the first or
+the last time did wandering wits cheat me of the goal, for presently in
+the quiet out of my thoughts, stole into my imagination the vision of
+that dreaming head my eyes had sheltered on.
+
+"Hypnos," I sighed the word; and--another face, Fanny's, seemed to melt
+into and mingle with the visionary features. Why, why, was my desperate
+thought, why needed _she_ allow the world to come to such close
+quarters? Why, with so many plausible reasons given in her letter for
+keeping poor Mr Crimble waiting, had she withheld the one that counted
+for most? And what was it? I knew in my heart that _that_ could not be
+"making the best use of the mess." Surely, if one just told only the
+truth, there wasn't anything else to tell. It had taken me some time to
+learn this lesson.
+
+A low, rumbling voice shook up from the kitchen. Mrs Bowater was talking
+to herself. Dejection drew over me again at the thought of the deceit I
+was in, and I looked at my love for Fanny as I suppose Abraham at the
+altar of stones looked at his son Isaac. Then suddenly a thought far
+more matter-of-fact chilled through my mind. I saw again Mr Crimble
+huddling down towards me in that echoing hall, heard my voice delivering
+Fanny's message, and realized that half of what I had said had been
+written in mockery. It had been intended for my eye only--"_Let alone my
+prayers_." In the solitude of the darkness the words had a sound far
+more sinister than even Fanny can have intended.
+
+Mr Crimble, however, had accepted them apparently in good faith--to
+judge at least from the letter which reached me the following morning:--
+
+
+     "DEAR MISS M.,--Thank you. I write with a mind so overburdened that
+     words fail me. But I realize that Miss Bowater has no truer friend
+     than yourself, and shall be frank. After that _terrible_ morning
+     you might well have refused to help me. I cannot believe that you
+     will--for her sake. This long concealment, believe me, is not of my
+     own seeking. It cannot, it must not, continue, a moment beyond the
+     necessity. For weeks, nay, months, I have been tortured with doubts
+     and misgivings. Her pride, her impenetrable heedlessness; oh,
+     indeed, I realize the difficulties of her situation. I dare not
+     speak till she gives consent. Yet silence puts me in a false
+     position, and tongues, as perhaps even you may be aware, begin to
+     wag. Nor is this my first attempt, and--to be more frank than I
+     feel is discreet--there is my mother (quite apart from _hers_) now,
+     alas, aged and more dependent on my affection and care than ever.
+     To make a change now--the talk, the absence of Christian _charity_,
+     my own temperament and calling! I pray for counsel to guide my
+     stumbling bark on this sea of _darkest_ tempest.
+
+     "Can F. decide that her affections are such as could justify her
+     in committing her future to me? Am I justified in asking her? You,
+     too, must have many anxieties--anxieties perhaps unguessed at by
+     those of coarser fibre. And though I cannot venture to ask your
+     confidences, I do ask for your feminine intuition--even though this
+     may seem an _intrusion_ after my sad discomfiture the other day.
+     And yet, I assure you, it was not corporeal fear--are not we
+     priests the police of the City Beautiful? Might I not have
+     succeeded merely in making us _both_ ridiculous? But that is past,
+     and the dead past must bury its dead: there is no gentler sexton.
+
+     "Need I say that this letter is not the fruit of any mere
+     _impulse_. The thought, the very image of her never leaves my
+     consciousness night or day; and I get no rest. I am almost afraid
+     at the power she has of imprinting herself on the mind. I implore
+     you to be discreet, without needless deception. I will wait
+     patiently. My last desire is to _hasten_ an answer--unless, dear
+     Miss M., one in the affirmative. And would it be possible--indeed
+     the chief purpose of this letter was to make this small
+     request--would it be possible to give me one hour--no tea--this
+     afternoon? There was a phrase in your whispered message--probably
+     because of the peculiar acoustic properties of Brunswick
+     House--that was but half-caught. We must not risk the faintest
+     shadow of misunderstanding.
+
+     "Believe me, yours most gratefully, though 'perplexed in the
+     extreme,'
+
+     "HAROLD CRIMBLE.
+
+     "PS.--I feel at times that it is incumbent on one to burn one's
+     boats; even though out of sight the further shore.
+
+     "And the letter: would it be even possible to share a glance at
+     _that_?"
+
+
+My old habit of hunting in the crannies of what I read had ample
+opportunity here. Two things stood out in my mind: a kind of
+astonishment at Mr Crimble's "stumbling bark" which he was asking _me_
+to help to steer, and inexpressible relief that Fanny's letter was
+buried beyond hope of recovery before he could call that afternoon. The
+more I pitied and understood his state of mind, the more helpless and
+anxious I felt. Then, in my foolish fashion, I began again picturing in
+fancy the ceremony that would bring Mr Crimble and my landlady into so
+close a relationship. Why did he fear the wagging of tongues so much? I
+didn't. Would Miss Bullace be a bridesmaid? Would I? I searched in my
+drawer and read over the "Form of Solemnization of Matrimony." I came to
+"the dreadful day of judgment," and to "serve" and "obey," and
+shivered. I was not sure that I cared for the way human beings had
+managed these things. But at least, bridesmaids _said_ nothing, and if
+I----
+
+While I was thus engaged Mrs Bowater entered the room. I smuggled my
+prayer-book aside and gave her Fanny's letter. She was always a woman of
+few words. She folded it reflectively; took off her spectacles, replaced
+them in their leather case, and that in her pocket.
+
+"'Soap, handkerchiefs, stockings,'" she mused, "though why in the world
+she didn't _say_ 'silk' is merely Fanny's way. And I am sure, miss," she
+added, "she must have had one peculiar moment when the thought occurred
+to her of the bolt."
+
+"But, Mrs Bowater," I cried in snake-like accents, "you _said_ you were
+'soliciting no divulgements.'"
+
+Mrs Bowater's mouth opened in silent laughter. "Between you----" she
+began, and broke off. "Gracious goodness, but here's that young man, Mr
+Crimble, calling again."
+
+
+Mr Crimble drank tea with me, though he ate nothing. And now, his
+darkest tempest being long since stilled, I completely absolve myself
+for amending the message which Lady Pollacke's tesselated hall had
+mercifully left obscure. He sat there, almost like a goldfish--though
+black in effect beyond description--gaping for the crumb that never
+comes. "She bade me," I muttered my falsehood, "she bade me say secretly
+that she has had your letter, that she is giving it her earnest
+attention, her earnest attention, _alone, and in her prayers_."
+
+The dark liquid pupils appeared for one sheer instant to rotate, then he
+turned away, and, as if quite helplessly, stifled an unsheltered yawn.
+
+"'Alone,'" he cried desperately. "I see myself, I see myself in her
+young imagination!"
+
+I think he guessed that my words were false, that his ear had not been
+as treacherous as all that. Whether or not, no human utterance have I
+ever heard so humble, tragic, final. It knelled in my ear like the
+surrender of all hope. And yet it brought me, personally, some
+enlightenment. It was with Mr Crimble's eyes that I now scanned not only
+his phantom presence in Fanny's imagination, but my own, standing beside
+him--a "knick-knack" figure of fun, pygmied beneath the flappets of his
+clerical coat, like a sun-beetle by a rook. The spectacle strengthened
+me without much affecting Fanny. She was no longer the absolute sultana
+of my being. I could _think_ now, as well as adore.
+
+How strange it is that when our minds are needled to a sharp focus mere
+"things" swarm so close. There was not a single ornament or book or
+fading photograph in Mrs Bowater's parlour that in this queer privacy
+did not mutely seem to cry, "Yes, here am I. This is how things go."
+
+I leant forward and looked at him. "We mustn't care what she sees, what
+she thinks, if only we can go on loving her."
+
+"'Can, can'?" echoed Mr Crimble, "I have prayed on my knees _not_ to."
+
+This was a sharp ray on my thoughts of love. "But why?" I said. "Even
+when I was a child, I knew by my mother's face that I must go on, and
+should go on, loving her, Mr Crimble, whether she loved me or not. One
+can't make a bad mistake in giving, can one? And yet--well, you must
+remember that I cannot but have been a--a disappointment; that as long
+as I live I can't expect any great affection, any disproportionate one,
+I mean."
+
+"But, but," he stumbled on, "a daughter's affection--it's different. I
+mustn't brood on my trouble. It unhinges me. Why, the clock stops. But
+nevertheless may God bless you for that."
+
+"But surely," I persisted, smiling as cheerfully as I could, "_Nil
+desperandum_, Mr Crimble. And you know what they say about fish in the
+sea."
+
+His eye rolled round on me as if a serpent had spoken. "I am sorry, I am
+sorry," he repeated rapidly, in the same low, unemphatic undertone as if
+to himself. "I must just wait. You have never seen a sheep--a bullock,
+shall we call him?--being driven to the slaughter-house. On, on--from
+despair to despair. That's my position." His face was emptied of
+expression, his eyes fixed.
+
+These words, his air, his look, this awful private thing--I can't
+say--it shocked and frightened me beyond words. But I answered him
+steadily none the less. "Listen, Mr Crimble," I said, "look at _me_,
+here, what I am. I have had my desperate moments too--more alone in the
+world than you can ever be! And I swear before God that I will never,
+never be _not_ myself." I wonder what the listener thought of this
+little challenge, not perhaps what Mr Crimble did.
+
+"Well," he replied, with sudden calm, "that's the courage of the
+martyrs, and not all of them perhaps have been Christians, if history is
+to be credited. Yes, and in sober truth, I assure you, _you_, that I
+would go to the stake for--for Miss Bowater."
+
+He rose, and in that instant of dignity I foresaw what was never to
+be--lawn sleeves encasing those loose, black arms. He had somehow wafted
+me back to my Confirmation.
+
+"And the letter? I have no wish to intrude. But her actual words. I
+mayn't see _that_?"
+
+"You will please forgive me," I entreated helplessly, "it is buried;
+because, you see, Fanny--you see, Mrs Bowater----"
+
+"Ah," he said. "It is this deception which dismays, scandalizes me most.
+But you will keep me informed?"
+
+He seized his soft round hat, and it was on this cold word we parted. I
+stood by the window, with hand stretched out to summon him back. But no
+word of comfort or hope came to my aid, and I watched him out of sight.
+
+
+
+
+Chapter Twenty-One
+
+
+That night I wrote to Fanny, copying out my letter from the scrawling
+draft from which I am copying it now:--
+
+
+     "DEAR FANNY,--I have given Mr Crimble your message; first, exactly
+     in your own words, though he did not quite hear them, and then,
+     leaving out a little. You may be angry at what I am going to
+     say--but I am quite sure you ought to answer him at _once_. Fanny,
+     he's _dreadfully_ fond of you. I never even dreamed people were
+     like that--in such torture for what can't be, unless you mean you
+     _do_ care, but are too proud to tell him so. If he knows you have
+     no heart for him, he may soon be better. This sounds hateful. But I
+     am not such a pin in a pincushion as not to know that even the
+     greatest sorrows and disappointments wear out. Why, isn't that
+     beech-tree we sat under a kind of cannibal of its own dead leaves?
+
+     "Your private letter is quite safe; though I prefer not to burn
+     it--indeed, _cannot_ burn it. You know how I have longed for it.
+     But please, if possible, don't send me two in future. It doesn't
+     seem fair; and your mother knew already about our star-gazing. You
+     see, how else could the door have been bolted!! But it's best to
+     have been found out--next, I mean, to telling oneself.
+
+     "What day are you coming home? I look at it, as if it were a
+     lighthouse--even though it is out of sight. Shall we go on with
+     _Wuthering Heights_ when you do come? I saw the 'dazzling'
+     moon--but there, Fanny, what I want most to beg of you is to write
+     to Mr. Crimble--all that you feel, even if not all that you think.
+     No, perhaps I mean the reverse. He must have been wondering about
+     you long before I began to. And there it was, all sunken in; no one
+     could have guessed his longing by looking at him. I am afraid it
+     must affect his health.
+
+     "And now good-bye. I have made a vow to myself not to think into
+     things too much. Your affectionate friend (as much of her as there
+     is)--
+
+     "MIDGETINA.
+
+     "PS.--Please tell me the _day_ you are coming; and that shall be my
+     birthday."
+
+
+Fanny was prompt in reply:--
+
+
+     "DEAR MIDGETINA,--It's a strange fact, but while, to judge from
+     your letter, _you_ seem to be growing smaller, I (in spite of Miss
+     Stebbings's water porridge) am growing fatter. Now, which is the
+     tragedy? I _may_ come home on the 30th. If so, kill the fatted
+     calf; I will supply the birthday-cake. How foolish of you to keep
+     letters. I never do, lest I should remember the answers. Anyhow, I
+     shall not write again. But if, by any chance, Mr Crimble should
+     make another call, will you explain that my chief motive in not
+     singing at the concert was because I should have been a second
+     mezzo-soprano. One of two in one concert _must_ be superfluous.
+     Perhaps I did not explain this clearly; nor did I say how charming
+     I thought my double was.
+
+     "I am tired--of overwork. I have finished _Wuthering Heights_. It
+     is a mad, untrue book. The world is not like Emily Bronte's
+     conception of it. It is neither dream nor nightmare, Midgetina, but
+     wide, wide awake. And I am convinced that the poets are only
+     cherubs with sugar-sticks to their little rosebud mouths. I
+     abominate whitewash. As for 'putting people out of their misery,'
+     and cannibal beech-trees: no, fretful midge! If you could see me
+     sitting here looking down on rows and rows of vacant and hostile
+     faces--though one or two are infatuated enough--you would realize
+     that such a practice would lead me into miscellaneous infanticide.
+
+     "Personally, I never did think into things too painfully; though as
+     regards 'telling,' the reverse is _certainly_ the wiser course. So
+     you will forgive so short, and perhaps none too sweet, a letter
+     from your affec.--F."
+
+
+Enclosed with this was a narrow slip of paper:--
+
+
+     "I shall _not_ write to you know who. Think, if you like, but don't
+     _feel_ like a microscope. He is only in love. And however
+     punctilious your own practice may be, pray, Miss M., do not
+     preach--at any rate to your affecte. but unregenerate friend.--F."
+
+
+I believe I drafted and destroyed three answers to this letter. It broke
+down my defences far more easily than had the errand boys. It shamed me
+for a prig, a false friend, a sentimentalist. And the "fretful midge"
+rankled like salt in a wounded heart. Yet Fanny was faithless even to
+her postscript. A sheaf of narcissuses hooded in blue tissue paper was
+left at the house a day or two afterwards. It was accompanied by Mr
+Crimble's card in a little envelope tied in with the stalks:--
+
+
+     "I am given a ray of hope."
+
+
+Mrs Bowater had laid this offering on my table with a peculiar grimace,
+whether scornful or humorous, it was impossible to detect. "From Mr
+Crimble, miss. Why, one might think he had two irons in the fire!"
+
+I sat gazing at this thank-offering long after she had gone--the waxy
+wings, the crimson-rimmed corona, the pale-green cluster of pistil and
+stamen. The heavy perfume stole over my senses, bringing only weariness
+and self-distaste to my mind. Fly that I was, caught in a web--once more
+I began a letter to Fanny, imploring her to write to her mother, to tell
+her everything. But that letter, too, was torn up into tiny pieces and
+burnt in the fire.
+
+Next morning, heavily laden with my parasol, a biscuit or two in my bag,
+my _Sense and Sensibility_ and a rug in my arms, I set off very early
+for Wanderslore, having arranged with Mrs Bowater over night that she
+should meet me under my beech at a quarter to one.
+
+Under the flat, bud-pointed branches, I pressed on between clusters of
+primrose, celandine, and wild wood anemone, breathing in the earthy
+freshness of grass and moss. And presently I came out between the stones
+and jutting roots in sight of the vacant windows. I stood for a moment
+confronting their black regard, then descended the knoll and was soon
+making myself comfortable beside the garden house. But first I managed
+to clamber up on a fragment of the fallen masonry and peep in at its low
+windows. A few dead, last-year's flies lay dry on their backs; dusty,
+derelict spider-webs; a litter of straw, and a few potsherds--the place
+was empty. But it was mine, and the very remembrance of which it
+whispered to me--the picture of my poor father's bedroom that night of
+the storm--only increased my sense of possession.
+
+What was wrong with me just then, what I had sallied out in hope to be
+delivered from, was the unhappy conviction that my life was worthless,
+and I of no use in the world. I had taught myself to make knots in
+strings, but actual experience seemed to have proved that most human
+fumblings resulted only in "grannies" and not in the true lover's
+variety. They secured nothing, only tangled and jammed. I was young
+then, and yet as heavily burdened with other people's responsibilities
+as was poor Christian with the bundle of his sins. But my bundle, too,
+in that lovely, desolate loneliness at last fell off my shoulders.
+
+Could I not still be loyal in heart and mind to Fanny, even though now I
+knew how little she cared whether I was loyal or not? I even climbed up
+behind Mr Crimble's thick spectacles and looked down again at myself
+from that point of vantage. Whether or not I was his affair, I could try
+to make him mine--perhaps even persuade Fanny to love him.
+
+Oh, dear; was not every singing bird in that wilderness, every unfolding
+flower and sunlit March leaf welcoming the spirit within me to their
+quiet habitation? As if in response to this naive thought, welled up in
+my memory the two last stanzas of my _Tom o' Bedlam_, which, either for
+pride or shame, had stuck in my throat on the skin mat in Lady
+Pollacke's sky-lit drawing-room:----
+
+
+     "With a heart of furious fancies,
+       Whereof I am commander:
+         With a burning spear,
+         And a horse of air,
+       To the wilderness I wander.
+
+     With a knight of ghosts and shadows,
+       I summoned am to tourney:
+         Ten leagues beyond
+         The wide world's end;
+       Methinks it is no journey."
+
+
+Parasol for spear, the youngest Miss Shanks's pony for horse of air,
+there was I (even though common-sized boots might reckon it a mere mile
+or so), ten leagues at least beyond--Mrs Bowater's. Nor, like her
+husband, had I broken my leg; nor had Fanny broken my heart. All would
+come right again. Why, what a waste of Fanny it would be to make her Mrs
+Crimble. My bishop, according to Miss Fenne, had had quite a homely
+helpmate, "little short of a frump, Caroline, as I remember her thirty
+years ago." Perhaps if I left off my fine colours and bought a nice
+brown stuff dress and a bonnet, might not Mr Crimble change his mind...?
+I have noticed that as soon as I begin to laugh at myself, the whole
+world seems to smile in return.
+
+Absurd, contrary, volatile creature that I was--a kind of thankfulness
+spread over my mind. I turned on to my knees where I sat and repeated
+the prayers which in my haste to be off I had neglected before coming
+out. And thus kneeling, I opened my eyes on the garden again, bathed
+delicately in the eastern sunshine. There was my old friend, Mr Clodd's
+_Nature_, pranking herself under the nimble fingers of spring; and in
+her sight as well as in the sight of my godmother's God, and Mr
+Crimble's Almighty, and, possibly, of Dr Phelps's Norm, were not, in
+deed and in truth, all men equal? How mysterious and how entrancing! If
+"sight," then _eyes_: but whose? where? I gazed round me dazzledly, and
+if wings had been mine, would have darted through the thin, blue-green
+veil and been out into the morning.
+
+Poor she-knight! romantical Miss Midge! she had no desire to hunt Big
+Game, or turn steeplejack; her fancies were not dangerously "furious";
+but, as she knelt there, environed about by that untended garden, and
+not so ridiculously pygmy either, even in the ladder of the world's
+proportion--saw-edged blade of grass, gold-cupped moss, starry
+stonecrop, green musky moschatel, close-packed pebble, wax-winged
+fly--well, I know not how to complete the sentence except by remarking
+that I am exceedingly glad I began to write my Life.
+
+I realized too that it is less flattering to compare oneself with the
+very little things of the world than with the great. Given time, I might
+scale an Alp; I could only _kill_ an ant. Besides, I am beginning to
+think that one of the pleasantest ways of living is in one's memory. How
+much less afflicting at times would my present have been if I had had
+the foresight to remind myself how beguiling it would appear as the
+past. Even my old sharpest sorrows have now hushed themselves to sleep,
+and those for whom I have sorrowed are as quiet.
+
+Having come to a pause in my reflections, I opened my _Sense and
+Sensibility_ at Chapter XXXV. Yet attend to Miss Austen I could not. She
+is one of those compact and cautious writers that will not feed a
+wandering mind; and at last, after three times re-reading the same
+paragraph, an uneasy conviction began to steal over me. There was no
+doubt now in my mind. I was being watched. Softly, stealthily, I raised
+my eyes from my book and with not the least motion of head or body,
+glanced around me. Whereupon, as if it had been playing sentinel out of
+the thicket near at hand, a blackbird suddenly jangled its challenge,
+and with warning cries fled away on its wings towards the house.
+
+
+
+
+Chapter Twenty-Two
+
+
+Then instantly I discovered the cause of the bird's alarm. At first I
+fancied that this strange figure was at some little distance. Then I
+realized that his stature had misled me, and that he could not be more
+than twenty or thirty yards away. Standing there, with fixed, white face
+and black hair, under a flowering blackthorn, he remained as motionless
+and as intent as I. He was not more than a few inches, apparently,
+superior in height to myself.
+
+"So," I seemed to whisper, as gaze met gaze, "there!" hardly certain the
+while if he was real or an illusion. Indeed, if, even then before my
+eyes, he had faded out into the tangle of thorn, twig, and thin-spun
+blossom above and around him, it would not have greatly astonished,
+though it would have deeply disappointed me. With a peculiar, trembling
+curiosity, I held him with my gaze. If he would not disclose himself,
+then must I.
+
+Slowly and deliberately my cold hand crept out and grasped my parasol.
+Without for a moment removing my eyes from this interloper's face, I
+pushed its ribbed silk tent taut into the air. Click! went the tiny
+spring; and at that he stirred.
+
+"Who are you: watching me?" I cried in a low, steady voice across the
+space that divided us. His head stooped a little. I fancied--and
+feared--that he was about to withdraw. But after a pause he drew himself
+up and came nearer, casting, as he approached, his crooked shadow away
+from the sun on the close-cropped turf beside him.
+
+To this day I sometimes strive in vain to see, quite clearly in my mind,
+that face, as it appeared at that first meeting. A different memory of
+it obtrudes itself; yet how many, many times have I searched his
+features for news of himself, and looked passingly--and once with final
+intensity--into those living eyes. But I recollect that his clothes
+looked slightly out of keeping and grotesque amid the green things of
+early spring. It seemed he had wasted in them. So, too, the cheek had
+wasted over its bone, and seemed parched; the thin lips, the ears
+slightly pointed. And then broke out his low, hollow voice. Scarcely
+rising or falling, the mere sound of it seemed to be as full of meaning
+as the words.
+
+He looked at me, and at all I possessed, as if piece by piece--as if he
+had been a long time searching for them all. Yet he now seemed to avoid
+my eyes, though they were serenely awaiting his. Indeed from this moment
+almost to the last, I was never at a loss or distressed in his company.
+He never called me out of myself beyond an easy and happy return, though
+he was to creep into my imagination as easily as a single bee creeps
+into the thousand-celled darkness of its hive.
+
+Whenever I parted from him, his remembrance was like that of one of
+those strange figures which thrust themselves as if out of the
+sleep-world into the mind's wakefulness; vividly, darkly, impress
+themselves upon consciousness, and then are gone. So I sometimes wonder
+if I ever really knew him, if he was ever perfectly real to me; like
+Fanny, for instance. Yet he made no pretence to be mysterious, and we
+were soon talking together almost as naturally as if we were playmates
+of childhood who had met again after a long separation.
+
+He confessed that, quite unknown to me, he had watched me come and go in
+the cold mornings of winter, when frost had soon driven me home again
+out of the bare, frozen woods. He had even been present, I think, when
+Fanny and I had shared--or divided--the stars between us. A faint
+distaste at any rate showed itself on his face when he admitted that he
+had seen me not alone. I was unaccustomed to that kind of interest, and
+hardly knew whether to be pleased or angry.
+
+"But you know I come here to be alone," I said as courteously as
+possible.
+
+"Yes," he answered, with face turned away. "That's how I saw you."
+
+Without my being aware of it, too, he played a kind of chess with me,
+seizing each answer in turn for hook on which to hang another question.
+What had I to conceal? Of my short history, though not of myself, I told
+him freely; yet asked him few questions in return. Nor at that time did
+I even consider how strange a chance had brought two such human beings
+as he and I to this place of meeting. Yet, after all, whales are but
+little creatures by comparison with the ocean in which they roam, and
+glow-worm will keep tryst with glow-worm in forests black as night.
+
+Through all he said was woven a thread of secrecy. So low and monotonous
+was his voice (not lifting itself much, but only increasing in resonance
+when any thought angered or darkened his mind); so few were his gestures
+that he might have been talking in his sleep. Not once that long morning
+did he laugh, not even when I mischievously proffered him my parasol (as
+he sat a few paces away) to screen him from the March sun! Solemnly he
+shared Mrs Bowater's biscuits with me, scattering the crumbs to a robin
+that hopped up between us, as if he had been invited to our breakfast.
+
+His head hung so low between his heavy shoulders that it reminded me of
+a flower stooping for want of water. Not that there was anything limp or
+fragile or gentle in his looks. He was, far rather, clumsy and ugly in
+appearance, yet with a grace in his look like that of an old, haggled
+thorn-tree when the wind moves its branches. And anyhow, he was come to
+be my friend--out of the unknown. And when I looked around at the serene
+wild loveliness of the garden, it seemed to be no less happy a place
+because it was no longer quite a solitude.
+
+"You read," he said, glancing reflectively, but none too
+complimentarily, at my book.
+
+"It isn't wise to think too much." I replied solemnly, shutting Miss
+Austen up. "Besides, as I haven't the opportunity of seeing many people
+in the flesh, you know, the next best thing is to meet them in
+books--specially in this kind of book. If only I were Jane Austen; my
+gracious, I would enjoy myself! Her people are just the same as people
+are now--inside. I doubt if leopards really want to change their spots.
+But of course"--I added, since he did not seem inclined to express any
+opinion--"I read other kinds of books as well. That's the best of being
+a dunce--there's so much to learn! Just lately I have been learning to
+tie knots."
+
+I laughed, and discovered that I was blushing.
+
+He raised his eyes slowly to my face, then looked so long and earnestly
+at my hands, that I was forced to hide them away under my bag. Long
+before I had noticed that his own hands were rather large and powerful
+for his size. Fanny's face I had loved to watch for its fairness and
+beauty--it would have been as lovely if she had not been within. To
+watch Mrs Bowater's was like spelling out bits of a peculiar language. I
+often found out what she was feeling or thinking by imitating her
+expression, and then translating it, after she was gone. This young
+man's kept me engrossed because of the self that brooded in it--its dark
+melancholy, too; and because even then, perhaps, I may have remotely and
+vaguely realized that flesh and spirit could not be long of one company.
+He himself was, as it were, a foreigner to me, and I felt I must make
+the best and most of him before he went off again.
+
+Perhaps memory reads into this experience more than in those green salad
+days I actually found there. But of this at least I am certain--that the
+morning sped on unheeded in his company, and I was even unconscious of
+how cold I was until he suddenly glanced anxiously into my face and told
+me so. So now we wandered off together towards the great house--which
+hitherto I had left unapproached. We climbed the green-stained scaling
+steps from terrace to terrace, tufted with wallflower and snapdragon
+amongst the weeds, cushioned with bright moss, fretted with lichen.
+Standing there, side by side with him, looking up--our two figures
+alone, on the wide flowerless weed-grown terrace--hale, sour weeds some
+of them, shoulder-high--I scrutinized the dark, shut windows.
+
+What was the secret that had kept it so long vacant, I inquired. Mrs
+Bowater had never given me any coherent answer to this question. My
+words dropped into the silence, like a pebble into a vast, black pool of
+water.
+
+"There was a tale about," he replied indifferently, and yet, as I
+fancied, not so indifferently as he intended, "that many years ago a
+woman"--he pronounced the word almost as if it had reference to a
+different species from ourselves--"that a woman had hanged herself in
+one of its upper rooms."
+
+"Hanged herself!" It was the kind of fable Mrs Ballard used to share
+with Adam Waggett's mother over their tea and shrimps. Frowning in
+horror and curiosity, I scanned his face. Was this the water I could dip
+for in his well? Alas, how familiar I was to become with the bucket.
+
+He made a movement with his hands; at which I saw the poor creature up
+there in the darkness, suspended lifeless, poor, poor human, with head
+awry.
+
+"Why?" I asked him, pondering childishly over this picture.
+
+"It was mere gossip," he replied, "and true or not, such as 'they' make
+up to explain their own silly superstitions. Just thinking long enough
+and hard enough would soon invite an evil spirit into any old empty
+house. Human beings are no better than sheep, though they don't always
+see the dogs and shepherds that drive them."
+
+"And does it," I faltered, glancing covertly up the walls, and conscious
+of a novel vein of interest in this strangely inexhaustible world, "does
+the evil spirit ever look out of the windows?"
+
+He turned his face to me, smiling; and inquired if I had ever heard the
+phrase, "the eyelids of the dawn." "There's Night, too," he said.
+
+"But whose spirit? Whose?" I persisted. "When I am here alone in the
+garden, why, it is just peace. How could that be, if an evil spirit
+haunted here?"
+
+"Yes," he said, "but a selfish, solitary peace. Dead birds don't sing.
+Don't come when you can't get back; or the clouds are down."
+
+"You are trying to frighten me," I said, in a louder voice. "And I have
+been too much alone for that. Of course things must look after
+themselves. Don't _we_? And you said an _evil_ spirit. What is the good
+of dreaming when you are wide awake?"
+
+"Then," said he, almost coldly, "do you deny that Man is an evil spirit?
+He distorts and destroys."
+
+But with that the words of my mother came back to me out of a far-away
+morning: "He made us of His Power and Love." Yet I could not answer him,
+could only wait, as if expectant that by mere silence I should be able
+to share the thoughts he was thinking. And, all the while, my eyes were
+brooding in some dark chamber of my mind on Fanny, and not, as they well
+might have, on the dark bark of Mr Crimble tossing in jeopardy beneath
+its fleeting ray of hope.
+
+Truly this stranger was making life very interesting, even if he was
+only prodding over its dead moles. And truly I was an incorrigibly
+romantic young lady; for when, with a glance at my grandfather's watch,
+I discovered that it was long past noon, and told him I must be gone;
+without a single moment's hesitation, I promised to come again to meet
+him on the very first fine morning that showed. So strong within me was
+the desire to do so, that a profound dismay chilled my mind when, on
+turning about at the end of the terrace--for he had shown no inclination
+to accompany me--I found that he was already out of sight. I formally
+waved my hand towards where he had vanished in case he should be
+watching; sighed, and went on.
+
+It was colder under the high, sunless trees. I gathered my cloak closer
+around me, and at that discovered not only that Miss Austen had been
+left behind, but that Fanny's letter still lay in undisturbed
+concealment beneath its stone. It was too late to return for them now,
+and a vague misgiving that had sprung up in me amid the tree-trunks was
+quieted by the assurance that for these--rather than for any other
+reason--I must return to Wanderslore as soon as I could. So, in
+remarkably gay spirits, I hastened light-heeled on my way in the
+direction of civilized society, of nefarious Man, and of my
+never-to-be-blessed-too-much Mrs Bowater.
+
+
+
+
+Chapter Twenty-Three
+
+
+My landlady was already awaiting me at the place appointed, and we
+walked off together towards the house. It had been a prudent
+arrangement, for we met and passed at least half a dozen strangers
+before we arrived there, and one and all by the unfeigned astonishment
+with which they turned to watch our two figures out of sight (for I
+stooped once or twice, as if to tie my shoelace, in order to see),
+clearly proved themselves to belong to that type of humanity to which my
+new acquaintance had referred frigidly as THEY. Vanity of vanities, when
+one old loitering gentleman did not so much as lift an eyelid at me--he
+was so absorbed in own thoughts--I felt a pang of annoyance.
+
+As soon as I was safely installed in my own room again, I confided in
+Mrs Bowater a full account of my morning's adventure. Not so much
+because I wished to keep free of any further deceit, as because I simply
+couldn't contain myself, and must talk of my Stranger. She heard me to
+the end without question, but with an unusual rigidity of features. She
+compressed her lips even tighter before beginning her catechism.
+
+"What was the young man's name," she inquired; "and where did he live?"
+
+My hope had been that she herself would be able to supply these little
+particulars. With a blank face, I shook my head: "We just talked of
+things in general."
+
+"I see," she said, and glanced at me, as if over her spectacles. Her
+next question was even less manageable. "Was the young fellow a
+gentleman?"
+
+Alas! she had fastened on a flaw in my education. This was a problem
+absolutely new to me. I thought of my father, of Mr Waggett, Dr Grose,
+Dr Phelps, the old farmer in the railway train, of Sir Walter Pollacke,
+my bishop, Heathcliff, Mr Bowater, Mr Clodd, even Henry--or rather all
+these male phantoms went whisking across the back of my mind, calling
+up every other two-legged creature of the same gender within sight or
+hearing. Meanwhile, Mrs Bowater stood like Patience on her Brussels
+carpet, or rather like Thomas de Torquemada, watching these intellectual
+contortions.
+
+"Well, really, do you know, Mrs Bowater," I was forced to acknowledge at
+last, with a sigh and a smile, "I simply can't say. I didn't think of
+it. That seems rather on _his_ side, doesn't it? But to be quite, quite
+candid, perhaps _not_ a gentleman; not _exactly_, I mean."
+
+"Which is no more than I supposed," was her comment, "and if _not_--and
+any kind of not, miss--what was he, then? And _if_ not, why, you can
+never go there again!"
+
+"Indeed, but I must," I said, as if to myself.
+
+"With your small knowledge of the world," she retorted unmovedly, "you
+must, if you please, be guided by those with more. Who isn't a gentleman
+couldn't be desirable company if chanced on like a stranger in a young
+lady's lonely rambles. And _how_ tall did you say? And what's more," she
+continued, not pausing for an answer, and gathering momentum on her way,
+"if he _is_ a gentleman, I'd better come along with you, miss, and see
+for myself."
+
+A rebellious and horrified glance followed her retreating figure out of
+the room. So this was the reward for being open and above-board. What a
+ridiculous figure I should cut, tippeting along behind my landlady. What
+would my stranger think of me? What would she think of him? _Was_ he a
+"gentleman"? To decide whether or not the Spirit of Man is an evil
+spirit had been an easy problem by comparison. _Gentle man_--why, of
+course, self muttered in shame to self convicted of yet another mean
+little snobbery. He had been almost absurdly gentle--had treated me as
+if I were an angel rather than a young woman.
+
+But the nettlerash produced by Mrs Bowater's bigotry was not to be so
+easily allayed as all that. It had invited yet another kind of THEM in.
+An old, green, rotting board hung over the wicket gate that led up the
+stony path into Wanderslore--"Trespassers will be prosecuted." Why
+couldn't one put boards up in the Wanderslore of one's mind? My landlady
+had never inquired if Lady Pollacke was a gentlewoman. How mechanical
+things were in their unexpectedness. That morning I had gone out to free
+myself from the Crimble tangle, merely to return with a few more knots
+in the skein.
+
+A dead calm descended on me. I was adrift in the Sargasso Sea--in the
+Doldrums, and had dropped my sextant overboard. Even a long stare at the
+master-mariner on the wall gave me no help. Yet I must confess that
+these foolish reflections made me happy. I would share them with
+Fanny--perhaps with the "gentleman" himself, some day. I leaned over the
+side of my small vessel, more deeply interested in the voyage than I had
+been since Pollie had carried me out of my girlhood into the Waggetts'
+wagonette. And as I sat there, simmering over these novelties, a voice,
+clear as a cockcrow, exclaimed in my mind, "If father hadn't died, I'd
+have had nothing of all this." My hands clenched damp in my lap at this
+monstrosity. But I kept my wits and managed to face it. "If father
+hadn't died," I answered myself, "you don't know _what_ would have
+happened. And if you think that, because I am happy now, anything could
+make me _not_ wish him back, it's a lie." But I remained a little less
+comfortable in mind.
+
+
+The evening post brought me a letter and a registered parcel. I turned
+them over and over, examining the unfamiliar handwriting, the bright red
+seals; but all in vain. In spite of my hard-won knotlore, I was still
+kneeling over the package and wrestling with string and wax, when Mrs
+Bowater, folding _her_ letter away in its envelope, announced baldly:
+"She's not coming home, it seems, at all these holidays, having been
+invited by some school friend into the country--Merriden, or some such
+place. Not that you might expect Fanny to write plain, when she doesn't
+_mean_ plain."
+
+"Oh, Mrs Bowater! Not at all?"
+
+Cold fogs of disappointment swept in, blotting out my fool's paradise.
+That inward light without which life is dark indeed died in eclipse. The
+one thought and desire which I now realized I had been feeding on from
+hour to hour, had been snatched away. To think that they had been
+nothing but waste. "Oh, Fanny," I whispered bitterly to myself, "oh,
+Fanny!" But the face I lifted to her mother showed only defiance.
+
+"Well," I muttered, "who cares? Let's hope she will enjoy herself
+better than mooning about in this dingy old place."
+
+Mrs Bowater merely continued to look quietly over the envelope at me.
+
+"Oh, but you know, Mrs Bowater," I quaked miserably, "it's not dingy to
+_me_. Surely a promise is a promise, whoever you make it to!"
+
+With that I stooped my face over the stuffy-smelling brown paper, and
+attacked the last knot with my teeth. With eyes still a little asquint
+with resentment I smoothed away the wrappings from the shape within.
+Then every thought evaporated in a sigh. For there, of a delicate veined
+fairness against the white paper, lay a minute copy in ivory of none but
+lovely Hypnos. Half-blindly I stared at it--lost in a serenity beyond
+all hope of my poor, foolish life--then lifted it with both hands away
+from my face: "A present--to me! Look!" I cried, "look!"
+
+Mrs Bowater settled her face over the image as if it had been some
+tropical and noxious insect I was offering for her inspection. But I
+thrust it into her hand and opened my letter:--
+
+
+     "MY DEAR YOUNG LADY,--I am no poet, and therefore cannot hope to
+     share with you the music of 'the flaming drake,' but we did share
+     my Hypnos. Only a replica, as I told you, but none the less one of
+     the most beautiful things I possess. Will you, then, give me the
+     pleasure of accepting the contents of the little package I am
+     having posted with this--as a small token of the delight your
+     enthusiasm gave Yours most sincerely,--
+
+     "WALTER POLLACKE.
+
+     "PS.--Lady Pollacke tells me that we may perhaps again look forward
+     to your company to tea in a few days, please do not think, then, of
+     acknowledging this little message by post."
+
+
+But I did acknowledge it, not with that guardedness of the feelings
+which Miss Austen seemed to recommend, but from the very depths of my
+heart. Next morning came Lady Pollacke's invitation:--
+
+
+     "DEAR MISS M.,--I hasten to renew my invitation of last Thursday.
+     Will you give us the pleasure of your company at tea on Friday
+     afternoon? Mrs Monnerie--the younger daughter, as you will
+     remember, of Lord B.--has expressed an exceedingly warm wish to
+     make your acquaintance, and Mr. Pellew, who is giving us a course
+     of sermons at St. Peter's during Holy Week, will also be with us.
+     May we, perhaps, share yet another of those _delightful_
+     recitations?
+
+     "Believe me,
+
+     "Yours sincerely,
+
+     "LYDIA PRESTON POLLACKE."
+
+
+I searched my memory for memorial of Lord B.; alas, in vain. This lapse
+made the thought of meeting his younger daughter a little alarming. Yet
+I must confess to having been pleasantly flattered by these attentions.
+Even the black draught administered by Fanny, who had not even thought
+it worth her while to send me a word of excuse or explanation, lost much
+of its bitterness. I asked Mrs Bowater if she supposed I might make Sir
+Walter a little present in return for his. Would it be a proper thing to
+do, would it be _lady_like?
+
+"What's meant kindly," she assured me, after a moment's reflection,
+"even if taken amiss, which, to judge from his letter, it won't be, is
+nothing to be thought of but only _felt_."
+
+This advice decided me, and early on my Friday morning I trimmed and
+freshened up as well as I could one of my grandfather's dwarf
+cedar-trees which, in the old days, had stood on my window balcony. Its
+branches were now a little dishevelled, but it was still a fresh and
+pretty thing in its grey-green pot.
+
+
+
+
+Chapter Twenty-Four
+
+
+With this dwarf tree in my arms, when came the auspicious afternoon, I
+followed Lady Pollacke's parlourmaid--her neat little bonnet tied with a
+bow under her ear--down my Bateses, and was lifted by Mrs Bowater into
+the carriage. How demure a greeting we exchanged when, the maid and I
+having seated ourselves together under its hood, my glance fell upon the
+bloodstone brooch pinned conspicuously for the occasion near the topmost
+button of her trim, outdoor jacket. It gave me so much confidence that
+even the sudden clatter of conversation that gushed out over me in the
+doorway of Lady Pollacke's drawing-room failed to be disconcerting. The
+long, flowery room was thronged with company, and everybody was talking
+to everybody else. On my entry, as if a seraph had spoken, the busy
+tongues sank instantly to a hush. I stood stilettoed by a score of eyes.
+But Sir Walter had been keeping good watch for me, and I at once
+delivered my great pot into his pink, outstretched hands.
+
+"My dear, dear young lady," he cried, stooping plumply over me, "the
+pleasure you give me! A little masterpiece: and real old Nankin. Alas,
+my poor Hypnos!"
+
+"But it is me, _me_," I cried. "If I could only tell you!"
+
+A murmur of admiration rippled across the room, in which I distinctly
+heard a quavering, nasal voice exclaim, "Touching, touching!"
+
+The words--as if a pleasant sheep had bleated--came, I fancied, from a
+rather less fashionable lady with a lorgnette, who was sitting almost
+alone on the outskirts of the room, and who I afterwards discovered was
+only a widowed sister of Lady Pollacke's. But I could spare her but one
+startled glance, for, at the same moment, I was being presented to the
+younger daughter of Lord B. Mrs Monnerie sat amply reclining in an
+immense gilded chair--a lady with a large and surprising countenance.
+Lady Pollacke's "_younger_" had misled my fancy. Far from being the
+slim, fair, sylphlike thing of my expectations, Mrs Monnerie cannot have
+been many years the junior of my godmother, Miss Fenne.
+
+Her skin had fallen into the queerest folds and puckers. Her black
+swimming eye under a thick eyebrow gazed down her fine, drooping nose at
+me with a dwelling expression at once indulgent, engrossed, and amused.
+With a gracious sweep of her hand she drew aside her voluminous silk
+skirts so that I could at once install myself by her side in a small,
+cane-seated chair that had once, I should fancy, accommodated a baby
+Pollacke, and had been brought down from the nursery for this occasion.
+
+Thus, then, I found myself--the exquisitely self-conscious centre of
+attention--striving to nibble a biscuit, nurse my child-size handleless
+tea-cup, and respond to her advances at one and the same time.
+
+Lady Pollacke hung like a cloud at sunset over us both, her cheek
+flushed with the effort to be amused at every sentence which Mrs
+Monnerie uttered and to share it as far as possible with the rest of her
+guests.
+
+"A little pale, eh?" mused Mrs Monnerie, brooding at me with her great
+eye. "She wants sea-air; sea-air--just to _tinge_ that rose-leaf
+porcelain. I must arrange it."
+
+I assured her that I was in the best of health.
+
+"Not at all," she replied. "All young people boast of their health. When
+I was your age every thought of illness was as black as a visitation of
+the devil. _That's_ the door where we must lay all such evils, isn't it,
+Mr Pellew?"
+
+A lean, tall, birdlike figure, the hair on his head still showing traces
+of auburn, disengaged itself from a knot of charmed spectators.
+
+"Ah," he said. "But I doubt, now," he continued, with a little
+deprecating wave of his tea-cup at me, "if Miss M. can remember me. When
+we first met we were precisely one week old, precisely one week old."
+
+Why, like Dr Phelps, Mr Pellew referred to me as _we_ I had not time to
+consider, for he was already confiding to Mrs Monnerie that he had never
+baptized an infant who more strenuously objected to Holy Water than had
+I. I looked at his long, fair eyelashes and the smile-line on his cheek
+as he bent with a sort of jocular urbanity over her chair, but could
+not recall his younger face, though during my christening I must, of
+course, have gazed at him even more absorbedly.
+
+"'Remember' you--I'll be bound she did," cried Mrs Monnerie with
+enthusiasm, "or was it the bachelor thumb? The mercy is you didn't drop
+her into the font. Can you swim, my dear?"
+
+"I couldn't at a week," I replied as archly as possible. "But I _can_
+swim; my father taught me."
+
+"But how wonderful!" broke our listeners into chorus.
+
+"There we are, then," asserted Mrs Monnerie; "sea-bathing! And are _we_
+a swimmer, Mr Pellew?"
+
+Mr Pellew seemed not to have caught her question. He was assuring me
+that Miss Fenne had kept him well informed--well informed of all my
+doings. He trusted I was comfortable with the excellent Mrs Bowater, and
+hoped that some day I should be able to pay a visit to his rectory in
+Devonshire. "Mrs Pellew, he knew...." What he knew about Mrs Pellew,
+however, was never divulged, for Mrs Monnerie swallowed him up:--
+
+"Devonshire, my dear Mr Pellew! no, indeed. Penthouse lanes, redhot
+fields, staring cows. Imagine it! She would be dried up like a leaf.
+What she wants is a mild but bracing sea-air. It shall be arranged. And
+who is this Mrs Bowater?"
+
+At this precise moment, among the strange faces far above me, I descried
+that of Mr Crimble, modestly peering out of the background. He coughed,
+and in a voice I should scarcely have recognized as his, informed Mrs
+Monnerie that my landlady was "a most res--an admirable woman." He
+paused, coughed again, swept my soul with his glance--"I assure you, Mrs
+Monnerie, in view of--of all the circumstances, one couldn't be in
+better hands. Indeed the house is on the crest of the hill, well out of
+the town, yet not a quarter of an hour's walk from my mother's."
+
+"Hah!" remarked Mrs Monnerie, with an inflection that I am sure need not
+have brought a warmth to my cheek, or a duskier pallor to Mr Crimble's.
+
+"You have perhaps heard the tragic story of Wanderslore," persisted Mr
+Crimble; "Miss M.'s--er--lodgings are immediately adjacent to the park."
+
+"Hah!" repeated Mrs Monnerie, even more emphatically. "Mrs Bowater, eh?
+Well, I must see for myself. And I'm told, Miss M.," she swept down at
+me, "that you have a beautiful gift for recitation." She looked round,
+patted her lap imperiously, and cried, "Come, now, who's to break the
+ice?"
+
+In _fact_, no doubt, Mrs Monnerie was not so arbitrary a mistress of
+Lady Pollacke's little ceremony as this account of it may suggest. But
+that is how she impressed me at the time. She the sun, and I the
+least--but I hope not the least grateful--of her obsequious planets.
+Lady Pollacke at any rate set immediately to breaking the ice. She
+prevailed upon a Miss Templemaine to sing. And we all sat mute.
+
+I liked Miss Templemaine's appearance--brown hair, straight nose, dark
+eyelashes, pretty fringe beneath her peak-brimmed hat. But I was a
+little distressed by her song, which, so far as I could gather, was
+about two persons with more or less broken hearts who were compelled to
+part and said, "Ah" for a long time. Only physically distressed,
+however, for though I seemed to be shaken in its strains like a linnet
+in the wind, its adieux were protracted enough to enable me to examine
+the rest of the company at my leisure. Their eyes, I found, were far
+more politely engaged the while in gazing composedly down at the carpet
+or up at the ceiling. And when I did happen to intercept a gliding
+glance in my direction, it was almost as if with a tiny explosion that
+it collided with mine and broke away.
+
+Mrs Monnerie's eyelids, on the other hand, with a faintly fluttering
+motion, remained closed from the first bar to the last--a method of
+appreciation I experimented with for a moment but quickly abandoned;
+while at the first clash of the keys, Sir Walter had dexterously
+contrived to slide himself out of the room by the door at which he had
+unexpectedly entered it on my first visit. Such was the social situation
+when, after murmurs of gratitude and applause, Miss Templemaine took up
+her gloves and rose from the piano, and Mrs Monnerie reopened herself to
+the outer world with the ejaculation, "That's right. _Now_, my dear!"
+
+The summons was to me. My moment had come, but I was prepared for it. In
+my last ordeal I had broken down because I had chosen a poem that was a
+kind of secret thing in my mind. So, after receiving Lady Pollacke's
+letter, I had hunted about for a recitation as short, but less personal:
+one, I mean, whose sentiments I didn't mind. And since Mrs Bullace had
+chosen two of Mrs Browning's pieces for her triumph on New Year's Eve, I
+argued that she knew the parish taste, and that I could do no better.
+Of course, too, composure over what I was going to do was far more
+important than the composition.
+
+"Prepared for it," I said just now, but I meant it only in the sense
+that one prepares for a cold bath. There was still the plunge. I clasped
+my hands, stood up. Ceiling and floor gently rocked a little. There
+seemed to be faces--faces everywhere, and every eye in them was fixed on
+me. Thus completely encompassed, I could find no refuge from them, for
+unfortunately my Hypnos was completely obliterated from view by the lady
+with the lorgnette. So I fixed my attention, instead, on the window,
+where showed a blank break of clear, fair, blue sky between the
+rain-clouds of afternoon. A nervous cough from Lady Pollacke plunged me
+over, and I announced my title: "The Weakest Thing," by Elizabeth
+Barrett Browning:--
+
+
+     "Which is the weakest thing of all
+       Mine heart can ponder?
+     The sun, a little cloud can pall
+       With darkness yonder!
+     The cloud, a little wind can move
+       Where'er it listeth;
+     The wind, a little leaf above,
+       Though sere, resisteth!
+
+     What time that yellow leaf was green,
+       My days were gladder:
+     Now on its branch each summer-sheen
+       May find me sadder!
+     Ah, me! a _leaf_ with sighs can wring
+       My lips asunder--
+     Then is my heart the weakest thing
+       Itself can ponder.
+
+     Yet, Heart, when sun and cloud are pined
+       And drop together;
+     And at a blast which is not wind,
+       The forests wither,
+     Thou, from the darkening, deathly curse
+       To glory breakest,--
+     The Strongest of the Universe
+       Guarding the weakest."
+
+
+The applause, in which Miss Templemaine generously joined, was this
+time quite unconcealed, and Lady Pollacke's sister's last "Touching" had
+hardly died away when Mrs Monnerie added _her_ approbation.
+
+"Charming, perfectly charming," she murmured, eyeing me like a
+turtle-dove. "But tell me, my dear, why that particular poem? It seemed
+to have even less sense than usual."
+
+"No-o; ye-es," breathed Lady Pollacke, and many heads nodded in discreet
+accord.
+
+"Doesn't--er--perhaps, Mrs Browning dwell rather assiduously on the
+tragic side of life?" Mr Crimble ventured to inquire.
+
+Lady Pollacke jerked her head, either in the affirmative or in the
+negative, and looked inquiringly at Mrs Monnerie, who merely drooped her
+eyes a little closer towards me and smiled, almost as if she and I were
+in a little plot together.
+
+"What do _you_ say, Miss M.?"
+
+"Well, Mrs Monnerie," I replied a little nervously, for all eyes were
+turned on me, "I don't think I know myself what _exactly_ the poem
+means--the who's and what's--and what the blast was which was not wind.
+But I thought it was a poem which every one would understand as much as
+_possible_ of."
+
+To judge from the way she quivered in her chair, though quite inaudibly,
+Mrs Monnerie was extremely amused at this criticism.
+
+"And that is why you chose it?"
+
+"Well, yes," said I, "you see, when one is listening to poetry, not
+reading it to oneself, I mean, one hasn't time to pry about for all its
+bits of meaning, but only just to get the general--general--"
+
+"Aroma?" suggested Mrs Monnerie.
+
+"Yes--aroma."
+
+"And the moral?"
+
+The silence that hung over this little exchange was growing more and
+more dense. Luckless Miss M.! She only plunged herself deeper into it by
+her reply that, "Oh, there's nothing very much in the moral, Mrs
+Monnerie. That's quite ordinary. At least I read about that in _prose_,
+why, before I was seven!"
+
+"Touch--" began that further voice, but was silenced by a testy lift of
+Mrs Monnerie's eyelid. "Indeed!" she said, "and couldn't you, wouldn't
+you, now, give me the prose version? That's more my mark."
+
+"It was in a little nursery lesson-book of mine, called _The Observing
+Eye_; letters about snails and coral insects and spiders and things----"
+I paused. "A book, rather, you know, for Sundays. But my--my family and
+I----"
+
+"Oh, but do," cried Lady Pollacke in a voice I should hardly have
+recognized, "I _adore_ snails."
+
+Once more I was cornered. So I steeled myself anew, and stumbled through
+the brief passage in the squat, blue book. It tells how,--
+
+
+     "The history of each one of the animals we have now considered,
+     teaches us that our kind God watches over the wants and the
+     pleasures of the meanest of His creatures. We see that He gives to
+     them, not only the sagacity and the instruments which they need for
+     catching their food, but that He also provides them with some means
+     of defending themselves. We learn by their history that the
+     gracious Eye watches under the mighty waters, as well as over the
+     earth, and that no creature can stop doing His will without His eye
+     seeing it."
+
+
+
+
+Chapter Twenty-Five
+
+
+Once more I sat down, but this time in the midst of what seemed to me a
+rather unpleasant silence, as if the room had grown colder: a silence
+which was broken only by the distant whistlings of a thrush. At one and
+the same moment both Mr Pellew and Mr Crimble returned to tea-cups which
+I should have supposed must have, by this time, been empty, and Lady
+Pollacke's widowed sister folded up her lorgnette.
+
+"My dear Miss M.," said Mrs Monnerie dryly, with an almost wicked ray of
+amusement in her deep-set eyes, "wherever the top of Beechwood Hill may
+be, and whatever supplies of food may be caught on its crest, there is
+no doubt that _you_ have been provided with the means of defending
+yourself. But tell me now, what do you think, perhaps, Mr _Pellew's_
+little 'instruments' are? Or, better still--mine? Am I a mollusc with a
+hard shell, or a scorpion with a sting?"
+
+Lady Pollacke rose to her feet and stood looking down on me like a hen,
+though not exactly a motherly one. But this was a serious question over
+which I must not be flustered, so I took my time. I folded my hands, and
+fixed a long, long look on Mrs Monnerie. Even after all these years, I
+confess it moves me to recall it.
+
+"Of course, really and truly," I said at last, as deferentially as I
+could, "I haven't known you long enough to say. But I should think, Mrs
+Monnerie, you always knew the truth."
+
+I was glad I had not been too impetuous. My reply evidently pleased her.
+She chuckled all over.
+
+"Ah," she said reposefully, "the truth. And that is why, I suppose, like
+Sleeping Beauty, I am so thickly hedged in with the thorns and briers of
+affection. Well, well, there's one little truth we'll share alone, you
+and I." She raised herself in her chair and stooped her great face close
+to my ear: "We must know more of one another, my dear," she whispered.
+"I have taken a great fancy to you. We must meet again." She hoisted
+herself up. Sir Walter Pollacke had hastened in and stood smiling, with
+arm hooked, and genial, beaming countenance in front of her. Mr Crimble
+had already vanished. Mr Pellew was talking earnestly with Lady
+Pollacke. Conversation broke out, like a storm-shower, on every side.
+For a while I was extraordinarily alone.
+
+Into this derelict moment a fair-cheeked, breathless lady descended, and
+surreptitiously thrusting a crimson padded birthday book and a miniature
+pencil into my lap, entreated my autograph--"Just your signature, you
+know--for my small daughter. How she would have _loved_ to be here!"
+
+This lady cannot have been many years older than I, and one of those
+instantaneous, fleeting affections sprang up in me as I looked up at her
+for the first and only time, and seemed to see that small daughter
+smiling at me out of her face.
+
+Alas, such is vanity. I turned over the leaves to August 30th and found
+printed there, for motto, a passage from Shakespeare:--
+
+
+     "He that has had a little tiny wit,--
+     With hey, ho, the wind and the rain,--
+     Must make content with his fortunes fit,
+     For the rain it raineth every day."
+
+
+The 29th was little less depressing, from Samuel Taylor Coleridge:--
+
+
+     "He prayeth best who loveth best
+     All creatures great and small."
+
+
+This would never do. I bent double over the volume, turned back hastily
+three or four leaves, and scrawled in my name under August 25th on a
+leaf that bore the quotation:--
+
+
+     "Fie on't; ah, fie! 'tis an unweeded garden,
+     That grows to seed; things rank and gross in nature
+     Possess it merely. That it should come to this!"
+
+
+and beneath the quotation, the signature of Josephine Mildred Spratte.
+
+"Thank you, _thank_ you, she will be overjoyed," blushed the
+fair-haired lady. A sudden hunger for solitude seized upon me. I rose
+hastily, conscious for the first time of a headache, caused, no doubt,
+by the expensive and fumey perfumes in the air. Threading my way between
+the trains and flounces and trouser-legs around me, at last my adieux
+were over. I was in the porch--in the carriage. The breezes of heaven
+were on my cheek. My blessed parlourmaid was once more installed beside
+me. Yet even now the Pollacke faces were still flocking in my mind. The
+outside world was very sluggishly welling in. Looking up so long had
+stiffened my neck. I fixed my eyes on the crested back buttons of Lady
+Pollacke's stiff-looking coachman, and committed myself to my thoughts.
+
+It was to a Miss M., with one of her own handkerchiefs laid over her
+brows, and sprinkled with vinegar and lavender water, that Mrs Bowater
+brought in supper that evening. We had one of our broken talks together,
+none the less. But she persisted in desultory accounts of Fanny's
+ailments in her infancy; and I had to drag in Brunswick House by myself.
+At which she poked the fire and was mum. It was unamiable of her. I
+longed to share my little difficulties and triumphs. Surely she was
+showing rather too much of that discrimination which Lady Pollacke had
+recommended.
+
+She snorted at Mr Pellew, she snorted at my friendly parlourmaid and
+even at Mrs Monnerie. Even when I repeated for her ear alone my nursery
+passage from _The Observing Eye_, her only comment was that to judge
+from _some_ fine folk she knew of, there was no doubt at all that God
+watched closely over the pleasures of the meanest of His creatures, but
+as for their doing His will, she hadn't much noticed it.
+
+To my sigh of regret that Fanny had not been at home to accompany me,
+she retorted with yet another onslaught on the fire, and the apophthegm,
+that the world would be a far better place if people kept themselves
+_to_ themselves.
+
+"But Mrs Bowater," I argued fretfully, "if I did that, I should
+just--distil, as you might say, quite away. Besides, Fanny would have
+been far, far the--the gracefullest person there. Mrs Monnerie would
+have taken a fancy to _her_, now, if you like."
+
+Mrs Bowater drew in her lips and rubbed her nose. "God forbid," she
+said.
+
+But it was her indifference to the impression that I myself had made on
+Mrs Monnerie that nettled me the most. "Why, then, who _is_ Lord B.?" I
+inquired impatiently at last, pushing back the bandage that had fallen
+over my eyes.
+
+"From what I've heard of Lord B.," said Mrs Bowater shortly, "he was a
+gentleman of whom the less heard of's the better."
+
+"But surely," I protested, "that isn't Mrs Monnerie's fault any more
+than Fanny's being so lovely--I mean, than I being a midget was my
+father's fault? Anyhow," I hurried on, "Mrs Monnerie says I look pale,
+and must go to the sea."
+
+Mrs Bowater was still kneeling by the fire, just as Fanny used to kneel.
+And, like Fanny, when one most expected an answer, she remained silent;
+though, unlike Fanny, it seemed to be not because she was dreaming of
+something else. How shall I express it?--there fell a kind of loneliness
+between us. The severe face made no sign.
+
+"Would you--would you miss me?" some silly self within piped out
+pathetically.
+
+"Why, for the matter of that," was her sardonic reply, "there's not very
+much of you to miss."
+
+I rose from my bed, flung down the bandage, and ran down my little
+staircase. "Oh, Mrs Bowater," I said, burying my face in her camphory
+skirts, "be kind to me; be kind to me! I've nobody but you."
+
+The magnanimous creature stroked my vinegar-sodden hair with the tips of
+her horny fingers. "Why there, miss. I meant no harm. Isn't all the
+gentry and nobility just gaping to snatch you up? You won't want your
+old Mrs Bowater very long. What's more, you mustn't get carried away by
+yourself. You never know where that journey ends. If sea it is, sea it
+must be. Though, Lord preserve us, the word's no favourite of mine."
+
+"But suppose, suppose, Mrs Bowater," I cried, starting up and smiling
+enrapturedly into her face, "suppose we could go together!"
+
+"That," said she, with a look of astonishing benignity, "would be just
+what I was being led to suppose was the heighth of the impossible."
+
+At which, of course, we at once began discussing ways and means. But,
+delicious though this prospect seemed, I determined that nothing should
+persuade me to go unless all hope of Fanny's coming home proved vain.
+Naturally, from Fanny memory darted to Wanderslore. I laughed up at my
+landlady, holding her finger, and suggested demurely that we should go
+off together on the morrow to see if my stranger were true to his word.
+
+"We have kept him a very long time, and if, as you seem to think, Mrs
+Monnerie isn't such a wonderful lady, you may decide that after all _he_
+is a gentleman."
+
+She enjoyed my little joke, was pleased that I had been won over, but
+refused to accept my reasoning, though the topic itself was after her
+heart.
+
+"The point is, miss, not whether your last conquest is a wonderful lady,
+or a grand lady, or even a perfect lady for the matter of that, but,
+well, a _lady_. It's that's the kind in my experience that comes nearest
+to being as uncommon a sort as any sort of a good woman."
+
+This was a wholly unexpected vista for me, and I peered down its smooth,
+green, aristocratic sward with some little awe.
+
+"As for the young fellow who made himself so free in his manners," she
+went on placidly, so that I had to scamper back to pick her up again, "I
+have no doubt seeing will be believing."
+
+"But what is the story of Wanderslore?" I pressed her none too honestly.
+
+The story--and this time Mrs Bowater poured it out quite freely--was
+precisely what I had been told already, but with the addition that the
+young woman who had hanged herself in one of its attics had done so for
+jealousy.
+
+"Jealousy! But of whom?" I inquired.
+
+"Her husband's, not her own: driven wild by his."
+
+"You really mean," I persisted, "that she couldn't endure to live any
+longer because her husband loved her so much that he couldn't bear
+anybody else to love her too?"
+
+"In some such measure," replied Mrs Bowater, "though I don't say he
+didn't help the other way round. But she was a wild, scattering
+creature. It was just her way. The less she cared, the more they
+flocked. She couldn't _collect_ herself, and say, 'Here I am; who are
+you?' so to speak. Ah, miss, it's a sickly and dangerous thing to be too
+much admired."
+
+"But you said 'scattering': was she mad a little?"
+
+"No. Peculiar, perhaps, with her sidelong, startled look. A lovelier
+I've never seen."
+
+"You've seen her!"
+
+"Thirty years ago, perhaps. Alive _and_ dead."
+
+"Oh, Mrs Bowater, poor thing, poor thing."
+
+"That you may well say, for lovely in the latter finding she was not."
+
+My eyes were fixed on the fire, but the picture conjured up was dark
+even amidst the red-hot coals. "And he? did he die too? At least his
+jealousy was broken away."
+
+"And I'm not so sure of that," said Mrs Bowater. "It's like the men to
+go on wanting, even when it comes to scrabbling at a grave. And there's
+a trashy sort of creature, though well-set-up enough from the outside,
+that a spark will put in a blaze. I've no doubt he was that kind."
+
+I thought of my own sparks, but questioned on: "Then there's nothing
+else but--but her ghost there now?"
+
+"Lor, _ghosts_, miss, it's an hour, I see, when bed's the proper place
+for you and me. I look to be scared by that kind of gentry when they
+come true."
+
+"You don't believe, then, in _Destroyers_, Mrs Bowater?"
+
+"Miss, it's those queer books you are reading," was the evasive reply.
+"'Destroyers'! Why, wasn't it cruel enough to drive that poor
+feather-brained creature into a noose!"
+
+Candle and I and drowsing cinders kept company until St Peter's bell had
+told only the sleepless that midnight was over the world. It seemed to
+my young mind that there was not a day, scarcely an hour, I lived, but
+that Life was unfolding itself in ever new and ravishing disguises. I
+had not begun to be in the least tired or afraid of it. Smallest of
+bubbles I might be, tossing on the great waters, but I reflected the
+universe. What need of courage when no danger was apparent? Surely one
+need not mind being different if that difference added to one's share in
+the wonderful Banquet. Even Wanderslore's story was only of what
+happened when the tangle was so harshly knotted that no mortal fingers
+could unravel it. And though my own private existence now had Mrs
+Monnerie--and all that _she_ might do and mean and be--to cope with, as
+well as my stranger who was yet another queer story and as yet mine
+alone, these complications were enticing. One must just keep control of
+them; that was all. At which I thought a little unsteadily of Fanny's
+"pin," and remembered that that pin was helping to keep her and Mr
+Crimble from being torn apart.
+
+He had seemed so peering a guest at Brunswick House. Mrs Monnerie hadn't
+so much as glanced at him when he had commented on Mrs Browning's poems.
+There seemed to be a shadow over whatever he did. It was as though there
+could be a sadness in the very coursing of one's blood. How thankful I
+felt that mine hadn't been a really flattering reply to Mrs Monnerie's
+question. She was extremely arrogant, even for a younger daughter of a
+lord. On the other hand, though, of course, the sheer novelty of me had
+had something to do with it, she had certainly singled me out afterwards
+to know what I _thought_, and in thoughts there is no particular size,
+only effusiveness--no, _piercingness_. I smiled to myself at the word,
+pitied my godmother for living so sequestered a life, and wondered how
+and why it was that my father and mother had so obstinately shut me away
+from the world. If only Fanny was coming home--what a difference she
+would find in her fretful Midge! And with that, I discovered that my
+feet were cold and that my headache had ached itself away.
+
+
+
+
+Chapter Twenty-Six
+
+
+There had been no need to reserve the small hours for these ruminations.
+The next few days were wet and windy; every glance at the streaming
+panes cast my mind into a sort of vacancy. The wind trumpeted smoke into
+the room; I could fix my mind on nothing. Then the weather faired. There
+came "a red sky at night," and Spica flashing secrets to me across the
+darkness; and that supper-time I referred as casually as possible to Mr
+Anon.
+
+"I suppose one _must_ keep one's promises, Mrs Bowater, even to a
+stranger. Would half-past six be too early to keep mine, do you think?
+Would it look too--forward? Of course he may have forgotten all about me
+by this time."
+
+Mrs Bowater eyed me like an owl as I bent my cheeks over my bowl of
+bread and milk, and proceeded to preach me yet another little sermon on
+the ways of the world. Nevertheless, the next morning saw us setting out
+together in the crisp, sparkling air to my tryst, with the tacit
+understanding that she accompanied me rather in the cause of propriety
+than romance.
+
+Owing, I fancy, to a bunion, she was so leisurely a walker that it was I
+who must set my pace to hers. But the day promised to be warm, and we
+could take our ease. As we wandered on among the early flowers and
+bright, green grass, and under the beeches, a mildness lightened into
+her face. Over her long features lay a vacant yet happy smile, of which
+she seemed to be unaware. This set me off thinking in the old, old
+fashion; comparing my lot with that of ordinary human beings. How
+fortunate I was. If only she could have seen the lowlier plants as I
+could--scarcely looking down on any, and of the same stature as some
+among the taller of them, so that the air around me was dyed and
+illumined with their clear colours, and burthened with their breath.
+
+The least and humblest of them--not merely crisp-edged lichen,
+speckle-seed whitlow-grass and hyssop in the wall--are so close to
+earth, the wonder, indeed, is that common-sized people ever see them at
+all. They must, at any rate, I thought, commit themselves to their
+stomachs, or go down on their knees to see them _properly_. So, on we
+went, Mrs Bowater and I, she pursuing her private musings, and I mine.
+
+I smiled to myself at remembrance of Dr Phelps and his blushes. After
+all, if humanity should "dwindle into a delicate littleness," it would
+make a good deal more difference than he had supposed. What a
+destruction would ensue, among all the lesser creatures of the earth,
+the squirrels, moles, voles, hedgehogs, and the birds, not to mention
+the bees and hornets. _They_ would be the enemies then--the traps and
+poisons and the nets! No more billowy cornfields a good yard high, no
+more fine nine-foot hedges flinging their blossoms into the air. And all
+the long-legged, "doubled," bloated garden flowers, gone clean out of
+favour. It would be a little world, would it be a happier? The dwarfed
+Mrs Bowaters, Dr Phelpses, Miss Bullaces, Lady Pollackes.
+
+But there was little chance of such an eventuality--at least in my
+lifetime. It was far likelier that the Miss M.'s of the world would
+continue to be a by-play. Yet, as I glanced up at my companion, and
+called to mind other such "Lapland Giants" of mine, I can truthfully
+avouch that I did not much envy their extra inches. So much more
+thin-skinned surface to be kept warm and unscratched. The cumbersome
+bones, the curious distance from foot and fingertip to brain, too; and
+those quarts and quarts of blood. I shuddered. It was little short of a
+miracle that they escaped continual injury; and what an extended body in
+which to die.
+
+On the other hand, what real loss was mine--with so much to my
+advantage? These great spreading beech-trees were no less shady and
+companionable to me than to them. Nor, thought I, could moon or sun or
+star or ocean or mountain be any the less silvery, hot, lustrous, and
+remote, forlorn in beauty, or vast in strangeness, one way or the other,
+than they are to ordinary people. Could there be any doubt at all, too,
+that men had always coveted to make much finer and more delicate things
+than their clumsiness allowed?
+
+What fantastic creatures they were!--with their vast mansions,
+pyramids, palaces, scores of sizes too large either for carcass or mind.
+Their Satan a monster on whose wrist the vulture of the Andes could
+perch like an aphis on my thumb; yet their Death but skeleton-high, and
+their Saviour of such a stature that wellnigh without stooping He could
+have laid His fingers on my head.
+
+Time's sands had been trickling fast while I thought these small
+thoughts that bright spring daybreak. So, though we had loitered on our
+way, it seemed we had reached our destination on the wings of the
+morning. Alas, Mrs Bowater's smile can have been only skin-deep; for,
+when, lifting my eyes from the ground I stopped all of a sudden, spread
+out my hands, and cried in triumph, "There! Mrs Bowater"; she hardly
+shared my rapture.
+
+She disapproved of the vast, blank "barn of a place," with its blackshot
+windows and cold chimneys. The waste and ruination of the garden
+displeased her so much that I grew a little ashamed of my barbarism.
+
+"It's all going to wrack and ruin," she exclaimed, snorting at my stone
+summer-house no less emphatically than she had snorted at Mrs Monnerie.
+"Not a walkable walk, nor the trace of a border; and was there ever such
+a miggle-maggle of weeds! A fine house in its prime, miss, but now,
+money melting away like butter in the sun."
+
+"But," said I, standing before her in the lovely light amid the dwelling
+dewdrops, "really and truly, Mrs Bowater, it is only going back to its
+own again. What you call a miggle-maggle is what these things were made
+to be. They are growing up now by themselves; and if you could look as
+close as I can, you'd see they breathe only what each can spare. They
+are just racing along to live as wildly as they possibly can. It's the
+tameness," I expostulated, flinging back my hood, "that would be
+shocking to _me_."
+
+Mrs Bowater looked down at me, listening to this high-piped recitative
+with an unusual inquisitiveness.
+
+"Well, that's as it may be," she retorted, "but what _I'm_ asking is,
+Where's the young fellow? He don't seem to be as punctual as they were
+when I was a girl."
+
+My own eyes had long been busy, but as yet in vain.
+
+"I did not come particularly to see him," was my airy reply. "Besides,
+we said no time--_any_ fine day. Shall we sit down?"
+
+With a secretive smile Mrs Bowater spread a square of waterproof
+sheeting over a flat stone that had fallen out of the coping of the
+house, unfolded a newspaper over the grass, and we began our breakfast.
+Neither of us betrayed much appetite for it; she, I fancy, having
+already fortified herself out of her brown teapot before leaving the
+house, and I because of the odour of india-rubber and newspaper--an
+odour presently intensified by the moisture and the sun. Paying no heed
+to my fastidious nibblings, she munched on reflectively, while I grew
+more and more ill at ease, first because the "young fellow" was almost
+visibly sinking in my old friend's esteem, and next because her
+cloth-booted foot lay within a few inches of the stone beneath which was
+hidden Fanny's letter.
+
+"It'll do you good, the sea," she remarked presently, after sweeping yet
+one more comprehensive glance around her, "and we can only hope Mrs
+Monnerie will be as good as her word. A spot like this--trespassing or
+not--is good for neither man nor beast. And when you are young the more
+human company you get, with proper supervising, the better."
+
+"Were _you_ happy as a girl, Mrs Bowater?" I inquired after a pause.
+
+Our voices went up and up into the still, mild air. "Happy enough--for
+my own good," she said, neatly screwing up her remaining biscuits in
+their paper bag. "In my days children were brought up. Taught to make
+themselves useful. I would as soon have lifted a hand against my mother
+as answer her back."
+
+"You mean she--she whipped you?"
+
+"If need be," my landlady replied complacently, folding her
+thread-gloved hands on her lap and contemplating the shiny toecaps of
+her boots. "She had large hands, my mother; and plenty of temper kept
+well under control. What's more, if life isn't a continual punishment
+for the stoopidities and wickedness of others, not to mention ourselves,
+then it must be even a darker story than was ever told me."
+
+"And was, Mrs Bowater, Mr Bowater your--your first----" I looked
+steadily at a flower at my foot in case she might be affected at so
+intimate a question, and not wish me to see her face.
+
+"If Mr Bowater was not the first," was her easy response, "he may well
+live to boast of being the last. Which is neither here nor there, for we
+may be sure he's enjoying attentive nursing. Broken bones are soon
+mended. It's when things are disjointed from the root that the wrench
+comes."
+
+The storm-felled bole lay there beside us, as if for picture to her
+parable. I began to think rather more earnestly than I had intended to
+that morning. In my present state of conscience, it was never an easy
+matter to decide whether Mrs Bowater's comments on life referred openly
+to things in general or covertly to me in particular. How fortunate that
+the scent of Fanny's notepaper was not potent enough to escape from its
+tomb. And whether or not, speech seemed less dangerous than silence.
+
+"It seems to me, Mrs Bowater," I began rather hastily, "at least to
+judge from my own father and mother, that a man _depends_ very much on a
+woman. Men don't seem to grow up in the same way, though I suppose they
+are practical enough as men."
+
+"If it were one female," was the reply, "there'd be less to be found
+fault with. That poor young creature over there took her life for no
+better reason, even though the reason was turned inside out as you may
+say."
+
+I met the frightful, louring stare of the house. "What was her name?" I
+whispered--but into nothing, for, bolt upright as she was, Mrs Bowater
+had shut her eyes, as if in preparation for a nap.
+
+
+A thread-like tangle of song netted the air. We were, indeed,
+trespassers. I darted my glance this way and that, in and out of the
+pale green whispering shadows in this wild haunt. Then, realizing by
+some faint stir in my mind that the stiff, still, shut-away figure
+beside me was only feigning to be asleep, I opened the rain-warped
+covers of my _Sense and Sensibility_, and began plotting how to be rid
+of her for a while, so that my solitude might summon my stranger, and I
+might recover Fanny's letter.
+
+Then once more I knew. Raising my eyes, I looked straight across at him,
+scowling there beneath his stunted thorn in a drift of flowers like
+fool's parsley. He was making signs, too, with his hands. I watched him
+pensively, in secret amusement. Then swifter than Daphne into her
+laurel, instantaneously _he_ vanished, and _I_ became aware that its
+black eyes were staring out from the long face of the motionless figure
+beside me, as might an owl's into an aviary.
+
+"Did you hear a bird, Mrs Bowater?" I inquired innocently.
+
+"When I was a girl," said the mouth, "sparrowhawks were a common sight,
+but I never heard one sing."
+
+"But isn't a sparrowhawk quite a large bird?"
+
+"We must judge," said Mrs Bowater, "not by the size, but the kind.
+Elseways, miss, your old friend might have been found sleeping, as they
+say, at her box." She pretended to yawn, gathered her legs under her,
+and rose up and up. "I'll be taking a little walk round. And you shall
+tell your young acquaintance that I mean him no harm, but that I mean
+you the reverse; and if show himself he won't, well, here I sit till the
+Day of Judgment."
+
+An angry speech curled the tip of my tongue. But the simple-faced
+flowers were slowly making obeisance to Mrs Bowater's black, dragging
+skirts, and when she was nearly out of sight I sallied out to confront
+my stranger.
+
+His face was black with rage and contempt. "_That_ contaminating
+scarecrow; who's she?" was his greeting. "The days I have waited!"
+
+The resentment that had simmered up in me on his behalf now boiled over
+against him. I looked at him in silence.
+
+"That contaminating scarecrow, as you are pleased to call her, is the
+best friend I have in the world. I need no other."
+
+"And I," he said harshly, "have no friend in _this_ world, and need
+you."
+
+"Then," said I, "you have lost your opportunity. Do you suppose I am a
+child--to be insulted and domineered over only because I am alone?
+Possibly," and my lips so trembled that I could hardly frame the words,
+"it is _your_ face I shall see when I think of those windows."
+
+I was speaking wiselier than I knew. He turned sharply, and by a play of
+light it seemed that at one of them there stood looking down on us out
+of the distance a shape that so had watched for ever, leering darkly out
+of the void. And there awoke in me the sense of this stranger's
+extremity of solitude, of his unhappy disguise, of his animal-like
+patience.
+
+"Why," I said, "Mrs Bowater! You might far rather be _thanking_ her
+for--for----"
+
+"Curses on her," he choked, turning away. "There was everything to tell
+you."
+
+"What everything?"
+
+"Call her back now," he muttered furiously.
+
+"That," I said smoothly, "is easily done. But, forgive me, I don't know
+your name."
+
+His eyes wandered over the turf beneath me, mounted slowly up, my foot
+to my head, and looked into mine. In their intense regard I seemed to be
+but a bubble floating away into the air. I shivered, and turned my back
+on him, without waiting for an answer. He followed me as quietly as a
+sheep.
+
+Mrs Bowater had already come sauntering back to our breakfast table, and
+with gaze impassively fixed on the horizon, pretended not to be aware of
+our approach.
+
+I smiled back at my companion as we drew near. "This, Mrs Bowater," said
+I, "is Mr Anon. Would you please present him to Miss Thomasina of
+Bedlam?"
+
+For a moment or two they stood facing one another, just as I have seen
+two insects stand--motionless, regardful, exchanging each other's
+presences. Then, after one lightning snap at him from her eye, she rose
+to my bait like a fish. "A pleasant morning, sir," she remarked affably,
+though in her Bible voice. "My young lady and I were enjoying the spring
+air."
+
+Back to memory comes the darkness of a theatre, and Mrs Monnerie
+breathing and sighing beside me, and there on the limelit green of the
+stage lolls ass-headed Bottom the Weaver cracking jokes with the
+Fairies.
+
+My Oberon addressed Mrs Bowater as urbanely as St George must have
+addressed the Dragon--or any other customary monster.
+
+He seemed to pass muster, none the less, for she rose, patted her sheet,
+pushed forward her bonnet on to her rounded temples, and bade him a
+composed good-morning. She would be awaiting me, she announced, in an
+hour's time under my beech tree.
+
+"I think, perhaps, _two_, Mrs Bowater," I said firmly.
+
+She gave me a look--all our long slow evening firelit talks together
+seemed to be swimming in its smile; and withdrew.
+
+The air eddied into quiet again. The stretched-out blue of the sky was
+as bland and solitary as if a seraph sat dreaming on its Eastern
+outskirts. Mr Anon and I seated ourselves three or four feet apart, and
+I watched the sidelong face, so delicately carved against the green;
+yet sunken in so sullen a stare.
+
+Standing up on his feet against the background of Mrs Bowater's
+ink-black flounces, with his rather humped shoulders and straight hair,
+he had looked an eccentric, and, even to my view, a stunted figure. Now
+the whole scene around us seemed to be sorting itself into a different
+proportion before my eyes. He it was who was become the unit of space,
+the yard-stick of the universe. The flowers, their roots glintily netted
+with spider-webs, nodded serenely over his long hands. A peacock
+butterfly with folded colours sipped of the sunshine on a tuft nearly at
+evens with his cheek. The very birds sang to his size, and every rift
+between the woodlands awaited the cuckoo. Only his clothes were
+grotesque, but less so than in my parlour Mr Crimble's skirts, or even
+Lady Pollacke's treacherous bonnet.
+
+I folded my white silk gloves into a ball. A wren began tweeting in a
+bush near by. "I am going away soon," I said, "to the sea."
+
+The wren glided away out of sight amongst its thorns. I knew by his
+sudden stillness that this had been unwelcome news. "That will be very
+pleasant for me, won't it?" I said.
+
+"The sea?" he returned coldly, with averted head. "Well, _I_ am bound
+still further."
+
+The reply fretted me. I wanted bare facts just then. "Why are you so
+angry? What is your name? And where do you live?" It was my turn to ask
+questions, and I popped them out as if from a _Little by Little_.
+
+And then, with his queer, croaking, yet captivating voice, he broke into
+a long, low monologue. He gave me his name--and "Mr Anon" describes him
+no worse. He waved his hand vaguely in the direction of the house he
+lived in. But instead of apologizing for his ill-temper, he accused me
+of deceiving and humiliating him; of being, so I gathered, a toy of my
+landlady's, of betraying and soiling myself.
+
+Why all this wild stuff only seemed to flatter me, I cannot say. I
+listened and laughed, pressing flat with both hands the sorry covers of
+my book, and laughed also low in my heart.
+
+"Oh, contempt!" he cried. "I am used to that."
+
+The words curdled on his tongue as he expressed his loathing of poor Mrs
+Bowater and her kind--mere Humanity--that ate and drank in musty houses
+stuck up out of the happy earth like warts on the skin, that battened
+on meat, stalked its puddled streets and vile, stifling towns, spread
+its rank odours on the air, increased and multiplied. Monstrous in
+shape, automatic, blinded by habit, abandoned by instinct, monkey-like,
+degraded!
+
+What an unjust tirade! He barked it all out at me as if the blame were
+mine; as if _I_ had nibbled the Apple. I turned my face away, smiling,
+but listening. Did I realize, he asked me, what a divine fortune it was
+to be so little, and in this to be All. On and on he raved: I breathed
+air "a dewdrop could chill"; I was as near lovely naught made visible as
+the passing of a flower; the mere mattering of a dream. And when I died
+my body would be but a perishing flake of manna, and my bones....
+
+"Yes, a wren's picking," I rudely interrupted. "And what of my soul,
+please? Why, you talk like--like a poet. Besides, you tell me nothing
+new. I was thinking all that and more on my way here with my landlady.
+What has _size_ to do with it? Why, when I thought of my mother after
+she was dead, and peered down in the place of my imagination into her
+grave, I saw her spirit--young, younger than I, and bodiless, and
+infinitely more beautiful even than she had been in my dreams, floating
+up out of it, free, sweet, and happy, like a flame--though shadowy.
+Besides, I don't see how you can help _pitying_ men and women. They seem
+to fly to one another for company; and half their comfort is in their
+numbers."
+
+Never in all my life had I put my thoughts into words like this; and
+he--a stranger.
+
+There fell a silence between us. The natural quietude of the garden was
+softly settling down and down like infinitesimal grains of sand in a
+pool of water. It had forgotten that humans were harbouring in its
+solitude. And still he maintained that his words were not untrue, that
+he knew mankind better than I, that to fall into their ways and follow
+their opinions and strivings was to deafen my ears, and seal up my eyes,
+and lose my very self. "The Self everywhere," he said.
+
+And he told me, whether in time or space I know not, of a country whose
+people were of my stature and slenderness. This was a land, he said,
+walled in by enormous, ice-capped mountains couching the furnace of the
+rising sun, and yet set at the ocean's edge. Its sand-dunes ring like
+dulcimers in the heat. Its valleys of swift rivers were of a green so
+pale and vivid and so flower-encrusted that an English--even a
+Kentish--spring is but a coarse and rustic prettiness by comparison.
+Vine and orange and trees of outlandish names gave their fruits there;
+yet there also willows swept the winds, and palms spiked the blue with
+their fans, and the cactus flourished with the tamarisk. Geese, of dark
+green and snow, were on its inland waters, and a bird clocked the hours
+of the night, and the conformation of its stars would be strange to my
+eyes. And such was the lowliness and simplicity of this people's
+habitations that the most powerful sea-glass, turned upon and searching
+their secret haunts from a ship becalmed on the ocean, would spy out
+nothing--nothing there, only world wilderness of snow-dazzling
+mountain-top and green valley, ravine, and condor, and what might just
+be Nature's small ingenuities--mounds and traceries. Yet within all was
+quiet loveliness, feet light as goldfinches', silks fine as gossamer,
+voices as of a watery beading of silence. And their life being all
+happiness they have no name for their God. And it seems--according to Mr
+Anon's account of it--that such was the ancient history of the world,
+that Man was so once, but had swollen to his present shape, of which he
+had lost the true spring and mastery, and had sunk deeper and deeper
+into a kind of oblivion of the mind, suffocating his past, and now all
+but insane with pride in his own monstrosities.
+
+All this my new friend (and yet not so _very_ new, it seemed)--all this
+he poured out to me in the garden, though I can only faintly recall his
+actual words, as if, like Moses, I had smitten the rock. And I listened
+weariedly, with little hope of understanding him, and with the suspicion
+that it was nothing but a Tom o' Bedlam's dream he was recounting. Yet,
+as if in disproof of my own incredulity, there sat I; and over the trees
+yonder stood Mrs Bowater's ugly little brick house; and beyond that, the
+stony, tapering spire of St Peter's, the High Street. And I looked at
+him without any affection in my thoughts, and wished fretfully to be
+gone. What use to be lulled with fantastic pictures of Paradise when I
+might have died of fear and hatred on Mrs Stocks's doorstep; when
+everything I said was "touching, touching"?
+
+"Well," I mockingly interposed at last, "the farthing dip's guttering.
+And what if it's all true, and there _is_ such a place, what then? How
+am I going to get there, pray? Would you like to mummy me and shut me up
+in a box and _carry_ me there, as they used to in Basman? Years and
+years ago my father told me of the pygmy men and horses--the same size
+as yours, I suppose--who lived in caves on the banks of the Nile. But I
+doubt if I believed in them much, even then. I am not so ignorant as all
+that."
+
+The life died out of his face, just as, because of a cloud carried up
+into the sky, the sunlight at that moment fled from Wanderslore. He
+coughed, leaning on his hands, and looked in a scared, empty, hunted
+fashion to right and left. "Only that you might stay," he scarcely
+whispered. " ... I love you."
+
+Instinctively I drew away, lips dry, and heart numbly, heavily beating.
+An influence more secret than the shadow of a cloud had suddenly chilled
+and darkened the garden and robbed it of its beauty. I shrank into
+myself, cold and awkward, and did not dare even to glance at my
+companion.
+
+"A fine thing," was all I found to reply, "for a toy, as you call me. I
+don't know what you mean."
+
+Miserable enough that memory is when I think of what came after, for now
+my only dread was that he might really be out of his wits, and might
+make my beloved, solitary garden for ever hateful to me. I drew close my
+cape, and lifted my book.
+
+"There is a private letter of mine hidden under that stone," I said
+coldly. "Will you please be so good as to fetch it out for me? And you
+are never, never to say that again."
+
+The poor thing looked so desperately ill and forsaken with his humped
+shoulders--and that fine, fantastic story still ringing in my
+ears!--that a kind of sadness came over me, and I hid my face in my
+hands.
+
+"The letter is not there," said his voice.
+
+I drew my fingers from my face, and glared at him from between them;
+then scrambled to my feet. Out swam the sun again, drenching all around
+us with its light and heat.
+
+"Next time I come," I shrilled at him, "the letter _will_ be there. The
+thief will have put it back again! Oh, how unhappy you have made me!"
+
+
+
+
+Chapter Twenty-Seven
+
+
+I stumbled off, feeling smaller and smaller as I went, more and more
+ridiculous and insignificant, as indeed I must have appeared; for
+distance can hardly lend enchantment to any view of _me_. Not one single
+look did I cast behind; but now that my feelings began to quiet down, I
+began also to think. And a pretty muddle of mind it was. What had
+enraged and embittered me so? If only I had remained calm. Was it that
+my pride, my vanity, had in some vague fashion been a punishment of him
+for Fanny's unkindness to me?
+
+"But he stole, he _stole_ my letter," I said aloud, stamping my foot on
+a budding violet; and--there was Mrs Bowater. Evidently she had been
+watching my approach, and now smiled benignly.
+
+"Why, you are quite out of breath, miss; and your cheeks!... I hope you
+haven't been having words. A better-spoken young fellow than I had
+fancied; and I'm sure I ask his pardon for the 'gentleman.'"
+
+"Ach," I swept up at my beech-tree, now cautiously unsheathing its first
+green buds in the lower branches, "I think he must be light in his
+head."
+
+"And that often comes," replied Mrs Bowater, with undisguised
+_bonhomie_, "from being heavy at the heart. Why, miss, he may be a young
+nobleman in disguise. There's unlikelier things even than that, to judge
+from that trash of Fanny's. While, as for fish in the sea--it's
+sometimes wise to be contented with what we can catch."
+
+Who had been talking to me about fish in the sea--quite lately? I
+thought contemptuously of Pollie and the Dream Book. "I am sorry," I
+replied, nose in air, "but I cannot follow the allusion."
+
+The charge of vulgarity was the very last, I think, which Mrs Bowater
+would have lifted a finger to refute. My cheeks flamed hotter to know
+that she was quietly smiling up there. We walked on in silence.
+
+That night I could not sleep. I was afraid. Life was blackening my mind
+like the mould of a graveyard. I could think of nothing but one face,
+one voice--that scorn and longing, thought and fantasy. What if he did
+love me a little? I might at least have been kind to him. Had I so many
+friends that I could afford to be harsh and ungrateful? How dreadfully
+ill he had looked when I scoffed at him. And now what might _not_ have
+happened to him? I seemed lost to myself. No wonder Fanny.... My body
+grew cold at a thought; the palms of my hands began to ache.
+
+Half-stifled, I leapt out of bed, and without the least notion of what I
+was doing, hastily dressed myself, and fled out into the night. I must
+find him, talk to him, plead with him, before it was too late. And in
+the trickling starlight, pressed against my own gatepost--there he was.
+
+"Oh," I whispered at him in a fever of relief and shame and
+apprehensiveness, "what are you doing here? You must go away at once, at
+once. I forgive you. Yes, yes; I forgive you. But--at once. Keep the
+letter for me till I come again." His hand was wet with the dew. "Oh,
+and never say it again. Please, please, if you care for me the least bit
+in the world, never, never say what you did again." I poured out the
+heedless words in the sweet-scented quiet of midnight. "Now--now go"; I
+entreated. "And indeed, indeed I am your friend."
+
+The dark eyes shone quietly close to mine. He sighed. He lifted my
+fingers, and put them to my breast again. He whispered unintelligible
+words between us, and was gone. No more stars for me that night. I slept
+sound until long after dawn....
+
+
+Softly as thistledown the days floated into eternity; yet they were days
+of expectation and action. April was her fickle self; not so Mrs
+Monnerie. Her letter to Mrs Bowater must have been a marvel of tact.
+Apartments had been engaged for us at a little watering-place in
+Dorsetshire, called Lyme Regis. Mrs Bowater and I were to spend at least
+a fortnight there alone together, and after our return Mrs Monnerie
+herself was to pay me a visit, and see with her own eyes if her
+prescription had been successful. After that, perhaps, if I were so
+inclined, and my landlady agreed with Mr Pellew that it would be good
+for me, I might spend a week or two with her in London. What a twist of
+the kaleidoscope. I had sown never a pinch of seed, yet here was
+everything laughing and blossoming around me, like the wilderness in
+Isaiah.
+
+Indeed my own looking-glass told me how wan and languishing a Miss M.
+was pining for change of scene and air. She rejoiced that Fanny was
+enjoying herself, rejoiced that she was going to enjoy herself too. I
+searched Mrs Bowater's library for views of the sea, but without much
+reward. So I read over Mr Bowater's Captain Maury--on the winds and
+monsoons and tide-rips and hurricanes, freshened up my _Robinson
+Crusoe_, and dreamed of the Angels with the Vials. In the midst of my
+packing (and I spread it out for sheer amusement's sake), Mr Crimble
+called again. He looked nervous, gloomy, and hollow-eyed.
+
+I was fast becoming a mistress in affairs of the sensibilities. Yet,
+when, kneeling over my open trunk, I heard him in the porch, I mimicked
+Fanny's "Dash!" and wished to goodness he had postponed his visit until
+only echo could have answered his knock. It fretted me to be bothered
+with him. And now? What would I not give to be able to say I had done my
+best and utmost to help him when he wanted it? Here is a riddle I can
+find no answer to, however long I live: How is it that our eyes cannot
+foresee, our very hearts cannot forefeel, the future? And how should we
+act if that future were plain before us? Yet, even then, what could I
+have said to him to comfort him? Really and truly I had no candle with
+which to see into that dark mind.
+
+In actual fact my task was difficult and delicate enough. In spite of
+her vow not to write again, yet another letter had meanwhile come from
+Fanny. If Mr Crimble's had afforded "a ray of hope," this had shut it
+clean away. It was full of temporizings, wheedlings, evasions--and
+brimming over with Fanny.
+
+It suggested, too, that Mrs Bowater must have misread the name of her
+holiday place. The half-legible printing of the postmark on the
+envelope--fortunately I had intercepted the postman--did not even begin
+with an M. And no address was given within. I was to tell Mr Crimble
+that Fanny was over-tired and depressed by the term's work, that she
+simply couldn't set her "weary mind" to anything, and as for
+decisions:--
+
+
+     "He seems to think only of himself. You couldn't believe,
+     Midgetina, what nonsense the man talks. He can't _see_ that all
+     poor Fanny's future is at stake, body and soul. Tell him if he
+     _wants_ her to smile, he must sit in patience on a pedestal, and
+     smile too. One simply can't trust the poor creature with cold,
+     sober facts. His mother, now--why, I could read it in your own
+     polite little description of her at your Grand Reception--she
+     smiles and smiles. So did the Cheshire Cat.
+
+     "'But oh, dear Fanny, time and your own true self, God helping,
+     would win her over.' So writes H. C. That's candid enough, if you
+     look into it; but it isn't sense. Once hostile, old ladies are
+     _not_ won over. They don't care much for mind in the young. Anyhow,
+     one look at me was enough for her--and it was followed by a sharp
+     little peer at poor Harold! She guessed. So you see, my dear, even
+     for youthful things, like you and me, time gathers roses a jolly
+     sight faster than we can, and it would have to be the _fait
+     accompli_, before a word is breathed to her. That is, if I could
+     take a deep breath and say, Yes.
+
+     "But I can't. I ask you: Can you _see_ Fanny Bowater a Right
+     Reverendissima? No, nor can I. And not even gaiters or an apron
+     here and now would settle the question off-hand. Why I confide all
+     this in you (why, for that matter, it has all been confided in
+     _me_), I know not. You want nothing, and if you did, you wouldn't
+     want it long. Now, would you? Perhaps that is the secret. But Fanny
+     wants a good deal. She cannot even guess how much. So, while Miss
+     Stebbings and Beechwood Hill for ever and ever would be hell before
+     purgatory, H. C. and St Peter's would be merely the same thing,
+     with the fires _out_. And I am quite sure that, given a chance,
+     heaven is our home.
+
+     "Oh, Midgetina, I listen to all this; mumbling my heart like a dog
+     a bone. What the devil has it got to do with _me_, I ask myself?
+     Who set the infernal trap? If only I could stop thinking and
+     mocking and find some one--not 'to love me' (between ourselves,
+     there are far too many of _them_ already), but capable of making me
+     love him. They say a woman can't be driven. I disagree. She _can_
+     be driven--mad. And apart from that, though twenty men only succeed
+     in giving me hydrophobia, one could persuade me to drink, if only
+     his name was Mr Right, as mother succinctly puts it.
+
+     "But first and last, I am having a real, if not a particularly
+     sagacious, holiday, and can take care of myself. And next and last,
+     play, I _beseech_ you, the tiny good Samaritan between me and
+     poor, plodding, blinded H. C.--even if he does eventually have to
+     go on to Jericho.
+
+     "And I shall ever remain, your most affec.--F."
+
+
+How all this baffled me. I tried, but dismally failed, to pour a trickle
+of wine and oil into Mr Crimble's wounded heart, for his sake and for
+mine, not for Fanny's, for I knew in myself that his "Jericho" was
+already within view.
+
+"I don't understand her; I don't understand her," he kept repeating,
+crushing his soft hat in his small, square hands. "I cannot reach her; I
+am not in touch with her."
+
+Out of the fount of my womanly wisdom I reminded him how young she was,
+how clever, and how much flattered.
+
+"You know, then, there are--others?" he gulped, darkly meeting me.
+
+"That, surely, is what makes her so precious," I falsely insinuated.
+
+He gazed at me, his eyes like an immense, empty shop-window. "That
+thought puts---- I can't," and he twisted his head on his shoulders as if
+shadows were around him; "I can't bear to think of her
+and--with--_others_. It unbalances me. But how can you understand?... A
+sealed book. Last night I sat at my window. It was raining. I know not
+the hour: and Spring!" He clutched at his knees, stooping forward. "I
+repudiated myself, thrust myself out. Oh, believe me, we are not alone.
+And there and then I resolved to lay the whole matter before"--his
+glance groped towards the door--"before, in fact, her _mother_. She is a
+woman of sagacity, of proper feeling in her station, though how she came
+to be the mother of---- But that's neither here nor there. We mustn't
+probe. Probably she thinks--but what use to consider it? One word to
+her--and Fanny would be lost to me for ever." For a moment it seemed his
+eyes closed on me. "How can I bring myself to speak of it?" a remote
+voice murmured from beneath them.
+
+I looked at the figure seated there in its long black coat; and far away
+in my mind whistled an ecstatic bird--"The sea! the sea! You are going
+away--out, out of all this."
+
+So, too, was Mr Crimble, if only I had known it. It was my weak and
+cowardly acquiescence in Fanny's deceits that was speeding him on his
+dreadful journey. None the less, a wretched heartless impatience fretted
+me at being thus helplessly hemmed in by my fellow creatures. How
+clumsily they groped on. Why couldn't they be happy in just living free
+from the clouds and trammels of each other and of themselves? The
+selfish helplessness of it all. It was, indeed, as though the strange
+fires which Fanny had burnt me in--which any sudden thought of her could
+still fan into a flickering blaze--had utterly died down. Whether or
+not, I was hardened; a poor little earthenware pot fresh from the
+furnace. And with what elixir was it brimmed.
+
+I rose from my chair, walked away from my visitor, and peered through my
+muslin curtains at the green and shine and blue. A nursemaid was lagging
+along with a sleeping infant--its mild face to the sky--in a
+perambulator. A faint drift of dandelions showed in the stretching
+meadow. Kent's blue hems lay calm; my thoughts drew far away.
+
+"Mr Crimble," I cried in a low voice: "is she _worth_ all our care for
+her?"
+
+"'Our'--'our'?" he expostulated.
+
+"Mine, then. When I gave her, just to be friends, because--because I
+loved her, a little ivory box, nothing of any value, of course, but
+which I have loved and treasured since childhood, she left it without a
+thought. It's in my wardrobe drawer--shall I show it to you? I _say_ it
+was nothing in itself; but what I mean is that she just makes use of me,
+and with far less generosity than--than other people do. Her eyes, her
+voice, when she moves her hand, turns her head, looks back--oh, I know!
+But," and I turned on him in the light, "does it mean anything? Let us
+just help her all we can, and--keep away."
+
+It was a treachery past all forgiveness: I see that now. If only I had
+said, "Love on, love on: ask nothing." But I did not say it. A contempt
+of all this slow folly was in my brain that afternoon. Why couldn't the
+black cowering creature take himself off? What concern of mine was his
+sick, sheepish look? What particle of a fig did he care for Me? Had he
+lifted a little finger when I myself bitterly needed it? I seemed to be
+struggling in a net of hatred.
+
+He raised himself in his chair, his spectacles still fixed on me; as if
+some foul insect had erected its blunt head at him.
+
+"Then _you_ are against her too," he uttered, under his breath. "I might
+have known it, I might have known it. I am a lost man."
+
+It was pitiful. "Lost fiddlesticks!" I snapped back at him, with bared
+teeth. "I wouldn't--I've never harmed a fly. Who, I should like to know,
+came to _my_ help when...?" But I choked down the words. Silence fell
+between us. The idiot clock chimed five. He turned his face away to
+conceal the aversion that had suddenly overwhelmed him at sight of me.
+
+"I see," he said, in a hollow, low voice, with his old wooden,
+artificial dignity. "There's nothing more to say. I can only thank you,
+and be gone. I had not realized. You misjudge her. You haven't the----
+How could it be expected? But there! thinking's impossible."
+
+How often had I seen my poor father in his last heavy days draw his hand
+across his eyes like that? Already my fickle mind was struggling to find
+words with which to retract, to explain away that venomous outbreak. But
+I let him go. The stooping, hatted figure hastened past my window; and I
+was never to see him again.
+
+
+
+
+Chapter Twenty-Eight
+
+
+Yet, in spite of misgivings, no very dark foreboding companioned me that
+evening. With infinite labour I concocted two letters:--
+
+
+     "DEAR MR CRIMBLE,--I regret my words this afternoon. Bitterly.
+     Indeed I do. But still truth is important, isn't it? _One we know_
+     hasn't been too kind to either of us. I still say that. And if it
+     seems inconsiderate, please remember Shakespeare's lines about the
+     beetle (which I came across in a Birthday Book the other day)--a
+     creature I detest. Besides, we can return good for evil--I can't
+     help this sounding like hypocrisy--even though it is an extremely
+     tiring exchange. I _feel_ small enough just now, but would do
+     anything in the world that would help in the way we both want. I
+     hope that you will believe this and that you will forgive my
+     miserable tongue. Believe me, ever yours sincerely,--M. M."
+
+
+My second letter was addressed to Fanny's school, "c/o Miss
+Stebbings":--
+
+
+     "DEAR FANNY,--He came again to-day and looks like a corpse. I can
+     do no more. You must know how utterly miserable you are making him;
+     that I can't, and won't, go on being so doublefaced. I don't call
+     _that_ being the good Samaritan. Throw the stone one way or the
+     other, however many birds it may kill. That's the bravest thing to
+     do. A horrid boy I knew as a child once aimed at a jay and
+     killed--a wren. Well, there's only one wren that I know of--your M.
+
+     "PS.--I hope this doesn't sound an angry letter. I thought only the
+     other day how difficult it must be being as fascinating as you are.
+     And, of course, we are _what_ we are, aren't we, and cannot, I
+     suppose, help acting like that? You can't think how he looked, and
+     talked. Besides, I am sure you will enjoy your holiday much more
+     when you have made up your mind. Oh, Fanny, I can't say what's in
+     mine. Every day there's something else to dread. And all that I do
+     seems only to make things worse. _Do_ write: and, though, of
+     course, it isn't my affair, do have a '_sagacious_' holiday, too."
+
+
+Mrs Bowater almost squinted at my two small envelopes when she licked
+the stamps for me. "We can only hope," was her one remark, "that when
+the secrets of all hearts are opened, they'll excuse some of the letters
+we reach ourselves to write." But I did not ask her to explain.
+
+Lyme Regis was but a few days distant when, not for the first time since
+our meeting at Mrs Bowater's gatepost, I set off to meet Mr Anon--this
+time to share with him my wonderful news. When showers drifted across
+the sun-shafted sky we took refuge under the shelter of the
+garden-house. As soon as the hot beams set the raindrops smouldering, so
+that every bush was hung with coloured lights, we returned to my smoking
+stone. And we watched a rainbow arch and fade in the windy blue.
+
+He was gloomy at first; grudged me, I think, every moment that was to be
+mine at Lyme Regis. So I tempted him into talking about the books he had
+read; and about his childhood--far from as happy as mine. It hurt me to
+hear him speak of his mother. Then I asked him small questions about
+that wonderful country he had told me of, which, whether it had any real
+existence or not, filled me with delight as he painted it in his
+imagination. He was doing his best to keep his word to me, and I to keep
+our talk from becoming personal.
+
+If I would trust myself to him, friend to friend--he suddenly broke out
+in a thick, low voice, when I least expected it--the whole world was
+open to us; and he knew the way.
+
+"What way?" said I. "And how about poor Mrs Bowater? How strange you
+are. Where do you live? May I know?"
+
+There was an old farm-house, he told me, on the other side of the park,
+and near it a few cottages--at the far end of Loose Lane. He lodged in
+one of these. Against my wiser inclinations he persuaded me to set off
+thither at once and see the farm for myself.
+
+On the further side of Wanderslore, sprouting their pallid green
+frondlets like beads at the very tips of their black, were more yews
+than beeches. We loitered on, along the neglected bridle-path. Cuckoos
+were now in the woods, and we talked and talked, as if their voices
+alone were not seductive enough to enchant us onwards. Sometimes I
+spelled out incantations in the water; and sometimes I looked out
+happily across the wet, wayside flowers; and sometimes a robin
+flittered out to observe the intruders. How was it that human company so
+often made me uneasy and self-conscious, and nature's always brought
+peace?
+
+"Now, you said," I began again, "that they have a God, and that they are
+so simple He hasn't a name. What did you mean by that? There can't be
+one God for the common-sized, and one for--for me; now, can there? My
+mother never taught me that; and I have thought for myself." Indeed I
+had.
+
+"'God'!" he cried; "why, what is all this?"
+
+All this at that moment was a clearing in the woods, softly shimmering
+with a misty, transparent green, in whose sunbeams a thousand flies
+darted and zigzagged like motes of light, and the year's first
+butterflies fluttered and languished.
+
+"But if I speak," I said, "listen, now, my voice is just swallowed up.
+Out of just a something it faints into a nothing--dies. No, no;" (I
+suppose I was arguing only to draw him out), "all this cares no more for
+me than--than a looking-glass. Yet it is mine. Can you see Jesus Christ
+in these woods? Do you believe we are sinners and that He came to save
+us? I do. But I can see Him only as a little boy, you know, smiling,
+crystal, intangible: and yet I do not _like_ children much."
+
+He paused and stared at me fixedly. "_My_ size?" he coughed.
+
+"Oh, size," I exclaimed, "how you harp on that!"--as if _I_ never had.
+"Did you not say yourself that the smaller the body is, the happier the
+ghost in it? Bodies, indeed!"
+
+He plunged on, hands in pockets, frowning, clumsy. And up there in the
+north-west a huge cloud poured its reflected lights on his strange face.
+Inwardly--with all my wits in a pleasant scatter--I laughed; and
+outwardly (all but) danced. Solemnly taking me at my word, and as if he
+were reading out of one of his dry old books, he began to tell me his
+views about religion, and about what we are, qualities, consciousness,
+ideas, and that kind of thing. As if you could be anything at any moment
+but just that moment's whole self. At least, so it seemed then: I was
+happy. But since in his earnestness his voice became almost as false to
+itself as was Mr Crimble's when he had conversed with me about Hell, my
+eyes stole my ears from him, and only a few scattered sentences reached
+my mind.
+
+Nevertheless I enjoyed hearing him talk, and encouraged him with bits of
+questions and exclamations. Did he believe, perhaps, in the pagan
+Gods?--Mars and all that? Was there, even at this very moment, cramped
+up among the moss and the roots, a crazy, brutal Pan in the woods? And
+those delicious Nymphs and Naiads! What would he do if one beckoned to
+him?--or Pan's pipes began wheedling?
+
+"Nymphs!" he grunted, "aren't you----"
+
+"Oh," I cried, coming to a pause beside a holly-tree so marvellously
+sparkling with waterdrops on every curved spine of it that it took my
+breath away: "let's talk no more thoughts. They are only mice gnawing. I
+can hear _them_ at night."
+
+"You cannot sleep?" he inquired, with so grave a concern that I laughed
+outright.
+
+"Sleep! with that Mr Crimble on my nerves?" I gave a little nod in my
+mind to my holly, and we went on.
+
+"Crimble?" he repeated. His eyes, greenish at that moment, shot an angry
+glance at me from under their lids. "Who is he?"
+
+"A friend, a friend," I replied, "and, poor man, as they say, in love.
+Calm yourself, Mr Jealousy; not with me. I am three sizes too small.
+With Miss Bowater. But there," I went on, in dismay that mere vanity
+should have let this cat out of its bag, "that's not my secret. We
+mustn't talk of that either. What I really want to tell you is that we
+haven't much time. I am going away. Let's talk of Me. Oh, Mr Anon, shall
+I ever be born again, and belong to my own world?"
+
+It seemed a kind of mournful serenity came over his face. "You say you
+are going away"; he whispered, pointing with his finger, "and yet you
+expect me to talk about _that_."
+
+We were come to the brink of a clear rain-puddle, perhaps three or four
+feet wide, in the moss-greened, stony path, and "_that_" was the image
+of myself which lay on its surface against the far blue of the sky--the
+under-scarlet of my cape, my face, fair hair, eyes. I trembled a little.
+His own reflection troubled me more than he did himself.
+
+"Come," I said, laying a hand on his sleeve, "the time's so short, and
+indeed I _must_ see your house, you know: you have seen mine. Ah, but
+you should see Lyndsey and Chizzel Hill, and the stream in my father's
+garden. I often hear _that_ at night, Mr Anon. I would like to have died
+a child, however long I must live."
+
+But now the cloud had completely swallowed up the sun; a cold gust of
+wind swept hooting down on us, and I clung to his arm. We pushed on,
+emerged at last from the rusty gates, its eagles green and scaling, and
+came to the farm. But not in time. A cloud of hail had swirled down;
+beating on our heads and shoulders. It all but swept me up into the air.
+Catching hands, we breasted and edged on up the rough, miry lane towards
+a thatched barn, open on one side and roofing a red and blue wagon.
+Under this we scrambled, and tingling all over with the buffetings of
+the wind and the pelting of hailstones, I sat laughing and secure,
+watching, over my sodden skirts and shoes, the sweeping, pattering
+drifts paling the green.
+
+Around us in the short straw and dust stalked the farmer's fowls,
+cackling, with red-eyed glances askew at our intrusion. Ducks were
+quacking. Doves flew in with whir of wing. I thought I should boil over
+with delight. And presently a sheep-dog, ears down and tail between its
+legs, slid round the beam of the barn door. Half in, half out, it stood
+bristling, eyes fixed, head thrust out. My companion drew himself up and
+with a large stone in his hand, edged, stooping and stealthily--and very
+much, I must confess, like the picture of a Fuegian I have seen in a
+book--between the gaudy wheels of the wagon, and faced the low-growling
+beast. I watched him, enthralled. For a moment or two he and the
+sheep-dog confronted each other without stirring. Then with one sharp
+bark, the animal flung back its head, and with whitened eye, turned and
+disappeared.
+
+"Oh, _bravissimo_!" said I, mocking up at Mr Anon from under my hood.
+"He was cowed, poor thing. _I_ would have made friends with him."
+
+We sate on in the sweet, dusty scent of the stormy air. The hail turned
+to rain. The wind rose higher. I began to be uneasy. So heavily streamed
+the water out of the clouds that walking back by the way we had come
+would be utterly impossible for me. What's to be done now?--I thought to
+myself. Yet the liquid song of the rain, the gurgling sighs and
+trumpetings of the wind entranced me; and I turned softly to glance at
+my stranger. He sat, chin on large-boned hands, his lank hair plastered
+on his hollow temples by the rain, his eyes glassy in profile.
+
+"I am glad of this," he muttered dreamily, as if in response to my
+scrutiny. "We are here."
+
+A scatter of green leaf-sheaths from a hawthorn over against the barn
+was borne in by the wind.
+
+"I am glad too," I answered, "because when you are at peace, so I can
+be; for that marvellous land you tell me of is very far away. Why,
+who----?" But he broke in so earnestly that I was compelled to listen,
+confiding in me some queer wisdom he had dug up out of his books--of how
+I might approach nearer and nearer to the brink between life and
+reality, and see all things as they are, in truth, in their very selves.
+All things visible are only a veil, he said. A veil that withdraws
+itself when the mind is empty of all thoughts and desires, and the heart
+at one with itself. That is divine happiness, he said. And he told me,
+too, out of his far-fetched learning, a secret about myself.
+
+It was cold in the barn now. The fowls huddled close. Rain and wind ever
+and again drowned the low, alluring, far-away voice wandering on as if
+out of a trance. Dreams, maybe; yet I have learned since that one half
+of his tale is true; that at need even an afflicted spirit, winged for
+an instant with serenity, may leave the body and, perhaps, if lost in
+the enchantments beyond, never turn back. But I swore to keep his words
+secret between us. I had no will to say otherwise, and assured him of my
+trust in him.
+
+"My very dear," he said, softly touching my hand, but I could make no
+answer.
+
+He scrambled to his feet and peered down on me. "It is not my peace. All
+the days you are away...." He gulped forlornly and turned away his head.
+"But that is what I mean. Just nothing, all this"--he made a gesture
+with his hands as if giving himself up a captive to authority--"nothing
+but a sop to a dog."
+
+Then stooping, he drew my cape around me, banked the loose hay at my
+feet and shoulders, smiled into my face, and bidding me wait in patience
+a while, but not sleep, was gone.
+
+The warmth and odour stole over my senses. I was neither hungry nor
+thirsty, but drugged with fatigue. With a fixed smile on my face (a
+smile betokening, as I believe now, little but feminine vanity and
+satisfaction after feeding on that strange heart), my thoughts went
+wandering. The sounds of skies and earth drowsed my senses, and I nodded
+off into a nap. The grinding of wheels awoke me. From a welter of dreams
+I gazed out through the opening of the barn at a little battered cart
+and a shaggy pony. And behold, on the chopped straw and hay beside me,
+lay stretched out, nose on paw, our enemy, the sheep-dog. He thumped a
+friendly tail at me, while he growled at my deliverer.
+
+Thoughtful Mr Anon. He had not only fetched the pony-cart, but had
+brought me a bottle of hot milk and a few raisins. They warmed and
+revived me. A little light-witted after my sleep in the hay, I clambered
+up with his help into the cart and tucked myself in as snugly as I could
+with my draggled petticoats and muddy shoes. So with myself screened
+well out of sight of prying eyes, we drove off.
+
+All this long while I had not given a thought to Mrs Bowater. We stood
+before her at last in her oil-cloth passage, like Adam and Eve in the
+Garden. Her oldest bonnet on her head, she was just about to set off to
+the police station. And instead of showing her gratitude that her
+anxieties on my account were over, Mrs Bowater cast us the blackest of
+looks. Leaving Mr Anon to make our peace with her, I ran off to change
+my clothes. As I emerged from my bedroom, he entered at the door, in an
+old trailing pilot coat many sizes too large for him, and I found to my
+astonishment that he and my landlady had become the best of friends. I
+marvelled. This little achievement of Mr Anon's made me _like_ him--all
+of a burst--ten times as much, I believe, as he would have been
+contented that I should _love_ him.
+
+Indeed the "high tea" Mrs Bowater presided over that afternoon, sitting
+above her cups and saucers just like a clergyman, is one of the gayest
+memories of my life. And yet--she had left the room for a moment to
+fetch something from the kitchen, and as, in a self-conscious hush, Mr
+Anon and I sat alone together, I caught a glimpse of her on her return
+pausing in the doorway, her capped head almost touching the lintel--and
+looking in on us with a quizzical, benign, foolish expression on her
+face, like that of a grown-up peeping into a child's dolls' house. So
+swirling a gust of hatred and disillusionment swept over me at sight of
+her, that for some little while I dared not raise my eyes and look at Mr
+Anon. All affection and gratitude fled away. Miss M. was once more an
+Ishmael!
+
+
+
+
+Lyme Regis
+
+
+
+
+Chapter Twenty-Nine
+
+
+Out of a cab from a livery stable Mrs Bowater and I alighted at our
+London terminus next morning, to find positively awaiting us beside the
+wooden platform a first-class railway carriage--a palatial apartment.
+Swept and garnished, padded and varnished--a miracle of wealth! At this
+very moment I seem to be looking up in awe at the orange-rimmed (I think
+it was orange) label stuck on the glass whose inscription I afterwards
+spelled out backwards from within: "Mrs Bywater and Party." As soon as
+we and our luggage were safely settled, an extremely polite and fatherly
+guard locked the door on us. At this Mrs Bowater was a little troubled
+by the thought of how we should fare in the event of an accident. But he
+reassured her.
+
+"Never fear, ma'am: accidents are strictly forbidden on this line.
+Besides _which_," he added, with a solemn, turtle-like stare, "if I turn
+the key on the young lady, none of them young a-ogling Don Jooans can
+force their way in. Strict orders, ma'am."
+
+To make assurance doubly sure, Mrs Bowater pulled down the blinds at
+every stopping-place. We admired the scenery. We read the warning
+against pickpockets, and I translated it out of the French. After
+examining the enormous hotels depicted in the advertisements, we agreed
+there was nothing like home comforts. Mrs Bowater continued to lose and
+find in turn our tickets, her purse, her spectacle-case, her cambric
+pocket-handkerchief, not to mention a mysterious little screw of paper,
+containing lozenges I think. She scrutinized our luxury with grim
+determination. And we giggled like two school-girls as we peeped
+together through the crevices of the blinded windows at the rich, furry
+passengers who ever and again hurried along, casting angry glances at
+our shrouded windows.
+
+It being so early in the year--but how mild and sweet a day--there were
+few occupants of the coach at Axminster. As I had once made a
+(frequently broken) vow to do at once what scared me, I asked to be
+perched up on the box beside the lean, brick-faced driver. Thus giddily
+exalted above his three cantering roan horses, we bowled merrily along.
+With his whip he pointed out to me every "object of interest" as it went
+floating by--church and inn, farm and mansion.
+
+"Them's peewits," he would bawl. "And that's the selfsame cottage where
+lived the little old 'ooman what lived in a shoe." He stooped over me,
+reins in fist, with his seamed red face and fiery little eye, as if I
+were a small child home for the holidays. Evening sunlight on the
+hill-tops and shadowy in the valleys. And presently the three stepping
+horses--vapour jetting from their nostrils, their sides panting like
+bellows--dragged the coach up a hill steeper than ever. "And that
+there," said the driver, as we surmounted the crest--and as if for
+emphasis he gave a prodigious tug at an iron bar beside him, "that
+there's the Sea."
+
+The Sea. Flat, bow-shaped, hazed, remote, and of a blue stilling my eyes
+as with a dream--I verily believe the saltest tears I ever shed in my
+life smarted on my lids as the spirit in me fled away, to be alone with
+that far loveliness. A desire almost beyond endurance devoured me.
+"Yes," cried hidden self to self, "I can never, never love him; but he
+shall take me away--away--away. Oh, how I have wasted my days, sick for
+home."
+
+But small opportunity was given me for these sentimental reflections.
+Nearly at the foot of even another hill, and one so precipitous that
+during its rattling descent I had to cling like a spider to the driver's
+strap, we came to a standstill; and in face of a gaping knot of
+strangers I was lifted down--with a "There! Miss Nantuckety," from the
+driver--from my perch to the pavement.
+
+The lodgings Mrs Monnerie had taken for us proved to be the sea rooms in
+a small, white, bow-windowed house on the front, commanding the
+fishing-boats, the harbour, and the stone Cobb. I tasted my lips,
+snuffed softly with my nose, stole a look over the Bay, and glanced at
+Mrs Bowater. Was she, too, half-demented with this peculiar and
+ravishing experience? I began to shiver; but not with cold, with
+delight. Face creased up in a smile (the wind had stiffened the skin),
+cheeks tingling, and ravenously hungry, I watched the ceremonious
+civilities that were passing between landlady and landlady: Mrs Bowater
+angular and spare; Mrs Petrie round, dumpy, smooth, and a little bald.
+My friend Mrs Monnerie was evidently a lady whose lightest word was
+Sesame. Every delicacy and luxury that Lyme out of its natural resources
+can have squandered on King George III. was ours without the asking.
+
+Mrs Bowater, it is true, at our sea-fish breakfast next morning,
+referred in the first place to the smell of drains; next to fleas; and
+last to greasy cooking. But who should have the privilege of calling the
+Kettle black unless the Pot? Moreover, we were "first-class" visitors,
+and _had_ to complain of something. I say "we"; but since, in the first
+place, all the human houses that I have ever entered have been less
+sweet to the nose than mere country out-of-doors; since next (as I
+discovered when I was a child) there must be some ichor or acid in my
+body unpleasing to man's parasites; and since, last, I cannot bear
+cooked animals; these little inconveniences, even if they had not
+existed solely in Mrs Bowater's fancy, would not have troubled me.
+
+The days melted away. We would sally out early, while yet many of Lyme's
+kitchen chimneys were smokeless, and would return with the shadows of
+evening. How Mrs Bowater managed to sustain so large a frame for so many
+hours together on a few hard biscuits and a bottle of cold tea, I cannot
+discover. Her mood, like our weather that April, was almost always "set
+fair," and her temper never above a comfortable sixty degrees. We hired
+a goat-chaise, and with my flaxen hair down my back under a sunbonnet, I
+drove Reuben up and down the Esplanade--both of us passable
+ten-year-olds to a careless observer. My cheeks and hands were scorched
+by the sun; Mrs Bowater added more and more lilac and white to her
+outdoor attire; and Mrs Petrie lent her a striped, and once handsome
+parasol with a stork's head for handle, which had been left behind by a
+visitor--otherwise unendeared.
+
+On warm mornings we would choose some secluded spot on the beach, or on
+the fragrant, green-turfed cliffs, or in the Uplyme meadows. Though I
+could never persuade Mrs Bowater to join me, I sometimes dabbled in the
+sun in some ice-cold, shallow, seaweedy pool between the rocks. Then,
+while she read the newspaper, or crocheted, I also, over book or
+needle, indulged in endless reverie. For hours together, with eyes
+fixed on the glass-green, tumbling water, I would listen to its
+enormous, far, phantom bells and voices, happier than words can tell.
+And I would lie at full length, basking in the heat, for it was a hot
+May, almost wishing that the huge furnace of the sun would melt me away
+into a little bit of glass: and what colour would that have been, I
+wonder? If a small heart can fall in love with the whole world, that
+heart was mine. But the very intensity of this greed and delight--and
+the tiniest shell or pebble on the beach seemed to be all but exploding
+with it--was a severe test of my strength.
+
+One late twilight, I remember, as we idled homeward, the planet Venus
+floating like a luminous water-drop in the primrose of the western sky,
+we passed by a low white-walled house beneath trees. And from an open
+window came into the quiet the music of a fiddle. What secret decoy was
+in that air I cannot say. I stopped dead, looking about me as if for
+refuge, and drinking in the while the gliding, lamenting sounds.
+
+Curiously perturbed, I caught at Mrs Bowater's skirt. Sky and darkening
+headland seemed to be spinning around me--melting out into a dream. "Oh,
+Mrs Bowater," I whispered, as if I were drowning, "it is strange for us
+to be here."
+
+She dropped herself on the grass beside me, brushing with her dress the
+scent of wild thyme into the dewy air, and caught my hands in hers. Her
+long face close to mine, she gently shook me; "Now, now; now, now!" she
+called. "Come back, my pretty one. See! It's me, me, Mrs Bowater.... The
+love she's been to me!"
+
+I smiled, groped with my hand, opened my eyes in the dimness to answer
+her. But a black cloud came over them; and the next thing I recall is
+waking to find myself being carried along in her arms, cold and half
+lifeless; and she actually breaking ever and again into a shambling run,
+as she searched my face in what seemed, even to my scarcely conscious
+brain, an extravagant anxiety.
+
+
+Four days afterwards--and I completely restored--we found on the
+breakfast table of our quiet sea-room an unusually bountiful post: a
+broad, impressive-looking letter and a newspaper for Mrs Bowater, and a
+parcel, from Fanny, for me. Time and distance had divided me from the
+past more than I had supposed. The very sight of her handwriting gave
+me a qualm. "Fanny! Oh, my Heavens," cried a voice in me, "what's wrong
+now?"
+
+But removing the brown paper I found only a book, and it being near to
+my size as books go, I opened it with profound relief. My joy was
+premature. The book Fanny had sent me was by Bishop Jeremy Taylor, _Holy
+Living and Dying: with Prayers containing the Whole Duty of a
+Christian_. I read over and over this title with a creeping misgiving
+and dismay, and almost in the same instant, detected, lightly fastened
+between its fly-leaves, and above its inscription--"To Midgetina: In
+Memoriam"--an inch or two of paper, pencilled over in Fanny's minutest
+characters.
+
+A slow, furtive glance discovered Mrs Bowater far too deeply absorbed to
+have noticed my small movements. She was sitting bolt upright, her
+forehead drawn crooked in an unusual frown. An open letter lay beside
+her plate. She was staring into, rather than at, her newspaper. With
+infinite stealth I slipped Fanny's scrap of paper under the tablecloth,
+folded it small, and pushed it into my skirt pocket. "A present from
+Fanny," I cried in a clear voice at last.
+
+But Mrs Bowater, with drooping, pallid face, and gaze now fixed deep on
+a glass-case containing three stuffed, aquatic birds, had not heard me.
+I waited, watching her. She folded the newspaper and removed her
+spectacles. "On our return," she began inconsequently, "the honourable
+Mrs Monnerie has invited you to stay in her London house--not for a week
+or two; for good. That's all as it should be, I suppose, seeing that
+pay's pay and mine is no other call on you."
+
+The automatic voice ceased with a gasp. Her thoughts appeared to be
+astray. She pushed her knotted fingers up her cheeks almost to her eyes.
+
+"It's said," she added with long, straight mouth, "that that unfortunate
+young man, Mr Crimble--is ill." She gave a glance at me without
+appearing to see me, and left the room.
+
+What was amiss? Oh, this world! I sat trembling in empty dread,
+listening to her heavy, muffled footfall in the room above. The
+newspaper, with a scrawling cross on its margin, lay beside Mrs
+Monnerie's large, rough-edged envelope. I could bear the suspense no
+longer. On hands and knees I craned soundlessly forward over the white
+tablecloth, across the rank dish of coagulating bacon fat, and stole one
+or two of the last few lines of grey-black print at the foot of the
+column: "The reverend gentleman leaves a widowed mother. He was an only
+son, and was in his twenty-ninth year."
+
+"Leaves"; "was"--the dingy letters blurred my sight. Footsteps were
+approaching. I huddled back to my carpet stool on the chair. Mrs Petrie
+had come to clear away the breakfast things. Stonily I listened while
+she cheerfully informed me that the glass was still rising, that she
+didn't recollect such weather not for the month for ten years or more.
+"You must be what I've heard called an 'alcyon, miss." She nodded her
+congratulations at me, and squinnied at the untasted bacon.
+
+"I am going for a breath of air, Mrs Petrie," came Mrs Bowater's voice
+through the crack of the door. "Will you kindly be ready for your walk,
+miss, in half an hour?"
+
+Left once more to myself, I heard the "alarm" clock on the mantelpiece
+ticking as if every beat were being forced out of its works, and might
+be its last. An early fly or two--my strange, familiar friends--darted
+soundlessly beneath the ceiling. The sea was shimmering like an immense
+looking-glass. More pungent than I had ever remembered it, the
+refreshing smell of seaweed eddied in at the open window.
+
+With dry mouth and a heart that jerked my body with its beatings, I
+unfolded Fanny's scrap of paper:--
+
+
+     "WISE M.,--I have thrown the stone. And now I am fey for my own
+     poor head. Could you--and--will you absolutely secretly send me any
+     money you can spare? L15 if possible. I'm in a hole--full fathom
+     five--but mean to get out of it. I ask _you_, rather than mother,
+     because I remember you said once you were putting money by out of
+     that young lady's independence of yours. Notes would be best: if
+     not, a Post Office Order to this address, _somehow_. I must trust
+     to luck, and to your wonderful enterprise, if you would be truly a
+     dear. It's only until my next salary. If you can't--or won't--help
+     me, damnation is over my head: but I bequeathe you a kiss all honey
+     and roses none the less, and am, _pro tem._, your desperate F.
+
+     "PS.--Be sure not to give M. this address: and in a week or two we
+     shall all be laughing and weeping together over the Prodigal
+     Daughter."
+
+
+Fanny, then, had not heard our morning news. I read her scribble again
+and again for the least inkling of it, my thoughts in disorder. That
+sprawling cross on the newspaper; this gibbering and dancing as of a
+skeleton before my eyes; and "the stone," "the stone." What did it mean?
+The word echoed on in my head as if it had been shouted in a vault. I
+was deadly frightened and sick, stood up as if to escape, and found only
+my own distorted face in Mrs Petrie's flower-and-butterfly-painted
+chimney glass.
+
+"You, you!" my eyes cried out on me. And a furious storm--remorse,
+grief, horror-broke within. I knew the whole awful truth. Like a Shade
+in the bright light, Mr Crimble stood there beyond the table, not
+looking at me, its face turned away. Unspeakable misery bowed my
+shoulders, chilled my skin.
+
+"But you said 'ill,'" I whispered angrily up at last at Mrs Bowater's
+bonneted figure in the doorway. "I have looked where the cross is. He is
+dead!"
+
+She closed the door with both hands and seated herself on a chair beside
+it.
+
+"I've trapsed that Front, miss--striving to pick up the ends. It doesn't
+bear thinking of: that poor, misguided young man. It's hid away...."
+
+"What did he die of, Mrs Bowater?" I demanded.
+
+She caught at the newspaper, folded it close, nodded, shook her head.
+"Four nights ago," she said. And still, some one last shred of
+devotion--not of fidelity, not of fear, for I longed to pour out my
+heart to her--sealed my lips. _Holy Living and Dying: Holy Living and
+Dying:_ I read over and over the faded gilt letters on the cover of
+Fanny's gift, and she in her mockery, desperate, too. "Damnation"--the
+word echoed on in my brain.
+
+But poor Mrs Bowater was awaiting no confession from me. She had
+out-trapsed her strength. When next I looked round at her, the bonneted
+head lay back against the rose-garlanded wallpaper, the mouth ajar, the
+eyelids fluttering. It was my turn now--to implore her to "come back":
+and failing to do so, I managed at last to clamber up and tug at the
+bell-pull.
+
+
+
+
+Chapter Thirty
+
+
+I surveyed with horror the recumbent, angular figure stretched out on
+the long, narrow, horsehair sofa. The shut eyes--it was selfish to leave
+me like this.
+
+"There, miss, don't take on," Mrs Petrie was saying. "The poor thing's
+coming round now. Slipping dead off out of things--many's the time I've
+wished I could--even though you _have_ come down for a bit of
+pleasuring."
+
+But it was Lyme Regis's solemn, round-shouldered doctor who reassured
+me. At first sight of him I knew Mrs Bowater was not going to die. He
+looked down on her, politely protesting that she must not attempt to get
+up. "This unseasonable heat, perhaps. The heart, of course, not so
+strong as it might be." He ordered her complete rest in bed for a few
+days--light nourishment, no worry, and he would look in again. Me he had
+not detected under the serge window-curtain, though he cast an uneasy
+glance around him, I fancied, on leaving the room.
+
+After remaining alone under the still, sunshiny window until I could
+endure it no longer, I climbed up the steep, narrow stairs to Mrs
+Bowater's bedroom, and sat a while clasping the hand that hung down from
+the bed. The blind gently ballooned in the breeze. Raying lights circled
+across the ceiling, as carriage and cart glided by on the esplanade.
+Fearful lest even my finger-tips should betray me to the flat shape
+beneath the counterpane, I tried hard to think. My mind was in a whirl
+of fears and forebodings; but there was but one thing, supremely urgent,
+facing me now. I must forget my own miseries, and somehow contrive to
+send Fanny the money she needed.
+
+_Somehow_; but how? The poor little hoard which I had saved from my
+quarterly allowances lay locked up on Beechwood Hill in my box beneath
+my bed. By what conceivable means could I regain possession of it,
+unknown to Mrs Bowater?
+
+Conscience muttered harsh words in my ear as I sat there holding that
+cold, limp hand with mine, while these inward schemings shuttled softly
+to and fro.
+
+When my patient had fallen asleep, I got downstairs again--a more
+resolute, if not a better woman. Removing latch and box keys from their
+ribbon round my neck, I enclosed them in an envelope with a letter:--
+
+
+     "DEAR MR. ANON,--I want you, please, to help me. The large one of
+     these two keys unlocks my little house door: the smaller one a box
+     under my bed. Would you please let yourself in at Mrs Bowater's
+     to-morrow evening when it's dark--there will be nobody there--take
+     out Twenty Pounds which you will find in the box, and send them to
+     _Miss Fanny Bowater, the Crown and Anchor Hotel, B----_. I will
+     thank you when I come.
+
+     "Believe me, yours very sincerely,
+
+     "M. M."
+
+
+It is curious. Many a false, pandering word had sprung to my tongue when
+I was concocting this letter in my mind beside Mrs Bowater's bed, and
+even with Mrs Petrie's stubby, ink-corroded pen in my hand. Yet some
+last shred of honesty compelled me to be brief and frigid. I was simply
+determined to be utterly open with _him_, even though I seemed to myself
+like the dark picture of a man in a bog struggling to grope his way out.
+I dipped my fingers into a vase of wallflowers, wetted the gum, sealed
+down the envelope, and wrote on it this address: Mr ----, Lodging at a
+cottage near the Farm, North-west of Wanderslore, Beechwood, Kent. And I
+prayed heaven for its safe delivery.
+
+For Fanny no words would come--nothing but a mere bare promise that I
+would help her as soon as I could--an idiot's message. The next three
+days were an almost insupportable solitude. From Mr Anon no answer could
+be expected, since in my haste I had forgotten to give him Mrs Petrie's
+address. I brooded in horror of what the failure of my letter to reach
+him might entail. I shared Fanny's damnation. Wherever I went, a silent
+Mr Crimble dogged my footsteps. Meanwhile, Mrs Bowater's newspaper, I
+discovered, lay concealed beneath her pillow.
+
+At length I could bear myself no longer, and standing beside her bed,
+asked if I might read it. Until that moment we had neither of us even
+referred to the subject. Propped up on her pillows, her long face
+looking a strange colour against their whiteness, she considered my
+request.
+
+"Well, miss," she said at last, "you know too much to know no more."
+
+I spread out the creased sheets on the worn carpet, and read slowly the
+smudged, matter-of-fact account from beginning to end. There were
+passages in it that imprinted themselves on my memory like a photograph.
+Mr Crimble had taken the evening Service that last day looking "ill and
+worn, though never in what may be described as robust health, owing to
+his indefatigable devotion to his ecclesiastical and parochial duties."
+The Service over, and the scanty congregation dispersed, he had sate
+alone in the vestry for so unusual a time that the verger of St Peter's,
+a Mr Soames, anxious to get home to his supper, had at length looked in
+on him at the door, to ask if his services were required any further. Mr
+Crimble had "raised his head as if startled," and "had smiled in the
+negative," and then, "closing the eastern door behind him," had
+"hastened" out of the church. No other human eye had encountered him
+until he was found at 11.27 p.m. in an outhouse at the foot of his
+mother's garden. "The head of the unfortunate gentleman was wellnigh
+severed from the body." "He was an only son, and was in his twenty-ninth
+year. Universal sympathy will be extended by all to the aged lady who is
+prostrated by this tragic occurrence."
+
+Propped on my hands and knees, fearful that Mrs Bowater might interrupt
+me before I was prepared, I stared fixedly at the newspaper. I
+understood all that it said, yet it was as strange to me as if it had
+been written in Hebrew. I had seen, I had known, Mr Crimble. Who, then,
+was this? My throat drew together as I turned my head a little and
+managed to inquire, "What is an inquest, Mrs Bowater?"
+
+"Fretting out the why's and wherefore's," came the response, muffled by
+a handkerchief pressed close to her mouth.
+
+"And--_this_ 'why'?" I whispered, stooping low.
+
+"That's between him and his Maker," said the voice. "The poor young man
+had set his heart on we know where. As we make our bed so we must lie on
+it, miss. It's for nobody to judge: though it may be a lesson."
+
+"Oh, Mrs Bowater, then you knew I knew."
+
+"No, no. Not _your_ lesson, miss. I didn't mean that. It's not for you
+to fret yourself, though I must say---- I have always made it a habit,
+though without prying, please God, to be aware of more than interference
+could set right. Fanny and I have talked the affair over till we
+couldn't look in each other's faces for fear of what we might say. But
+she's _Mr_ Bowater's child, through and through, and my firm hand was
+not firm enough, maybe. You did what you could. It's not in human
+conscience to ask more than the natural frame can bear."
+
+Did what I could.... I cowered, staring at my knuckles, and it seemed
+that a little concourse of strangers, heads close together, were talking
+in my mind. My eyes were dry; I think the spectre of a smile had dragged
+up my lips. Mrs Bowater raised herself in her bed, and peered over at
+me.
+
+"It's the letters," she whispered at me. "If he hasn't destroyed them,
+they'll be read to the whole parish."
+
+I crouched lower. "You'll be thankful to be rid of me. I shall be
+thankful to be rid of myself, Mrs Bowater."
+
+She thrust a long, skinny arm clean out of the bed. "Come away, there;
+come away," she cried.
+
+"Oh," I said, "take me away, take me away. I can't bear it, Mrs Bowater.
+I don't _want_ to be alive."
+
+"There, miss, rest now, and think no more." She smoothed my hair,
+clucked a little low, whistling tune, as if for lullaby. "Why, there
+now," she muttered sardonically, "you might almost suppose I had been a
+mother myself!"
+
+There was silence between us for a while, then, quietly raising herself,
+she looked down at me on the pillow, and, finding me to be still awake,
+a long smile spread over her face: "Why, we don't seem neither of us to
+be much good at daytime sleeping."
+
+
+
+
+Chapter Thirty-One
+
+
+A morning or two afterwards we set out on our homeward journey--the sea
+curdling softly into foam on its stones, a solitary ship in the distance
+on its dim, blue horizon. We were a dejected pair of travellers, keeping
+each a solemn face turned aside at the window, thinking our thoughts,
+and avoiding, as far as we could, any interchange of looks that might
+betray them one to the other. For the first time in our friendship Mrs
+Bowater was a little short and impatient with me over difficulties and
+inconveniences which I could not avoid, owing to my size.
+
+Her key in the lock of the door, she looked down on me in the porch, a
+thin smile between nose and cheek. "No place like home there mayn't be,
+miss," she began, "but----" The dark passage was certainly uninviting;
+the clock had stopped. "I think I'll be calling round for Henry," she
+added abruptly.
+
+I entered the stagnant room, ran up my stairs, my heart with me--and
+paused. Not merely my own ghost was there to meet me; but a past that
+seemed to mutter, Never again, never again, from every object on shelf
+and wall. Yet a faint, sweet, unfamiliar odour lay on the chilly air. I
+drew aside the curtain and looked in. Fading on the coverlet of my bed
+lay a few limp violets, ivory white and faintly rosy.
+
+I was alone in the house, concealed now even from Mr Bowater's frigid
+stare. Yet at sight of these flowers a slight vertigo came over me, and
+I had to sit on my bed for a moment to recover myself.
+
+Then I knelt down, my heart knocking against my side, and dragged from
+out its hiding-place the box in which I kept my money. Gritty with the
+undisturbed dust of our absence, it was locked. I drew back, my hand on
+my mouth. What could be the meaning of this? My stranger had come and
+gone. Had he been so stupidly punctilious that, having taken out the
+twenty pounds, he had relocked an almost empty box?
+
+Or had he, at the last moment...? This riddle distressed me so much
+that instantly I was seized with a violent headache. But nothing could
+be done for the present. I laid by the violets in a drawer, pushed back
+the box, and, making as good a pretence at eating my supper as I could,
+prepared for the night.
+
+One by one the clocks in hall and kitchen struck out the hours, and, the
+wind being in the East, borne on it came the chimes of St Peter's.
+Automatically I counted the strokes, turning this way and that, as if my
+life depended on this foolish arithmetic, yet ready, like Job, to curse
+the day I was born. What had my existence been but a blind futility, my
+thought for others but a mask of egotism and selfishness? Yet, in all
+this turmoil of mind, I must have slept, for suddenly I found myself
+stiff, drawn-up, and wideawake--listening to a cautious, reiterated
+tapping against my window-pane. A tallow night-light burned beside me in
+a saucer of water. For the first time in my life--at least since
+childhood--I had been afraid to face the dark. Why, I know not; but I at
+once leapt out of bed and blew out that light. The night was moonless,
+but high and starry. I peered through the curtains, and a shrouded
+figure became visible in the garden--Fanny's.
+
+Curtain withdrawn, we looked each at each through the cold, dividing
+glass in the gloom--her eyes, in the night-spread pallor of her skin, as
+if congealed. The dark lips, with an exaggerated attempt at
+articulation, murmured words, but I could catch no meaning. The face
+looked almost idiotic in these contortions. I shuddered, shook my head
+violently. She drew back.
+
+Terrified that she would be gone--in my dressing-gown and slippers I
+groped my way across the room and was soon, with my door open, in the
+night air. She had heard me, and with a beckon of her finger, turned as
+if to lead me on.
+
+"No, no," I signalled, "I have no key." With a gesture, she drew close,
+stooped, and we talked there together, muttering in the porch.
+
+"Midgetina," she whispered, smiling bleakly, "it's this wretched money.
+I must explain. I'm at my wit's end--in awful trouble--without it."
+
+Huddled close, I wasted no time in asking questions. She must come in.
+But this she flatly refused to do. Yet money, money was her one cry:
+and that she must have before she saw her mother again. Not daring to
+tell her that I was in doubt whether or not my savings were still in my
+possession, I pushed her hand away as she knelt before me on the
+uppermost step. "I must fetch it," I said.
+
+By good fortune my money-box was not the weightiest of my grandfather's
+French trunks--not the brass-bound friend-in-need of my younger days,
+and it contained little but paper. I hoisted it on to my bed, and, as I
+had lately seen the porters do at the railway station, contrived to push
+under it and raise it on to my shoulder. Its edge drove in on my
+collar-bone till I thought it must snap. Thus laden, I staggered
+cautiously down the staircase, pushed slowly across the room, and, so,
+out into the passage and towards the rounded and dusky oblong of the
+open door.
+
+On the threshold Fanny met me, gasping under this burden, and at sight
+of me some blessed spirit within her seemed to give her pause. "No, no,"
+she muttered, and drew back as if suddenly ashamed of her errand. On I
+came, however, and prudence prevailed. With a sound that might have been
+sigh or sob she snatched the load from me and gathered it in, as best
+she could, under her cloak.
+
+"Oh, Midgetina!" she whispered meaninglessly. "Now we must talk." And
+having wedged back the catch of my door, we moved quickly and cautiously
+in the direction of Wanderslore.
+
+
+We climbed on up the quiet hill. The cool, fragrant, night seemed to be
+luring us on and on, to swallow us up. Yet, _there_ shone the customary
+stars; there, indeed, to my amazement, as if the heavenly clock of the
+universe had set back its hands on my behalf, straddled the
+constellation of Orion.
+
+Come to our beech-tree, now a vast indistinguishable tent of whispering,
+silky leaves, Fanny seated herself upon a jutting root, and I stood
+panting before her.
+
+"Well?" she said, with a light, desolate laugh.
+
+"Oh, Fanny, 'well'!" I cried.
+
+"Can't you trust me?"
+
+"Trust you?"
+
+"Oh, oh, mocking-bird!--with all these riches?"
+
+I cast a glance up into the leafy branches, and seated myself opposite
+to her.
+
+"Fanny, Fanny. Have you heard?"
+
+"'Heard,' she says!" It was her turn to play the parrot. "What am I here
+for, but to hear more? But never mind; that's all over. Has mother----"
+
+"'All over,' Fanny!" I interrupted her. "All over? But, the letters?"
+
+"What letters?" She stared at me, and added, looking away, "Oh, mine?"
+She gave out the word with a long, inexhaustible sigh. "That was all
+right. He did not hide, he burned.... Neither to nor from; not even to
+his mother. Every paper destroyed. I envy _her_ feelings! He just gave
+up, went out, _Exit_. I envy that, too."
+
+"Not even to you, Fanny? Not a word even to you?"
+
+The figure before me crouched a little closer together. "They said," was
+her evasive reply, "that there is melancholia in the family."
+
+I think the word frightened me even more than its meaning.
+"Melancholia," I repeated the melodious syllables. "Oh, Fanny!"
+
+"Listen, Midgetina," her voice broke out coldly. "I can guess easily
+enough what's saving up for me when I come home--which won't be yet a
+while, I can assure you. I can guess, too, what your friends, Lady
+Pollacke and Co., are saying about me. _Let_ them rave. That can't be
+helped. I shall bear it, and try to grin. Maybe there would be worse
+still, if worse were known. But your worse I won't have, not even from
+you. I was not his keeper. I did _not_ play him false. I deny it. Could
+I prevent him--caring for me? Was he man enough to come openly? Did he
+say to his mother, 'Take her or leave her, I mean to have her'--as _I_
+would have done? No, he blew hot and cold. He temporized; he--he was a
+coward. Oh, this everlasting dog-fight between body and mind! Ages
+before you ever crept upon the scene he pestered and pestered me--until
+I have almost retched at the sound of church bells. What was it, I ask
+you, but sheer dread of what the man might go and _do_ that kept me
+shilly-shallying? And what's more, Miss Wren, who told me to throw the
+stone? Pff, it sickens me, this paltering world. I can't and won't see
+things but with my reason. My reason, I tell you. What else is a
+schoolma'am for? Did he want me for _my_ sake? Who begged and begged
+that his beautiful love should be kept secret? There was once a
+philosopher called Plato, my dear. He poisoned Man's soul."
+
+Flesh and spirit, Fanny must have been very tired. Her voice fluttered
+on like a ragged flag.
+
+"But listen, listen!" I entreated her. "I haven't blamed you for that,
+Fanny. I swear it. I mean, you can't help _not_ loving. I know that. But
+perhaps if only we had---- It's a dreadful thing to think of him sitting
+there alone--the vestry--and then looking up 'with a smile.' Oh, Fanny,
+with a smile! I dare hardly go into his mind--and the verger looking in.
+I think of him all day."
+
+"And I all night," came the reply, barked out in the gloom. "Wasn't the
+man a Christian, then?"
+
+"Fanny," I covered my eyes. "Don't say that. We shall both of us just
+suffocate in the bog if you won't even let yourself listen to what you
+are saying."
+
+"Well," she said doggedly, "be sure you shall suffocate last, Miss
+Midge. There's ample perch-room for you on Fanny's shoulder." I felt,
+rather than saw, the glance almost of hatred that she cast at me from
+under her brows.
+
+"Mock as you like at me," was my miserable answer, "I have kept my word
+to you--all but: and it was I who helped--Oh yes, I know that."
+
+"Ah! 'all but,'" her agile tongue caught up the words. "And what else,
+may I ask?"
+
+I took a deep breath, with almost sightless eyes fixed on the beautiful,
+mysterious glades stretching beneath us. "He came again. Why, it was not
+very many days ago. And we talked and talked, and I grew tired, yes, and
+angry at last. I told him you were only making use of me. You were. I
+said that all we could do was just to go on loving you--and keep away. I
+know, Fanny, I cannot be of any account; I don't understand very much.
+But that is true."
+
+
+She leaned nearer, as if incredulous, her face as tranquil in its
+absorption as the planet that hung in the russet-black sky in a rift of
+the leaves.
+
+"Candid, and candid," she scoffed brokenly, and all in a gasp.
+
+The voice trailed off. Her mouth relaxed. And suddenly my old love for
+her seemed to gush back into my heart. A burning, inarticulate pity rose
+up in me.
+
+"Listen, Midgetina," she went on. "That was honest. And I can be honest,
+too. I don't care _what_ you said. If you had called me the vilest word
+they can set their tongue to, I'd still have forgiven you. But would you
+have me give in? Go under? Have you ever _seen_ Mother Grundy? I tell
+you, he haunts me--the blackness, the deadness. That outhouse! Do you
+suppose I can't see inside that? He sits by my bed. I eat his shadow
+with my food. At every corner in the street his black felt hat bobs and
+disappears. If even he hadn't been so solemn, so insignificant!..." Her
+low, torturing laugh shook under the beechen hollow.
+
+"And I say this"--she went on slowly, as if I sat at a distance, "if
+he's not very careful I shall go the same way. I can't bear that--_that_
+kind of spying on me. Don't you suppose you can sin _after_ death? If
+only he had given me away--betrayed me! We should at least have been
+square. But that," she jerked back her head. "That's only one thing. I
+had not meant to humble myself like this. You seem not to care what
+humiliations I have to endure. You sit there, oh, how absurd for me,
+watching and watching me, null and void and meaningless. Yet you are
+human: you feel. You said you loved me--oh, yes. But touch me, come
+here"--she laid her hand almost fondly on her breast--"and be humanly
+generous, no. That's no more your nature than--than a changeling's.
+Contamination, perhaps!"
+
+Her eyes fretted round her, as if she had lost her sense of direction.
+
+"And now there's this tongueless, staring ghost." She shuddered, hiding
+her face in her hands. "The misery of it all."
+
+"Fanny, Fanny," I besought her. "You know I love you." But the words
+sounded cold and distant, and some deadly disinclination held me where I
+was, though I longed to comfort her. "And at times, I confess it, I have
+hated you too. You haven't always been very kind to me. I was trying to
+cure myself. You were curing me. But still I go on--a little."
+
+"It's useless, useless," she replied, dropping her hands into her lap
+and gazing vacantly on the ground. "I can't care; I can't even cry. And
+all you say is only pity. I don't want that. Would you still pity me, I
+wonder, if you knew that even though I had come to take this wretched
+money from you, I meant to taunt you, to accuse you of lying to me?"
+
+"Taunt," "lying." My cheek grew hot. I drew back my head with a jerk and
+stared at her. "I don't understand you."
+
+"There. What did I say! She doesn't understand me," she cried with a
+sob, as if calling on the angels to bear witness to her amazement.
+"Well, then, let Fanny tell you, Miss M., whoever and whatever you may
+be, that she, yes, even she, can understand that unearthliness, too. Oh,
+these last days! I have had my fill of them. Take all: give nothing.
+There's no other means of grace in a world like this."
+
+"But you said 'taunt' me," I insisted, with eyes fixed on the box that
+lay between the blunt-headed fronds of the springing bracken. "What did
+you mean by that? I did my best. Your mother was ill. She fainted,
+Fanny, when the newspaper came. I couldn't come back a single hour
+earlier. So I wrote to--to a friend, sending him my keys, and asking him
+to find the money for you. I know my letter reached him. Perhaps," I
+hesitated, in dread of what might be hanging over our heads, "perhaps
+the box is empty."
+
+But I need not have wasted myself. The puzzle was not quite
+inexplicable. For the moment Fanny's miseries seemed to have vanished.
+Animation came into her face and voice and movements as she told me how,
+the night before, thinking that her mother and I might have returned
+from Lyme Regis, she had come tapping. And suddenly as she stood in the
+garden, her face close to the glass, an utterly strange one had thrust
+itself into view, and the figure of "a ghastly gloating little dwarfish
+creature" had appeared in the porch.
+
+At first she had supposed--but only for an instant--that it was myself.
+"Of course, mother had mentioned him in her letters, but"--and Fanny
+opened her eyes at me--"I never guessed he was, well, like _that_."
+
+Then in her folly, and without giving him the least opportunity to
+explain his presence there, she had begun railing at him, and had
+accused him of forcing his way in to rob the house: "And he stood
+there, hunched up, looking at me--out of my own house." The very picture
+of Fanny helplessly standing there at her own door, and of these two
+facing each other like that in the porch--this ridiculous end to my fine
+stratagem, filled me with a miserable amusement. I leaned back my head
+where I sat, shrilly and dismally laughing and laughing, until tears
+sprang pricklingly into my eyes. If any listener had been abroad in the
+woods that night, he would, I think, have hastened his departure.
+
+But Fanny seemed to be shocked at my levity. She peered anxiously into
+the clear night-glooms around us.
+
+"And what!" I said, still striving to regain command over myself. "What
+happened then? Oh, Fanny, not a policeman?"
+
+But her memory of what had followed was confused, or perhaps she had no
+wish to be too exact. All that I could win from her for certain was that
+after an angry and bitter talk between herself and Mr Anon, he had
+simply slammed my door behind him and dared her to do her worst.
+
+"That was pretty brave of him," I remarked.
+
+"Oh," said Fanny amiably, "I am not blaming your friend, Midgetina. He
+seemed to be perfectly _competent_."
+
+Yet even now I remained unsatisfied. If Fanny had come secretly to
+Beechwood, as she had suggested, and had spent the night with a friend,
+solely to hear the last tidings of Mr Crimble, what was this other
+trouble, so desperate that she had lost both her wits and her temper at
+finding Mr Anon there? Supposing the house had been empty? My curiosity
+overcame me, and the none too ingenuous question slipped from my tongue:
+"Did you want some of the money for mourning, then, Fanny?"
+
+Her dark, pale face, above the black, enveloping cloak, met my look with
+astonishment.
+
+"Mourning!" she cried, "why, that would be the very---- No, not mourning,
+Midgetina. I owe a little to a friend--and not money only," she added
+with peculiar intensity. "Of course, if you have any doubts about
+lending it----"
+
+"Give, not lend," said I.
+
+"Yes, but how are we to get at it? I can't lug _that_ thing about, and
+you say _he_ has the key. Shall we _smash_ it open?"
+
+The question came so hurriedly that I had no time to consider what,
+besides money--and of course friendship--could be owed to a friend, and
+especially to a friend that made her clench her teeth on the word.
+
+"Yes, smash it open," I nodded. "It's only a box."
+
+"But such a pretty little box!"
+
+With knees drawn up, and shivering now after my outburst of merriment, I
+watched her labours. My beloved chest might keep out moth and rust, it
+was no match for Fanny. She wound up a large stone in her silk scarf. A
+few heavy and muffled blows, the lock surrendered, and the starlight
+dripped in like milk from heaven upon my hoard.
+
+"Why, Midgetina," whispered Fanny, delicately counting the notes over
+between her long, white fingers, "you are richer than I supposed--a
+female Croesus. Wasn't it a great risk? I mean," she continued,
+receiving no answer, "no wonder he was so cautious. And how much may I
+take?"
+
+It seemed as if an empty space, not of yards but of miles, had suddenly
+separated us. "All you want," said I.
+
+"But I didn't--I _didn't_ taunt you, now, did I?" she smiled at me, with
+head inclined to her slim shoulder, as if in mimicry of my ivory Hypnos.
+
+"There was nothing to taunt me about. Mayn't _I_ have a friend?"
+
+"Why," she retorted lightly, mechanically re-counting the bits of paper,
+"friend indeed! What about all those Pollackes and Monneries mother's so
+full of? You will soon be flitting to quite another sphere. It's the
+_old_ friends that then will be left mourning. You won't sit moon-gazing
+then, my dear."
+
+"No, Fanny," I said stubbornly, "I've had enough of that, just for the
+present."
+
+"Sst!" she whispered swiftly, raising her head and clasping the notes to
+her breast beneath her cloak, "what was that?"
+
+We listened. I heard nothing--nothing but sigh of new-born leaf, or
+falling of dead twig cast off from the parent tree. It was early yet for
+the nightingale.
+
+"Only the wind," said she.
+
+"Only the wind," I echoed scornfully, "or perhaps a weasel."
+
+She hurriedly divided my savings and thrust my share into my lap. I
+pushed it in under my arm.
+
+"Good heavens, Midgetina!" she cried, aghast. "You are almost naked.
+How on earth was I to know?"
+
+I clutched close my dressing-gown and stumbled to my feet, trying in
+vain to restrain my silly teeth from chattering. "Never mind about me,
+Fanny," I muttered. "They don't waste inquests on changelings."
+
+"My God!" was her vindictive comment, "how she harps on the word. As if
+I had nothing else to worry about." With a contemptuous foot she pushed
+my empty box under cover of a low-growing yew. Seemingly Wanderslore was
+fated to entomb one by one all my discarded possessions.
+
+Turning, she stifled a yawn with a sound very like a groan. "Then it's
+_au revoir_, Midgetina. Give me five minutes' start.... You know I am
+grateful?"
+
+"Yes, Fanny," I said obediently, smiling up into her face.
+
+"Won't you kiss me?" she said. "_Tout comprendre_, you know, _c'est tout
+pardonner_."
+
+"Why, Fanny," I replied; "no, thank you. I prefer plain English."
+
+But scarcely a minute had separated us when I sprang up and pursued her
+a few paces into the shadows, into which she had disappeared. To forgive
+all--how piteously easy now that she was gone. She had tried to conceal
+it, brazen it out, but unutterable wretchedness had lurked in every fold
+of her cloak, in the accents of her voice, in every fatigued gesture.
+Her very eyes had shone the more lustrously in the starlight for the
+dark shadows around them. But understand her--I could not even guess
+what horrible secret trouble she had been concealing from me. And beyond
+that, too--a hideous, selfish dread--my guilty mind was haunted by the
+fear of what she might do in her extremity.
+
+"Fanny, Fanny," I called falsely into the silence. "Oh, come back! I
+love you; indeed I love you."
+
+How little blessed it is at times even to give. No answer came. I threw
+myself on the ground. And I strove with myself in the darkness, crushing
+out every thought as it floated into my mind, and sinking on and on into
+the depths of unconsciousness.
+
+"Oh, my dear, my dear," came the whisper of a tender, guttural voice in
+my ear. "You are deathly cold. Why do you grieve so? She is gone.
+Listen, listen. They have neither love nor pity. And I--I cannot live
+without you."
+
+I sat up, black with rage. My stranger's face glimmered obscurely in the
+gloom.
+
+"Oh, if you spy on me again!" I rasped at him, "'live without me,' what
+do I care?--you can go and----"
+
+But, thank God, the _die without me_ was never uttered. I haven't _that_
+to haunt me. Some hidden strength that had been mine these few days
+melted away like water. "Not now; not now!" I entreated him. I hastened
+away.
+
+
+
+
+London
+
+
+
+
+Chapter Thirty-Two
+
+
+And then--well, life plays strange tricks. In a week or two London had
+swallowed me up. How many times, I wonder, had I tried in fancy to
+picture Mrs Monnerie's town house. How romantic an edifice fancy had
+made of it. Impressive in its own fashion, it fell far short of these
+ignorant dreams. It was No. 2 of about forty, set side by side, their
+pillared porticoes fronting a prodigious square. Its only "garden,"
+chiefly the resort of cats, children, nursemaids, an old whiskered
+gentleman in a bath chair, and sparrows, was visible to every passer-by
+through a spear-headed palisade of railings. Broad paving-stones skirted
+its areas, and over each descent of steps hung a bell-pull.
+
+On cloudless days the sun filled this square like a tank with a dry
+glare and heat in which even my salamanderish body sometimes gasped like
+a fish out of water. When rain fell out of the low, grey skies, and the
+scaling plane-trees hissed and the sparrows chirped, my spirits seemed
+to sink into my shoes. And fair or foul, London soot and dust were
+enemies alike to my eyes, my fingers, and my nose.
+
+Even my beloved cloud-burdened north-west wind was never quite free of
+smuts and grit; and when blew the east! But it must be remembered how
+ignorant and local I was. In my long carriage journey to Mrs Monnerie's
+through those miles and miles of grimed, huddling houses, those shops
+and hoardings and steeples, I had realized for the first time that its
+capital is not a part of _England_, only a sprawling human growth in it;
+and though I soon learned to respect it as _that_, I could never see
+without a sigh some skimpy weed struggling for life in its bricked-up
+crevices. It was nearly all dead, except for human beings, and that
+could not be said of Lyndsey, or even of Beechwood Hill.
+
+Maybe my imagination had already been prejudiced by a coloured drawing
+which Mr Wagginhorne had sent me once for a Valentine when I was a
+child. It hangs up now in that child's nursery for a memento that I have
+been nearly dead. In the midst of it on a hill, in gold and faded
+carmine, encircled with great five-pointed blue stars, and with green,
+grooved valleys radiating from its castellated towers, is a
+city--_Hierusalem_. A city surmounted by a narrow wreathing pennon on
+which, inscribed in silver, are the words: "Who heareth the Voice of My
+Spirit? And how shall they who deceive themselves resort unto Me?"
+
+Scattered far and near about this central piece, and connected with it
+by thin lines like wandering paths radiating from its gates across
+mountain, valley, and forest, lie, like round web-like smudges, if seen
+at a distance, the other chief cities of the world, Rome, Venice,
+Constantinople, Paris, and the rest. London sprawls low in the left-hand
+corner. The strongest glass cannot exhaust the skill and ingenuity of
+the maker of this drawing (an artist who, Mr Wagginhorne told me, was
+mad, poor thing--a man in a frenzy distemper--his very words). For when
+you peer close into this London, it takes the shape of a tusked, black,
+hairy boar, sprawling with hoofs outspread, fast asleep. And between
+them, and even actually diapering the carcass of the creature, is a
+perfect labyrinth of life--a high crowned king and queen, honey-hiving
+bees, an old man with a beard as if in a swoon, robbers with swords,
+travellers with beasts and torches, inns, a cluster of sharp-coloured
+butterflies (of the same proportion) fluttering over what looks like a
+clot of dung, a winding river, ships, trees, tombs, wasted unburied
+bodies, a child issuing from an egg, a phoenix taking flight: and so on.
+There is no end to this poor man's devices. The longer you look, the
+more strange things you discover. Yet at distance of a pace or two, his
+pig appears to fade into nothing but a cloudy-coloured cobweb--one of
+the many around his bright-dyed _Hierusalem_.
+
+Now I cannot help wondering if this peculiar picture may not already
+have tinged a young mind with a curious horror of London; even though my
+aversion may have needed no artificial aid.
+
+Still I must not be ungrateful. These were vague impressions; and as an
+actual fact, Mrs Monnerie had transported me into the very midst of the
+world of rank and fashion. Her No. 2 was now my home. The spaciousness,
+the unnatural solitude, the servants who never so much as glanced at me
+until after my back was turned, the hushed _opulency_, the formality! It
+was impossible to be just my everyday Miss M. My feet never found
+themselves twirling me round before their mistress was aware of it. I
+all but gave up gossiping with myself as I went about my little
+self-services.
+
+Parochial creature that I was--I missed Mrs Bowater's "homeliness." To
+have things out of proportion to my body was an old story. To that,
+needless to say, I was perfectly accustomed. But here things were at
+first out of all proportion to my taste and habits, a very different
+thing. It is, in fact, extremely difficult in retrospect to get side by
+side again with those new experiences--with a self that was at one
+moment intoxicated and engrossed, and the next humiliated and
+desperately ill at ease, at the novelty of her surroundings.
+
+I had a maid, too, Fleming, with a pointed face and greenish eyes, who,
+unlike Mrs Bowater, did not snort, but sniffed at things. Whether I
+retired for the night or rose in the morning, it was always to the
+accompaniment of a half-audible sniff. And I was never perfectly certain
+whether that sniff was one of the mind, or of the body, or of both. I
+found it hard to learn to do _little_ enough for myself. Fleming
+despised me--at least so I felt--even for emptying my wash-basin, or
+folding my nightgown. Worse, I was never sure of being alone: she stole
+about so softly on her duties. And then the "company."
+
+Not that the last black days at Beechwood were not even blacker for the
+change. At first I tried to think them quietly over, to ravel out my
+mistakes, and to get straight with my past. But I couldn't in all that
+splendour. I had to spend much more time in bewaring of _faux pas_, and
+in growing accustomed to being a kind of tame, petted animal--tame even
+to itself, I mean. So Mrs Bowater's went floating off into the past like
+a dingy little house on the edge of a muddy river. Amid that old horror
+and anxiety, even my dear Pollie's wedding day had slipped by unheeded.
+How often my thoughts went back to her now. If only _she_ could have
+been my Fleming.
+
+I tried to make amends for my forgetfulness--even to the extent of
+pocketing my pride, and commissioning Fleming to purchase for me (out of
+the little stock of money left me by Fanny) a cradle, as a wedding
+present for Pollie, and a chest of tools for her husband. Oddly enough,
+she did not sniff at this request. Her green eyes almost sparkled. At
+the very word, wedding, she seemed to revive into a new woman. And
+Pollie completely forgave me:--
+
+
+     "DEAR MISS M.,--We was mother and all very sorry and grieved you
+     couldn't come though it passed off very satisfactory. As for
+     forgetting please don't mention the word, Lyndsey have never been
+     the same since the old house was empty. It all passed off very
+     satisfactory though with such torrents of rain there was a great
+     pool in the churchyard which made everybody in high spirits. And
+     William and I can't thank you enough for those beautiful gifts you
+     have sent us. Will have been a carpenter since he was a boy but
+     there's things there miss he says he never heard on in his born
+     days but will be extreamly useful when he comes to know what for.
+     And Mother says it was just like your good kind heart to think of
+     what you sent me. You can't think how handsome it looks in the
+     new-papered room and I'm sure I hope if I may say so it may be
+     quite as useful as Will's tools, and its being pretty late to marry
+     it isn't as if I was a slip of a girl. And of course I have mother.
+     Though if any does come you may be sure it will be a Sunday treat
+     being too fine for ordinary.
+
+     "Please God miss I hope you are keeping well and happy in your new
+     suroundings and that dream will come true. It was a dreadful moment
+     that day by the shops but I'm thankful all came well. If you ever
+     writes to Mrs. B. I trust you will mention me to her kindly not
+     being much of a letter writer. If you could have heard the things
+     she said of you your ears would burn miss you were such a treasure
+     and to judge from her appearance she must have seen her troubles.
+     And being a married woman helps to see into things though thank God
+     I'm well and happy and William hopes to keep me so.
+
+     "Well I must close now trusting that you are in the best of health.
+     Your old Pollie.
+
+     "Miss Fenne have been very poorly of late so I've heard though not
+     yet took to her bed--more peculiar than ever about Church and such
+     like. Adam Waggett being W's oldest friend though not my choice was
+     to have been Best Man but he's in service in London and couldn't
+     come."
+
+
+But if I pined for Pollie's company, how can I express what the absence
+of Mrs Bowater meant to me? Even when I had grown used to my new
+quarters, I would sometimes wake myself calling her name in a dream. She
+had been almost unendurably kind to me that last May morning in
+Wanderslore, when she had come to fetch me from yet another long
+adieu--to Mr Anon. After he had gone, she and I had sat on for a while
+in that fresh spring beauty, a sober and miserable pair. Miserable on my
+side for miserable reasons. Then, if ever, had been the moment wherein
+to clear my breast and be in spirit as well as heart at one with her.
+Yet part for honesty and part for shame, I had remained silent. I could
+only comfort myself with remembering that we should soon meet again, and
+that the future might be kinder. Well, sometimes the future is kinder,
+but it is never the same thing as the past.
+
+"They may perhaps talk about that unfortunate ... about that poor young
+Mr Crimble, miss," was one of my landlady's last remarks, as she sat
+staring rigidly at the great, empty house. "We all take good care to
+spread about each other's horrors; and what else is a newspaper for? If
+so; well, I shouldn't ask it, I suppose. But I've been thinking maybe my
+Fanny wasn't _everything_ to blame. We've had it out together, she and
+I, though only by letter. She was frightened of me as much as anything,
+though goodness knows I tried to bring her up a God-fearing child. She
+had no one, as she thought, to go to--and him a weak creature for all
+his obstinacy and, as you might say, penned in by his mother and his
+cloth. They say the Cartholics don't marry, and there's nothing much to
+be wondered at in that. Poor young fellow, he won't bear much thinking
+on, even when he's gone out of mind. I'm fearing now that what's come
+about may make her wilder and harder. Help her all you can, if only in
+your thoughts, miss: she sets more store by you than you might guess."
+
+"Indeed, indeed, I will," I said.
+
+"You see, miss," Mrs Bowater monotoned on, "I'm nothing much better than
+an aunt for Fanny, with no children of my own for guidance; and him
+there helpless with his broken leg in Buenos Ayres." The long, bonneted
+face moved round towards me. "Do you feel _any_ smouldering affections
+for the young gentleman that's just gone?"
+
+This was an unexpected twist to our talk, but, in some little confusion,
+I met it as candidly as I could.
+
+"I am fonder of Fanny--and, of course, of you, Mrs Bowater; oh, far,
+far. But--I don't quite know how to express it--I am, as you might say,
+in my own _mind_ with him. I think he knows a little what I am, in
+myself I mean. And besides, oh, well, it isn't a miserable thing to feel
+that just one's company makes _anybody_ happy."
+
+Mrs Bowater considered this reply for some little time.
+
+"He didn't _look_ any too happy just now, to judge from his back view,"
+she remarked oracularly. "And when I was.... But there, miss, I'm
+thinking only of your comfort, and I'm not quite as comfortable as might
+be over that there Mrs Monnerie. Generous she may be, though not
+noticing it much perhaps from a purse with no bottom to it, judging from
+what I've seen. God bless you, one way or the other. And perhaps you'll
+sometimes remember the bits of Sundays we've shared up there--you and
+the old Dragon."
+
+A smile and a tear battled for the dark eye that looked down on me.
+Indeed, seldom after came a Sunday evening with its clanking bells and
+empty, London hush, but it brought back to me with a pang my hymns and
+talks with "the old Dragon." Not that any one I ever saw at Mrs
+Monnerie's appeared to work so hard as to _need_ a day of rest. There
+was merely a peculiar empty sensation on Sundays of there being nothing
+"to do."
+
+
+A flight of stone steps and a pillared porch led up to her great
+ornamental door. Beyond was a hall compared with which the marbles of
+Brunswick House were mere mosaic. An alabaster fountain, its jet
+springing lightly from a gilded torch held by a crouching faun, cooled,
+and discreetly murmured a ceaseless Hush! in the air. On either hand, a
+wide, shallow staircase ascended to an enormous gilded drawing-room,
+with its chairs and pictures; and to the library. The dining-room stood
+opposite the portico. When Mrs Monnerie and I were alone, we usually
+shared a smaller room with her parrot, Chakka; her little Chinese dog,
+Cherry--whose whimper had a most uncomfortable resemblance to the wild
+and homesick cry of my seagulls at Lyme Regis--and her collections of
+the world's smaller rarities. It is only, I suppose, one more proof of
+how volatile a creature I used to be that I took an intense interest in
+the contents of these cabinets for a few days, and then found them
+nothing but a vexation. No doubt this was because of an uneasy suspicion
+that Mrs Monnerie had also collected _me_.
+
+She could be extremely tactful in her private designs, yet she "showed
+me off" in a fashion that might have turned a far less giddy head than
+her _protegee's_, and perhaps cannot have been in the best of taste.
+
+So sure had she been of me that, when I arrived, a room on the first
+floor of No. 2 had already been prepared for my reception. A wonderful
+piece of fantasticalness--like a miniature fairy palace, but without a
+vestige of any _real_ make-believe in it. It was panelled and screened
+with carvings in wood, inlaid with silver and mother-of-pearl--dwarfs
+and apes and misshapen gods and goddesses leering and gaping out at one
+from amidst leafy branches, flowers, and fruits, and birds, and
+butterflies. The faintest sniff of that Indian wood--whatever it
+was--recalls to this day that nightmare scenery. Its hangings were of a
+silk so rich that they might have stood on edge on the floor. These
+screens and tapestries guarded a privacy that rarely, alas, contained a
+Miss M. worth being in private _with_.
+
+The one piece of chagrin exhibited by Mrs Monnerie in those early days
+of our acquaintance was at my insistence on bringing at least a few of
+my familiar sticks of furniture and chattels with me from Mrs Bowater's.
+Their plain Sheraton design, she thought, was barbarously out of keeping
+with the rest. It was; but I had my way.
+
+Not the least precious of these old possessions, though dismal for its
+memories, was the broken money chest which Fanny had pushed in under the
+yew in the garden at Wanderslore. Tacked up in canvas, its hinges and
+lock repaired, it had been sent on to me a week or two after my
+farewells to Beechwood, by Mr Anon. Inside it I found the nightgown I
+had buried in the rabbit's hole, Fanny's letter from under its stone, my
+_Sense and Sensibility_, and last, pinned on to a scrap of kingfisher
+coloured silk, a pair of ear-rings made out of two old gold coins. Apart
+from a few withered flowers, they are the only thing I possess that came
+from Wanderslore. Long afterwards, I showed these ear-rings to Sir W. P.
+He told me they were quarter Rose Nobles of Edward III.'s reign, and
+only a quarter of a quarter of an ounce in weight. They weigh pretty
+heavy for me now, however.
+
+My arrangement with Mrs Monnerie had been that, however long I might
+stay with her, I should still be in the nature of a visitor; that No. 2,
+in fact, should be my town house, and Mrs Bowater's my country. But I
+was soon to realize that she intended Mrs Bowater to have a very small
+share in me. She pretended to be jealous of me, to love me for my own
+sweet sake; and even while I knew it was mere pretence, it left its
+flattery on my mind; and for the first time in my life I feigned to be
+even smaller than I was; would mince my speeches, affect to be clever,
+even ogle the old lady, until it might be supposed we were a pair of
+queerly-assorted characters in a charade.
+
+Nevertheless, I had had the obstinacy to insist that I should be at
+liberty to stay with Mrs Bowater whenever I wished to do so; and I was
+free to invite any friend to visit me I chose. "And especially, my dear,
+any one an eighth as exquisite," Mrs Monnerie had kindly put it. It may
+seem a little strange that all these obligations should have been on her
+side. But Mrs Monnerie's whims were far more vigorous than most people's
+principles. The dews of her loving kindness descended on me in a shower,
+and it was some little time before I began to feel a chill.
+
+Not the least remarkable feature of No. 2 was its back view. The window
+of my room came down almost to the floor. It "commanded" an immense zinc
+cistern--George, by name--a Virginia Creeper groping along a brick wall,
+similar cisterns smalling into the distance, other brick walls and
+scores of back windows. Once, after contemplating this odd landscape for
+some little time, it occurred to me to speculate what the back view from
+the House of Life was like; but I failed to conceive the smallest notion
+of it. I rarely drew my curtains, and, oddly enough, when I did so, was
+usually in a vacant or dismal mood. My lights were electric. One simply
+twisted a tiny ivory button. At first their clear and coloured globes,
+set like tiny tulips in a candelabra, charmed my fancy. But, such is
+custom, I soon wearied of them, and pined for the slim, _living_ flame
+of candles--even for my coarse old night-light swimming in its grease in
+a chipped blue and white saucer.
+
+
+
+
+Chapter Thirty-Three
+
+
+Mrs Monnerie had rifled her collections for my use--pygmy Venetian
+glass, a silver-gilt breakfast and tea service, pygmy porcelain. There
+were absurd little _mechanical_ knick-knacks--piping birds, a maddening
+little operatic clock of which I at last managed to break the
+mainspring, a musical chair, and so on. My bath was of jade; my table a
+long one of ebony inlaid with ivory, with puffing cherub faces at each
+corner representing the four winds. My own few possessions, I must
+confess, looked not only worn but provincial by comparison. But I never
+surprised myself actually talking to any of Mrs Monnerie's exquisite
+novelties as to my other dumb, old, wooden friends. She delighted in
+them far more than I.
+
+I suppose, really to enjoy such pomp and luxury, one should be
+positively born in the purple; and then, I suppose, one must be careful
+that the dye does not go to the bone. Whether or not, I have long since
+come to the conclusion that I am vulgar by nature--like my mother
+tongue. And at times, in spite of my relief at being free of the
+blackness that had craped in my last days at Beechwood, I often found
+myself hungering for my Bowater parlour--even for its smell. Another
+thing I learned gradually at No. 2 was that I had been desperately
+old-fashioned; and that is, to some extent, to belong to the dead.
+
+Mrs Monnerie's chief desire, no doubt, was to give her new knick-knack a
+suitable setting. But it may also have reminded her childlessness--for
+she, too, like Mrs Bowater, was "nothing much better than an aunt"--of
+her childhood. Of course I affected as much pleasure in it as I could,
+and was really grateful. But she greatly disliked being thanked for
+anything, and would blandly shut her eyes at the least manifestation of
+gratitude. "Humour me, humour me, humour me," she once petulantly nodded
+at me; "there are at least a hundred prayers in the Prayer Book, my pet,
+to one thanksgiving, and that's human nature all over." It was what my
+frame must have _cost_ that scandalized me. When, one day, after
+rhapsodizing (not without a shudder) over a cape and hat, which she had
+given me, composed solely of the shimmering emerald feathers of the
+humming-bird, I rather tactlessly reminded her of my L110 a year, and of
+my determination to live within it, her eyelids pinched me a glance as
+if I had explained in public that I had been bitten by a flea.
+
+Yet as time went on, a peculiar affection sprang up in me for this
+crowded and lonely old woman. It has survived sore trials. She was by
+turns generous and mean, honeyed and cantankerous, impulsive and
+scheming. Like Mrs Bowater, she disapproved of the world in general, and
+yet with how different a result. A restless, darting mind lay hidden
+behind the great mask of her countenance, with its heavy-lidded eyes and
+tower of hair. She loved to sit indolently peering, musing, and
+gossiping, twiddling the while perhaps some little antique toy in her
+capacious lap. I can boast, at any rate, that I was a spellbound
+listener, and devoured her peculiar wandering, satirical talk as if it
+had been manna from heaven.
+
+It was the old, old story. Talking to me was the next most private thing
+to talking to herself; and I think she enjoyed for a while the company
+of so queer a confessor. Once, I remember, she confided to me the whole
+story of a girlish love affair, at least forty years old. I could hardly
+believe my eyes as I watched her; she looked so freshened and demure and
+spirited. It was as if she were her own twenties just dressed up. But
+she had a dry and acrid tongue, and spared nothing and nobody. To her
+and to Mrs Bowater I owe nearly all my stock of worldly wisdom. And now
+I shall never have time, I suppose, to sort it out.
+
+Mr Monnerie, as Fleming confided in me one day--and the aristocracy was
+this extremely reticent and contemptuous creature's favourite topic of
+conversation--Mr Monnerie had been a banker, and had made a late and
+dazzling marriage; for Mrs Monnerie's blood was as blue as Caddis Bay on
+a cloudless morning. I asked Fleming if she had ever seen "Lord B.," and
+what kind of man he was. She never had; but remarked obscurely that he
+must have lived mainly on porridge, he had sown so many wild oats.
+
+This information reminded me of an old rhyme I had once learned as a
+child, and used to shout about the house:--
+
+
+     "Come all you young men, with your wicked ways;
+     Sow your wild, wild oats in your youthful days;
+     That we may live happy when we grow old--
+     Happy, and happy, when we grow old:
+     The day is far spent, the night's coming on;
+     So give us your arm, and we'll joggle along--joggle
+          and joggle and joggle along."
+
+
+Fleming herself, I learned, had come from Ash, and was therefore, I
+suppose, of an Anglo-Saxon family, though she was far from stupid and
+rather elegant in shape. Because, I suppose, I did not like her, I was
+rather aggrieved she had been born in Kent. Mr and Mrs Monnerie, she
+told me, had had no children. The fair young man, Percy Maudlen, with
+the tired smile and beautiful shoes, who came to tea or luncheon at No.
+2 at least once a week, was Mrs Monnerie's only nephew by blood; and the
+still fairer Susan Monnerie, who used to float into my room ever and
+anon like a Zephyr, was the only one Mrs Monnerie cared to see of her
+three nieces by marriage. And yet the other two, when they were invited
+to luncheon, were far more docile and considerate in the opinions and
+sentiments they expressed. _That_ seemed so curious to me: there was no
+doubt that Mrs Monnerie belonged to the aristocracy, and yet there
+always appeared to be quarrels going on in the family--apart, of course,
+from births, deaths, and marriages, which seemed of little consequence.
+She enjoyed relatives in every county in England and Scotland; while I
+had not one, now, so far as I knew, not even in Kent.
+
+Marvell, the butler--he had formerly been Mr Monnerie's valet--was
+another familiar object of my speculations. His rather solemn,
+clean-shaven countenance and steady grey eyes suggested a severe critic
+of mankind. Yet he seemed bent only on giving pleasure and smoothing
+things over, and stooped my dish of sliced cherries or apricots over my
+shoulder with a gesture that was in itself the cream of flattery. It
+astonished me to hear that he had a grown-up son in India; and though I
+never met Mrs Marvell, I felt a prodigious respect for her.
+
+I would look up and see him standing so smooth and benevolent behind
+Mrs Monnerie's chair that he reminded me of my bishop, and I doubt if
+ever she crisply uttered his delightful name but it recalled the
+pleasant chime of a poem which my mother had taught me: _The Nymph
+Complaining of the Death of her Fawn_. I should have liked to have a
+long talk with Mr Marvell--any time of the day when he wasn't a butler,
+I mean--but the opportunity never came.
+
+One day, when he had left us to ourselves, I ventured to quote a stanza
+of this poem to Mrs Monnerie:--
+
+
+     "With sweetest milk and sugar first
+     I it at my own fingers nursed;
+     And as it grew, so every day
+     It waxed more white and sweet than they--
+     It had so sweet a breath! and oft
+     I blushed to see its foot more soft
+     And white--shall I say?--than my hand,
+     Nay, any lady's in the land...."
+
+
+"Charming, charming, Poppet," she cooed, much amused, pushing in a nut
+for Chakka. "Many shades whiter than _your_ wrinkled old claw, you old
+wretch. _Another_ sagacious old bird, my dear, though past blushing, I
+fear, at any lady's hand."
+
+Nothing would content her but that I must recite my _bon mot_ again when
+her nephew Percy dandled in to tea that afternoon. He sneered down on me
+with his pale eyes, and with finger and thumb exposed yet another inch
+of his silk sock, but made no comment.
+
+"Manners, my dear Percy, maketh man," said his aunt. "Congratulate Miss
+M."
+
+If Percy Maudlen had had no manners at all, I think I should at that
+moment have seen the pink tip of his tongue; for if ever any human being
+detested my small person it was he. For very good reasons, probably,
+though I never troubled to inquire into them, I disliked him, too,
+beyond expression. He was, of course, a superior young man with a great
+many similar ancestors looking out of his face, yet he resembled a
+weasel. But Susan Monnerie--the very moment I saw her I loved her; just
+as one loves a field of buttercups or a bush of may. For some little
+time she seemed to regard me as I suppose a linnet regards a young
+cuckoo that has been hatched out in her nest (though, of course, a squab
+cuckoo is of much the same size as its fostermother). But she gradually
+grew accustomed to me, and even realized at last that I was something a
+little more--and also perhaps less--human than either Chakka or Cherry
+or a Dresden china shepherdess.
+
+I would look at her just for pleasure's sake. Her hair was of the colour
+of undyed silk, with darker strands in it; her skin pale; and she had an
+odd little stutter in her light young voice when she was excited. I
+would often compare her with Fanny. What curious differences there were
+between them. She was graceful, but as if she had been taught to be.
+Unlike Fanny, she was not so fascinatingly just a beautiful body--with
+that sometimes awful Someone looking out of its windows. There was a
+lovely delicacy in her, as if, absurd though it may sound, every bit of
+her had been selected, actually picked out, from the finest materials.
+Perhaps it was her food and drink that had helped to make her so; for I
+don't think Miss Stebbings's diet was more than wholesome, or that
+following the sea in early life makes a man rich enough to afford many
+dainties for his children. Anyhow, there was nothing man-made in Fanny;
+and if there are women-shaped mermaids I know what looks will be seen in
+their faces.
+
+However that may be, a keen, roving spirit dwelt in Susan's clear, blue
+eyes. I never discovered in her any malice or vanity, and this, I think,
+frequently irritated Mrs Monnerie. Susan, too, used to ask me perfectly
+sane and ordinary questions; and I cannot describe what a flattery it
+was. I had always supposed that men and women were _intended_ to talk
+openly to one another in this world; but it was an uncommonly rare
+luxury for me at Mrs Monnerie's. I could talk freely enough to Susan,
+and told her a good deal about my early days, though I kept my life at
+Beechwood Hill more or less to myself.
+
+And that reminds me that Mrs Bowater proved to have been a good prophet.
+It was one day at luncheon. Mrs Monnerie happened to cast a glance at
+the _Morning Post_ newspaper which lay open on a chair near by, showing
+in tall type at the top of the column, "Sudden Death of Sir Jasper
+Goodge." Sir Jasper Goodge, whose family history, it seemed, was an open
+book to her, reminded her whimsically of another tragedy. She put back
+her head and, surveying me blandly as I sat up beside her, inquired if I
+had known at all intimately that unfortunate young man, Mr Crimble.
+
+"I remember him bobbing and sidling at me that delightful afternoon
+when--what do you think of it, Susan?--Poppet and I discovered in each
+other an unfashionable taste for the truth! A bazaar in aid of the
+Pollacke Blanket Fund, or something of the kind."
+
+The recollection seemed to have amused her so much that for the moment I
+held my breath and ignored her question.
+
+"But why was Mr Crimble unfortunate?" inquired Susan, attempting to make
+Cherry beg for a bread-crumb. I glanced in consternation at Marvell, who
+at the moment was bringing the coffee things into the room. But he
+appeared to be uninterested in Mr Crimble.
+
+"Mr Crimble was unfortunate, my dear," said Mrs Monnerie complacently,
+"because he cut his throat."
+
+"Ach! how horrible. How can you say such things! Get down, you little
+silly! Please, Aunt Alice, there must be something pleasanter to talk
+about than that? Everybody knows about the hideous old Sir Jasper
+Goodge; so it doesn't much matter what one says of him. But...." In
+spite of her command the little dog still gloated on her fingers.
+
+"There may be things pleasanter, my dear Susan," returned Mrs Monnerie
+complacently, "but there are few so illuminating. In Greek tragedy, I
+used to be told, all such horrors have the effect of what is called a
+purgation. Did Mr Crimble _seem_ that kind of young man, my dear? And
+why was he so impetuous?"
+
+"I think, Mrs Monnerie," said I, "he was in trouble."
+
+"H'm," said she. "He had a very sallow look, I remember. So he discussed
+his troubles? But not with _you_, my fairy?"
+
+"Surely, Aunt Alice," exclaimed Susan hotly, "it isn't quite fair or
+nice to bring back such ghastly memories. Why," she touched my hand with
+the tips of her light fingers, "she is quite cold already."
+
+"Poppet's hands are always cold," replied her aunt imperturbably. "And I
+suspect that she and I know more about this wicked world than has
+brought shadows to your young brow. We'll return to Mr Crimble, my dear,
+when Susan is butterflying elsewhere. She is so shockingly easily
+shocked."
+
+But it was Susan herself who returned to the subject. She came into my
+room where I sat reading--a collection of the tiniest little books in
+the most sumptuous gilt morocco had been yet another of Mrs Monnerie's
+kindnesses--and she stood for a moment musing out through my silk window
+blinds at the vast zinc tank on the roof.
+
+"Was that true?" she said at last. "Did you really know some one who
+killed himself? Who was he? What was he like?"
+
+"He was a young man--in his twenty-ninth year," I replied automatically,
+"dark, short, with gold spectacles, a clergyman. He was the curate at St
+Peter's--Beechwood, you know." I was speaking in a low voice, as if I
+might be overheard.
+
+It was extraordinary how swiftly Mr Crimble had faded into a vanishing
+shadow. From the very instant of his death the world had begun to adjust
+itself to his absence. And now nothing but a memory--a black, sad
+memory.
+
+But Susan's voice interrupted these faint musings. "A clergyman!" she
+was repeating. "But why--why did he--do that?"
+
+"They said, melancholia. I suppose it was just impossible--or _seemed_
+impossible--for him to go on living."
+
+"But what made him melancholy? How awful. And how can Aunt Alice have
+said it like that?"
+
+"But surely," argued I, in my old contradictory fashion, and spying
+about for a path of evasion, "it's better to call things by their proper
+names. What is the body, after all? Not that I mean one has any right
+to--to _not_ die in one's own bed."
+
+"And do you really think like that?--the body of no importance? You?
+Why, Miss M., Aunt Alice calls you her 'pocket Venus,' and she means it,
+too, in her own sly way."
+
+"It's very kind of her," said I, breathing more freely. "Some one I know
+always calls me Midgetina, or Miss Midge, anything of that sort. I don't
+mean, Miss Monnerie, that it doesn't _matter_ what we are called. Why,
+if that were so, there wouldn't be any Society at all, would there? We
+should all be--well--anonymous." Deep inside I felt myself smile. "Not
+that that makes much difference to good poetry."
+
+Susan sighed. "How zigzaggedly you talk. What has poetry to do with Mr
+Crimble?--that was his name, wasn't it?"
+
+"Well, it hasn't very much," I confessed. "He hadn't the time for it."
+
+Susan seated herself on a cushion on the floor--and with how sharp a
+stab reminded me of Fanny and the old, care-free days of _Wuthering
+Heights_.
+
+Surely--in spite of Fanny--life had definitely taken a tinge of Miss
+Bronte's imagination since then. But it was only the languor of Susan's
+movements, and that because she seemed a little tired, rather than
+merely indolent. And if from Fanny's eyes had now stooped a serpent and
+now a blinded angel; from these clear blue ones looked only a human
+being like myself. Even as I write that "like myself," I ponder. But let
+it stay.
+
+"So you really did know him?" Susan persisted. "And it doesn't seem a
+nightmare even to think of him? And who, I say, made it impossible for
+him to go on living?" So intense was her absorption in these questions
+that when they ceased her hands tightened round her knees, and her small
+mouth remained ajar.
+
+"You said '_what_' just now," I prevaricated, looking up at her.
+
+At this her blue eyes opened so wide I broke into a little laugh.
+
+"No, no, no, Miss Monnerie," I hastened to explain, "not _me_. It isn't
+my story, though I was in it--and to blame. But please, if you would be
+so kind, don't mention it again to Mrs Monnerie, and don't think about
+it any more."
+
+"Not think about it! _You_ must. Besides, thoughts sometimes think
+themselves. I always supposed that things like that only happened to
+quite--to different people, you know. Was _he_?"
+
+"_Different?_" I couldn't follow her. "He was the curate of St
+Peter's--a friend of the Pollackes."
+
+"Oh, yes, the Pollackes," said she; and having glanced at me again, said
+no more.
+
+The smallest confidence, I find, is a short cut to friendship. And after
+this little conversation there was no ice to break between Susan
+Monnerie and myself, and she often championed me in my little
+difficulties--even if only by her silence.
+
+
+
+
+Chapter Thirty-Four
+
+
+Miss Monnerie's visits were less punctual though more frequent than
+Percy Maudlen's. "And where is the toadlet?" I heard him drawl one
+afternoon as I was being carried downstairs by the light-footed Fleming,
+on the padded tray which Mrs Monnerie had had made for the purpose.
+
+"The toadlet, my dear Percy, is about to take a little gentle exercise
+with me in the garden, and you shall accompany us. If you were the kind
+of fairy-tale hero I used to read of in my nursery, you would discover
+the charm, and live happy ever after. But I see nothing of the heroic in
+you, and little of the hereafter. Miss M. is a feast of mercies."
+
+"H'm. Providence packs his mercies into precious small quarters at
+times," he yawned.
+
+"Which suggests an uncivil speculation," replied his aunt, "on the size
+of your hat."
+
+"But candidly, Aunt Alice," he retorted, "is your little _attachee_
+quite all there--I mean, all of her that there is? Personally I wouldn't
+touch her, if I could help it, with a pair of tongs.... A nasty trick!"
+
+Then, "Hah!" cried Mrs Monnerie in a large, pleasant voice, "here is
+Miss M. Percy has been exposing a wounded heart, precious one. He is
+hurt because you look at him as if there were positively nothing more of
+him than what is there to see."
+
+"Not at all, Aunt Alice," Percy drawled, with a jerk of his cane. "It
+was for precisely the opposite reason. Who knows you ain't a witch, Miss
+M.? Distilled? Heavens, Aunt Alice! you are not bringing Cherry _too_?"
+
+Yes, Cherry was coming too, with his globular eye and sneering nose. And
+so poor Percy, with a cold little smile on his fine pale features, had
+to accommodate himself to Mrs Monnerie's leisurely pace, and she to
+mine, while Cherry disdainfully shuffled in our rear. We were a singular
+quartette, though there were only two or three small children in the
+palisaded garden to enjoy the spectacle; and they, after a few polite
+and muffled giggles, returned to their dolls.
+
+It was a stifling afternoon. As I trod the yellow gravel the quivering
+atmosphere all but blinded me with its reflected glare. The only sounds
+to be heard were the clang of a milkman's hand-cart, and the pirouettes
+of a distant piano.
+
+"And what," Mrs Monnerie suddenly inquired, looking down on me, with
+mauve-tinted cheek, from under her beribanded, long-handled parasol,
+"what is Miss M. thinking about?"
+
+As a matter of fact I was walking at that moment in imagination with Mrs
+Bowater at Lyme Regis, but I seized the opportunity of hastening round
+from between aunt and nephew so that I could screen myself from the sun
+in Mrs Monnerie's ample shadow, and inquired why London gardeners were
+so much attached to geraniums, lobelias, calceolarias, and ice-plants?
+Mightn't one just as well _paint_ the border, Mrs Monnerie, red, yellow,
+and blue? Then it would last--rain, snow, anything.
+
+"Now I'll wager, Percy, you hadn't noticed _that_," said Mrs Monnerie in
+triumph.
+
+"I make it a practice," he replied, "never to notice the obvious. It is
+merely a kind of least common denominator, as I believe you call 'em,
+and," he wafted away a yawn with his glove, "I take no interest in
+vulgar fractions."
+
+I took a little look at him out of the corner of my eye, and wished that
+as a child I had paid more heed to my arithmetic lessons. "Look, Mrs
+Monnerie," I cried piteously, "poor Cherry's tongue is dangling right
+out of his head. He looks _so_ hot and tired."
+
+She swept me a radiant, if contorted, gleam. "Percy, would you take pity
+on poor dear Cherry? Twice round, I think, will be as much as I can
+comfortably manage."
+
+So Percy had to take poor dear Cherry into his arms, just like a baby;
+and the quartette to all appearance became a trio.
+
+But my existence at No. 2 was not always so monotonous as that. Mrs
+Monnerie, in spite of her age, her ebony cane, and a tendency to
+breathlessness, was extremely active and alert. If life is a fountain,
+she preferred to be one of the larger bubbles as near as possible to its
+summit. She almost succeeded in making me a minute replica of herself.
+We shared the same manicurist, milliner, modiste, and coiffeur. And
+since it was not always practicable for Mahometta to be carried off to
+these delectable mountains, they were persuaded to attend upon her, and
+that as punctually as the fawn-faced man, Mr Godde, who came to wind the
+clocks.
+
+Whole mornings were spent in conclave in Mrs Monnerie's boudoir--Susan
+sometimes of our company. Julius Caesar, so my little Roman history told
+me, had hesitated over the crossing of one Rubicon. Mrs Monnerie and I
+confabulated over the fording of a dozen of its tributaries a day. A
+specialist--a singularly bald man in a long black coat--was called in.
+He eyed me this way, he eyed me that--with far more deference than I
+imagine Mr Pellew can have paid me at my christening. He assured Mrs
+Monnerie of his confirmed belief that the mode of the moment was not of
+the smallest consequence so far as I was concerned. "The hard, small
+hat," he smiled; "the tight-fitting sleeve!" And yet, to judge by the
+clothes he did recommend, I must have been beginning to look a pretty
+dowd at Mrs Bowater's.
+
+"But even if Madam prefers to dress in a style of her own choice," he
+explained, "the difference, if she will understand, must still be _in_
+the fashion."
+
+But he himself--though Mrs Monnerie, I discovered after he was gone, had
+not even noticed that he was bald--he himself interested me far more
+than his excellent advice; and not least when he drew some papers out of
+a pocket-book, and happened to let fall on the carpet the photograph of
+a fat little boy with an immense mop of curls. So men--quite elderly,
+practical men, can blush, I thought to myself; for Dr Phelps had rather
+flushed than blushed; and my father used only to get red.
+
+Since nothing, perhaps, could make me more exceptional in appearance
+than I had been made by Providence, I fell in with all Mrs Monnerie's
+fancies, and wore what she pleased--pushing out of mind as well as I
+could all thought of bills. I did more than that. I really began to
+enjoy dressing myself up as if I were my own doll, and when alone I
+would sit sometimes in a luxurious trance, like a lily in a pot. Yet I
+did not entirely abandon my old little Bowater habit of indoor exercise.
+When I was alone in my room I would sometimes skip. And on one of
+Fleming's afternoons "out" I even furbished up what I could remember of
+my four kinds of Kentish hopscotch, with a slab of jade for dump. But in
+the very midst of such recreations I would surprise myself lost in a
+kind of vacancy. Apart from its humans and its furniture, No. 2 was an
+empty house.
+
+I do not mean that Mrs Monnerie was concerned only with externals. Sir
+William Forbes-Smith advised that a little white meat should enrich my
+usual diet of milk and fruit, and that I should have sea-salt baths. The
+latter were more enjoyable than the former, though both, no doubt,
+helped to bring back the strength sapped out of me by the West End.
+
+My cheekbones gradually rounded their angles; a livelier colour came to
+lip and skin, and I began to be as self-conscious as a genuine beauty.
+One twilight, I remember, I had slipped across from out of my bath for a
+pinch of the "crystals" which Mrs Monnerie had presented me with that
+afternoon; for my nose, also, was accustoming itself to an artificial
+life. An immense cheval looking-glass stood there, and at one and the
+same instant I saw not only my own slim, naked, hastening figure
+reflected in its placid deeps, but, behind me, that of Fleming,
+shadowily engrossed. With a shock I came to a standstill, helplessly
+meeting her peculiar stare. Only seven yards or so of dusky air divided
+us. Caught back by this unexpected encounter, for one immeasurable
+moment I stood thus, as if she and I were mere shapes in a picture, and
+reality but a thought.
+
+Then suddenly she recovered herself, and with a murmur of apology was
+gone. Huddled up in my towel, I sat motionless, shrunken for a while
+almost to nothing in the dense sense of shame that had swept over me.
+Then suddenly I flung myself on my knees, and prayed--though what about
+and to whom I cannot say. After which I went back and bathed myself
+again.
+
+The extravagances of Youth! No doubt, the worst pang was that though
+vaguely I knew that my most secret solitude had been for a while
+destroyed, that long intercepted glance of half-derisive admiration had
+filled me with something sweeter than distress. If only I knew what
+common-sized people really feel like in similar circumstances.
+Biographies tell me little; and can one trust what is said in novels?
+The only _practical_ result of this encounter was that I emptied all Mrs
+Monnerie's priceless crystals forthwith into my bath, and vowed never,
+never again to desert plain water. So, for one evening, my room smelt
+like a garden in Damascus.
+
+As for Fleming, she never, of course, referred to this incident, but our
+small talk was even smaller than before. If, indeed, to Percy, "toadlet"
+was the aptest tag for me; for Fleming, I fancy, "stuck-up" sufficed.
+Instinct told her that she was only by courtesy a _lady's_-maid.
+
+
+Less for her own sake than for mine, Mrs Monnerie and I scoured London
+for amusement, even though she was irritated a little by my preference
+for the kind which may be called instructive. The truth is, that in all
+this smooth idleness and luxury a hunger for knowledge had seized on me;
+as if (cat to grass) my mind were in search of an antidote.
+
+Mrs Monnerie had little difficulty in securing "private views." She must
+have known everybody that is anybody--as I once read of a Countess in a
+book. And I suppose there is not a very large number of this kind of
+person. Whenever our social engagements permitted, we visited the show
+places, galleries, and museums. Unlike the rest of London, I gazed at
+Amenhotep's Mummy in the late dusk of a summer evening; and we had much
+to say to one another; though but one whiff of the huge round library
+gave me a violent headache. When the streets had to be faced, Fleming
+came with us in the carriage, and I was disguised to look as much like a
+child as possible--a process that made me feel at least twenty years
+older. The Tower of London, the Zoo, Westminster Abbey, St Paul's--each
+in turn fell an early prey to my hunger for learning and experience. As
+for the Thames; the very sight of it seemed to wash my small knowledge
+of English history clear as crystal.
+
+Mrs Monnerie yawned her way on--though my comments on these marvels of
+human enterprise occasionally amused her. I made amends, too, by
+accompanying her to less well-advertised show-places, and patiently sat
+with her while she fondled unset and antique gems in a jeweller's, or
+inspected the china, miniatures, and embroideries in private
+collections. If the mere look of the books in the British Museum gave me
+a headache, it is curious that the Chamber of Horrors at Madame
+Tussaud's Wax Works did not. And yet I don't know; life itself had
+initiated me into this freemasonry. I surveyed the guillotine without a
+shudder, and eyed Mr Hare and Charles Peace with far less discomposure
+than General Tom Thumb, or even Robert Burns in the respectable gallery
+above. My one misfortune was that I could look at no murderer without
+instantly recomposing the imaginary scene of his crime within my mind.
+And as after a while Mrs Monnerie decided to rest on a chair set for her
+by the polite attendant under the scaffold, and we had the Chamber
+nearly to ourselves, I wandered on alone, and perhaps supped rather too
+full of horrors for one evening.
+
+Mrs Monnerie would often question me. "Well, what do you think of that,
+Mammetinka?" or, "Now, then, my inexhaustible little Miss Aristotle,
+discourse on that."
+
+And like a bullfinch I piped up in response to the best of my ability.
+My answers, I fear, were usually evasive. For I had begun to see that
+she was making experiments on my mind and senses, as well as on my
+manners and body. She was a "fancier." And one day I ogled up at her
+with the pert remark that she now possessed a pocket barometer which
+would do its very utmost to remain at 31 deg., if that was possible without
+being "Very Dry."
+
+She received this little joke with extraordinary good humour. "When I
+come down in the world, my dear," she said, "and these horrid anarchists
+are doing their best to send us all sky-high first, we'll visit the
+Courts of Europe together, like Count Boruwlaski. Do you think you could
+bring yourself to support your old friend in her declining years in a
+declining age?"
+
+I smiled and touched her glove. "Where thou goest, I will go," I
+replied; and then could have bitten off my tongue in remorse. "Pah,"
+gasped a secret voice, "so that's going the same way too, is it?"
+
+Yet heaven knows I was not a Puritan--and never shall be. I just adored
+things bright and beautiful. Music, too, in moderation, was my delight;
+and Susan Monnerie with her small, sweet voice would sometimes sing to
+me in one room while--in an almost unbearable homesickness--I listened
+in another. Concerts in general, however, left every muscle of my body
+as stiff with rheumatism as it was after my visit to Mr Moss's
+farm-house. The unexpected blare of a brass band simply froze my spine;
+and a really fine performance on the piano was sheer torture. Once,
+indeed, when Mrs Monnerie's carriage was one of a mellay clustered
+together while the Queen drove by, in the appalling clamour of the
+Lancers' trombones and kettledrums, I fell prostrate in a kind of fit.
+So it was my silly nerves that cheated me of my one and only chance to
+huzza a Crowned Head not, if I may say so without disrespect, so very
+many sizes larger than my own.
+
+Alas, Mrs Monnerie was an enthusiast for all the pleasures of the
+senses. I verily believe that it was only my vanity which prevented me
+from becoming as inordinately fat as Sir William Forbes-Smith's white
+meat threatened to make me.
+
+Brightest novelty of all was my first visit to a theatre--the London
+night, the glare and clamour of the streets, the packed white rows of
+faces, the sea-like noise of talk, the glitter, shimmer, dazzle--it
+filled my veins with quicksilver; my heart seemed to be throbbing in my
+breast as fast as Mrs Monnerie's watch. Fortunately she had remembered
+to take our seats on the farther side from the brass and drums of the
+orchestra. I restrained my shivers; the lights went out; and in the
+congregated gloom softly stole up the curtain on the ballet.
+
+Perched up there in the velvet obscurity of our box, I surveyed a
+woodland scene, ruins, distant mountains, a rocky stream on which an
+enormous moon shone, and actually moved in the theatrical heavens. And
+when an exquisite figure floated, pale, gauzy, and a-tiptoe, into those
+artificial solitudes, drenched with filmy light; with a far cry of
+"Fanny!" my heart suddenly stood still; and all the old stubborn
+infatuation flooded heavily back upon me once more.
+
+Susan sat ghostlike, serenely smiling. Percy's narrow jaws were working
+on their hinges like those of a rabbit I had seen through my
+grandfather's spyglass nibbling a root of dandelion. Mrs Monnerie
+reclined in her chair, hands on lap, with pursed-up mouth and weary
+eyes. There was nobody to confide in, then. But when from either side of
+the brightening stage flocked in winged creatures with lackadaisical
+arms and waxlike smilings, whose paint and powder caught back my mind
+rather than my feelings, my first light-of-foot was hovering beneath us
+close to the flaring footlights; and she was now no more Fanny than the
+circle of illuminated parchment over her head was the enchanting moon.
+What a complicated world it was with all these _layers_! The experience
+filled me with a hundred disquieting desires, and yet again, chiefest
+of them was that which made sensitive the stumps where, if I turned into
+a bird, my wings would grow, and which bade me "escape."
+
+"She's getting devilish old and creaky on her pins," yawned Percy, when
+the curtain had descended, and I had sighingly shrunk back into my own
+tasselled nook from the noise and emptiness of actuality.
+
+"No," said Mrs Monnerie, "it is you, Percy, who are getting old. You
+were born blase. You'll be positively yawning your head off at the Last
+Trump."
+
+"Dear Aunt Alice," said Percy, squinting through his opera-glasses,
+"nothing of the kind. I shall be helping you to find the mislaid
+knucklebones. Besides, it's better to be born----"
+
+But the rest of his sentence--and I listened to him only because I hated
+him--passed unheeded, for all my attention had been drawn to Susan. The
+hand beside me had suddenly clutched at her silk skirt, and a flush, gay
+as the Queen's Union Jacks in Bond Street, had mounted into her clear,
+pale cheek, as with averted chin she sat looking down upon some one in
+the stalls. At sight of her blushing, a richer fondness for her
+lightened my mind. I followed her eye to its goal, and gazed enthralled,
+now up, now down, stringing all kinds of little beads of thoughts
+together; until, perhaps conscious that she was being watched, she
+turned and caught me. Flamed up her cheeks yet hotter; and now mine too;
+for my spirits had suddenly sunk into my shoes at the remembrance of
+Wanderslore and my "ghostly, gloating little dwarfish creature." Then
+once more darkness stole over the vast, quieting house, and the curtain
+re-ascended upon Romance.
+
+
+
+
+Chapter Thirty-Five
+
+
+Instead of its being a month as had been arranged, it was over six weeks
+before I was deposited again with my elegant dressing-case--a mere
+flying visitor--on Mrs Bowater's doorstep. A waft of cooked air floated
+out into the June sunshine through the letter-box. Then, in the open
+door, just as of old, flushed and hot in her black clothes, there stood
+my old friend, indescribably the same, indescribably different. She
+knelt down on her own doormat, and we exchanged loving greetings. Once
+more I trod beneath the wreathing, guardian horns, circumnavigated the
+age-stained eight-day clock, and so into my parlour.
+
+Nothing was changed. There stood the shepherdess ogling the shepherd;
+there hung Mr Bowater; there dangled the chandelier; there angled the
+same half-dozen flies. Not a leg, caster, or antimacassar was out of
+place. Yet how steadfastly I had to keep my back turned on my landlady
+lest she should witness my discomfiture. Faded, dingy, crowded,
+shrunken--it seemed unbelievable, as I glanced around me, that here I
+could have lived and breathed so many months, and been so ridiculously
+miserable, so tragically happy. All that bygone happiness and
+wretchedness seemed, for the moment, mere waste and folly. And not only
+that--"common." I climbed Mr Bates's clumsy staircase, put down my
+dressing-case, and slowly removing my gloves, faced dimly the curtained
+window. Beyond it lay the distant hills, misty in the morning sunbeams,
+the familiar meadows all but chin-high with buttercups.
+
+"Oh, Mrs Bowater," I turned at last, "here I am. You and the quiet
+sky--I wish I had never gone away. What is the use of being one's self,
+if one is always changing?"
+
+"There comes a time, miss, when we don't change; only the outer walls
+crumble away morsel by morsel, so to speak. But that's not for you yet.
+Still, that's the reason. Me and the old sticks are just what we were,
+at least to the eye; and you--well, there!--the house has been like a
+cage with the bird gone."
+
+She stood looking at me with one long finger stretching bonily out on
+the black and crimson tablecloth, a shining sea of loving kindness in
+her eyes. "I can see they have taken good care of you and all, preened
+the pretty feathers. Why, you are a bit plumper in figure, miss; only
+the voice a little different, perhaps." The last words were uttered
+almost beneath her breath.
+
+"My voice, Mrs Bowater; oh, they cannot have altered _that_."
+
+"Indeed they have, miss; neater-twisted, as you might say; but not
+scarcely to be noticed by any but a very old friend. Maybe you are a
+little tired with your long drive and those two solemnities on the box.
+I remember the same thing--the change of voice--when Fanny came back
+from her first term at Miss Stebbings'."
+
+"How is she?" I inquired in even tones. "She has never written to me.
+Not a word."
+
+But, strange to say, as Mrs Bowater explained, and not without a symptom
+of triumph, that's just what Fanny _had_ done. Her letter was awaiting
+me on the mantelpiece, tucked in behind a plush-framed photograph.
+
+"Now, let me see," she went on, "there's hot water in your basin,
+miss--I heard the carriage on the hill; a pair of slippers to ease your
+feet, in case in the hurry of packing they'd been forgot; and your
+strawberries and cream are out there icing themselves on the tray. So we
+shan't be no time, though disturbing news has come from Mr Bowater, his
+leg not mending as it might have been foreseen--but that can wait."
+
+An unfamiliar Miss M. brushed her hair in front of me in the familiar
+looking-glass. It was not that her Monnerie raiment was particularly
+flattering, or she, indeed, pleasanter to look at--rather the contrary:
+and I gazed long and earnestly into the glass. But art has furtive and
+bewitching fingers. While in my home-made clothes I had looked just
+myself, in these I looked like one or other of my guardian angels, or
+perhaps, as an unprejudiced Fleming would have expressed it--the perfect
+lady. How gradual must have been the change in me to have passed thus
+unnoticed. But I didn't want to think. I felt dulled and dispirited.
+Even Mrs Bowater had not been so entranced to see me as I had
+anticipated. It was tiresome to be disappointed. I rummaged in a bottom
+drawer, got out an old gown, made a grimace at myself in my mind, and
+sat down to Fanny's letter. But then again, what are externals? Who was
+this cool-tempered Miss M. who was now scanning the once heartrending
+handwriting?
+
+
+     "DEAR MIDGETINA,--When this will reach you, I don't know. But
+     somehow I cannot, or rather I can, imagine you the cynosure of the
+     complete peerage, and prefer that my poor little letter should not
+     uprear its modest head in the midst of all that Granjer. You may
+     not agree--but if a few weeks of a High Life that may possibly
+     continue into infinity has made _no_ difference to you, then Fanny
+     is not among the prophets.
+
+     "We have not met since--we parted. But did you ever know a "dead
+     past" bury itself with such ingratiating rapidity? Have you in your
+     sublime passion for Nature ever watched a Sexton Beetle? But, mind
+     you, I have helped. The further all that slips away, the less I can
+     see I was to blame for it. What's in your blood needs little help
+     from outside. Cynical it may sound; but imagine the situation if I
+     _had_ married him! What could existence have been but a
+     Nightmare-Life-in-Death? (_Vide_ S. T. Coleridge). Now the Dream
+     continues--for us both.
+
+     "Oh, yes, I can see your little face needling up at this. But you
+     must remember, dear Midgetina, that you will never, never be able
+     to see things in a truly human perspective. Few people, of course,
+     try to. You do. But though your view may be delicate as gossamer
+     and clear as a glass marble, it can't be full-size. Boil a thing
+     down, it isn't the _same_. What remains has the virtues of an
+     essence, but not the volume of its origin. This sounds horribly
+     _school-booky_; but I am quite convinced you are too concentrated.
+     And I being what I am, only the full volume can be my salvation.
+     Enough. The text is as good as the sermon--far better, in fact.
+
+     "Now I am going to be still more callous. My own little private
+     worries have come right--been made to. I'm tit for tat, that is,
+     and wiser for it beyond words. Some day, when Society has taught
+     you all its lessons, I will explain further. Anyhow, first I send
+     you back L3 of what I owe you. And thank you. Next I want you to
+     find out from Mrs Mummery (as mother calls her--or did), if among
+     her distinguished acquaintance she knows any one with one or two,
+     or at most three, small and adorable children who need an excellent
+     governess. Things have made it undesirable for me to stay on here
+     much longer. It shall be I who give notice, or, shall we say,
+     terminate the engagement.
+
+     "Be an angel, then. First, wake up. Candidly, to think me better
+     than I am is more grossly unfair than if I thought you taller than
+     you are. Next, sweet cynosure, find me a sinecure. Don't trouble
+     about salary. (You _wouldn't_, you positive acorn of quixoticism,
+     not if I owed you half a million.) But remember: _Wanted by the end
+     of August at latest, a Lady, wealthy, amiable, with two Cherubic
+     Doves in family, boys preferred_. The simple, naked fact being that
+     after this last bout of life's fitful fever, I pine for a nap.
+
+     "Of course mother can see this letter if she wishes to, and you
+     don't mind. But personally I should prefer to have the bird
+     actually fluttering in my hand before she contemplates it in the
+     bush.
+
+     "I said _pine_ just now. Do you ever find a word suddenly so
+     crammed with meaning that at any moment it threatens to explode?
+     Well, Midgetina, them's my sentiments. Penitent I shall never be,
+     until I take the veil. But I have once or twice lately awoke in a
+     kind of glassy darkness--beyond all moonshine--alone. Then, if I
+     hadn't been born just thick-ribbed, unmeltable ice--well....
+     Vulgar, vulgar Fanny!
+
+     "Fare thee well, Midgetina. 'One cried, "God bless us," and "Amen,"
+     the other.' Prostituted though he may have been for scholastic
+     purposes, W. S. knew something of Life.
+
+     "Yours,--F."
+
+
+What was the alluring and horrifying charm for me of Fanny's letters?
+This one set my mind, as always, wandering off into a maze. There was a
+sour taste in it, and yet--it was all really and truly Fanny. I could
+see her unhappy eyes glittering through the mask. She saw
+_herself_--perhaps more plainly than one should. "Vulgar Fanny." As for
+its effect on me; it was as if I had fallen into a bed of nettles, and
+she herself, picking me up, had scoffed, "Poor little Midgekin," and
+supplied the dock. Her cynicism was its own antidote, I suppose. The
+selfishness, the vanity, and impenetrable hardness--even love had never
+been so blind as to ignore all that, and now what love remained for her
+had the sharpest of sharp eyes.
+
+And yet, though my little Bowater parlour looked cheap and dingy after
+the splendours of No. 2, Fanny somehow survived every odious comparison.
+She was very _intelligent_, I whispered to myself. Mrs Monnerie would
+certainly approve of that. And I prickled at the thought. And I--I was
+too "concentrated." In spite of my plumping "figure," I could never,
+never be full-size. If only Fanny had meant that as a compliment, or
+even as a kind of explanation to go on with. No, she had meant it for
+the truth. And it must be far easier for a leopard to change his spots
+than his inside. The accusation set all the machinery of my mind emptily
+whirring.
+
+My glance fell on my Paris frock, left in a shimmering slovenly ring on
+the floor. It wandered off to Fanny's postal order, spread over my lap
+like an expensive antimacassar. She had worked for that money; while I
+had never been anything more useful than "an angel." In fancy I saw her
+blooming in a house as sumptuous as Mrs Monnerie's. Bloom indeed! I
+hated the thought, yet realized, too, that it was safer--even if for the
+time being not so profitable--to be life-size. And, as if out of the
+listening air, a cold dart pierced me through. Suppose my Messrs Harris
+and Harris and Harris might not be such honest trustees as Miss Fenne
+had vouched for. Suppose they decamped with my L110 per annum!--I caught
+a horrifying glimpse of the wolf that was always sniffing at Fanny's
+door.
+
+Mrs Bowater brought in my luncheon, and--as I insisted--her own, too.
+The ice from Mr Tidy, the fishmonger's, had given a slightly marine
+flavour to the cream, and I had to keep my face averted as much as
+possible from the scorched red chop sprawling and oozing on her plate.
+How could she bring herself to eat it? We are such stuff as dreams are
+made on, said Hamlet. So then was Mrs Bowater. What a mystery then was
+this mutton fat! But chop or no chop, it was a happy meal.
+
+Having waved my extremely "Fannyish" letter at her, I rapidly dammed
+that current of her thoughts by explaining that I had changed my clothes
+not (as a gleam from her eye had seemed to suspect) because I was afraid
+of spoiling my London finery, but in order to be really at home. For the
+first time I surprised her muttering a grace over the bone on her plate.
+Then she removed the tray, accepted a strawberry, folded her hands in
+her lap, and we began to talk. She asked a hundred and one questions
+concerning my health and happiness, but never once mentioned Mrs
+Monnerie; and at last, after a small pause, filled by us both with the
+same thought, she remarked that "that young Mr Anon was nothing if not
+persistent."
+
+Since I had gone, not a week had passed, she told me, but he had come
+rapping at the door after dusk to inquire after me. "Though why he
+should scowl like a pitchpot to hear that you are enjoying the lap of
+luxury----" The angular shoulders achieved a shrug at least as Parisian
+as my discarded gown.
+
+"Why doesn't he write to me, then? Twice in ten weeks!"
+
+"Well it's _six_, miss, I've counted, though _seemingly_ sixty. But that
+being the question, he is there to answer it, at any time this evening,
+or at six to-morrow morning, if London ways haven't cured you of
+early-rising."
+
+So we went off together, Mrs Bowater and I, in the cool of the evening
+about half an hour after sunset--she, alas, a little ruffled because I
+had refused to change back again into my Monnerie finery. "But Mrs
+Bowater, imagine such a thing in a real wild garden!" I protested, but
+without mollifying her, and without further explaining--how could I do
+that?--that the gown which Miss Sentimentality (or Miss Coquette) was
+actually wearing was that in which she had first met Mr Anon.
+
+
+
+
+Chapter Thirty-Six
+
+
+I trod close in Mrs Bowater's track as she convoyed me through a sea of
+greenery breaking here and there to my waist and even above my hat.
+Summer had been busy in Wanderslore. Honeysuckle and acid-sweet brier
+were in bloom; sleeping bindweed and pimpernel. The air was liquidly
+sweet with uncountable odours. And the fading skies dyed bright the
+frowning front of the house, about which the new-come swifts shrieked in
+their play over my wilderness. Mr Anon looked peculiar, standing alone
+there.
+
+Having bidden him a gracious good-evening, Mrs Bowater after a long,
+ruminating glance at us, decided that she would "take a stroll through
+the grounds." We watched her black figure trail slowly away up the
+overgrown terraces towards the house. Then he turned. His clear,
+dwelling eyes, with that darker line encircling the grey-black iris,
+fixed themselves on me, his mouth tight-shut.
+
+"Well," he said at last, almost wearily. "It has been a long waiting."
+
+I was unprepared for this sighing. "It has indeed," I replied. "But it
+is exceedingly pleasant to see Beechwood Hill again. I wrote; but you
+did not answer my letter, at least not the last."
+
+My voice dropped away; every one of the fine little speeches I had
+thought to make, forgotten.
+
+"And now you are here."
+
+"Yes," I said quickly, a little timid of any silence between us, "and
+that's pleasant too. You can have no notion what a stiff, glaring garden
+it is up there--geraniums and gravel, you know, and windows, windows,
+windows. They are wonderfully kind to me--but I don't much love it."
+
+"Then why stay?" he smiled. "Still, you are, at least, safely out of
+_her_ clutches."
+
+"Clutches!" I hated the way we were talking. "Thank you very much. You
+forget you are speaking of one of my friends. Besides, I can take care
+of myself." He made no answer.
+
+"You are so gloomy," I continued. "So--oh, I don't know--about
+everything. It's because you are always cooped up in one place, I
+suppose. One must take the world--a little--as it is, you know. Why
+don't you go away; travel; _see_ things? Oh, if I were a man."
+
+His eyes watched my lips. Everything seemed to have turned sour. To have
+waited and dreamed; to have actually changed my clothes and come
+scuttling out in a silly longing excitement--for this. Why, I felt more
+lonely and helpless under Wanderslore's evening sky than ever I had been
+in my cedar-wood privacy in No. 2.
+
+"I mean it, I mean it," I broke out suddenly. "You domineer over me. You
+pamper me up with silly stories--'trailing clouds of glory,' I suppose.
+They are not true. It's every one for himself in this world, I can tell
+you; and in future, please understand, I intend to be my own mistress.
+Simply because in a little private difficulty I asked you to help
+me----"
+
+He turned irresolutely. "They have dipped you pretty deep in the
+dye-pot."
+
+"And what, may I ask, do you mean by that?"
+
+"I mean," and he faced me, "that I am precisely what your friend, Miss
+Bowater, called me. What more is there to say?"
+
+"And pray, am I responsible for everything my friends say? And to have
+dragged up _that_ wretched fiasco after we had talked it out to the very
+dregs! Oh, how I have been longing and longing to come home. And this is
+what you make of it."
+
+He turned his face towards the west, and its vast light irradiated his
+sharp-boned features, the sloping forehead beneath the straight, black
+hair. Fume as I might, resentment fainted away in me.
+
+"You don't seem to understand," I went on; "it's the waste--the waste of
+it all. Why do you make it so that I can't talk naturally to you, as
+friends talk? If I am alone in the world, so are you. Surely we can tell
+the truth to one another. I am utterly wretched."
+
+"There is only one truth that matters: you do not love me. Why should
+you? But that's the barrier. And the charm of it is that not only the
+Gods, but the miserable Humans, if only they knew it, would enjoy the
+sport."
+
+"Love! I detest the very sound of the word. What has it ever meant to
+me, I should like to know, in this--this cage?"
+
+"Scarcely a streak of gilding on the bars," he sneered miserably. "Still
+we are sharing the same language now."
+
+The same language. Self-pitying tears pricked into my eyes; I turned my
+head away. And in the silence, stealthily, out of a dark woody hollow
+nearer the house, as if at an incantation, broke a low, sinister,
+protracted rattle, like the croaking of a toad. I knew that sound; it
+came straight out of Lyndsey--called me back.
+
+"S-sh!" I whispered, caught up with delight. "A nightjar! Listen. Let's
+go and look."
+
+I held out my hand. His sent a shiver down my spine. It was clammy cold,
+as if he had just come out of the sea. Thrusting our way between the
+denser clumps of weeds, we pushed on cautiously until we actually stood
+under the creature's enormous oak. So elusive and deceitful was the
+throbbing croon of sound that it was impossible to detect on which naked
+branch in the black leafiness the bird sat churring. The wafted
+fragrances, the placid dusky air, and far, far above, the delicate,
+shallowing deepening of the faint-starred blue--how I longed to sip but
+one drop of drowsy mandragora and forget this fretting, inconstant self.
+
+We stood, listening; and an old story I had read somewhere floated back
+into memory. "Once, did you ever hear it?" I whispered close to him,
+"there was a ghost came to a house near Cirencester. I read of it in a
+book. And when it was asked, 'Are you a good spirit or a bad?' it made
+no answer, but vanished, the book said--I remember the very words--'with
+a curious perfume and most melodious twang.' With a curious perfume," I
+repeated, "and most melodious twang. There now, would you like _me_ to
+go like that? Oh, if I were a moth, I would flit in there and ask that
+old Death-thing to catch me. Even if _I_ cannot love you, you are part
+of all this. You feed my very self. Mayn't that be enough?"
+
+His grip tightened round my fingers; the entrancing, toneless dulcimer
+thrummed on.
+
+I leaned nearer, as if to raise the shadowed lids above the brooding
+eyes. "What can I give you--only to be your peace? I do assure you it is
+yours. But I haven't the secret of knowing what half the world means.
+Look at me. Is it not _all_ a mystery? Oh, I know it, even though they
+jeer and laugh at me. I beseech you be merciful, and keep me what I am."
+
+So I pleaded and argued, scarcely heeding the words I said. Yet I
+realize now that it was only my mind that wrestled with him there. It
+was what came after that took the heart out of me. There came a clap of
+wings, and the bird swooped out of its secrecy into the air above us, a
+moment showed his white-splashed, cinder-coloured feathers in the dusk,
+seemed to tumble as if broken-winged upon the air, squawked, and was
+gone. The interruption only hastened me on.
+
+"Still, still listen," I implored: "if Time would but cease a while and
+let me breathe."
+
+"There, there," he muttered. "I was unkind. A filthy jealousy."
+
+"But think! There may never come another hour like this. Know, know now,
+that you have made me happy. I can never be so alone again. I share my
+secretest thoughts--my imagination, with you; isn't that a kind of love?
+I assure you that it is. Once I heard my mother talking, and sometimes I
+have wondered myself, if I am quite like--oh, you know what they say: a
+freak of Nature. Tell me; if by some enchantment I were really and
+indeed come from those snow mountains of yours, and that sea, would you
+recognize me? Would you? No, no; it's only a story--why, even all this
+green and loveliness is only skin deep. If the Old World were just to
+shrug its shoulders, Mr Anon, we should all, big and little, be clean
+gone."
+
+My words seemed merely to be like drops of water dripping upon a sponge.
+"Wake!" I tugged at his hand. "Look!" Kneeling down sidelong, I stooped
+my cheek up at him from a cool, green mat of grass, amid which a
+glow-worm burned: "Is this a--a _Stranger's_ face?"
+
+He came no nearer; surveyed me with a long, quiet smile of infinitely
+sorrowful indulgence. "A Stranger's? How else could it be, if I love
+you?"
+
+Intoxicated in that earthy fragrance, washed about with the colours of
+the motionless flowers, it seemed I was merely talking to some one who
+could assure me that I was still in life, still myself. A strand of my
+hair had fallen loose, and smiling, its gold pin between my lips, I
+looped it back. "Oh, but you see--haven't I told you?--I can't love you.
+Perhaps; I don't know.... What shall I do? What shall I say? Now
+suppose," I went on, "I like myself _that_ much," and I held my thumb
+and finger just ajar, "then I like _you_, think of you, hope for you,
+why, that!"--and I swept my hand clean across the empty zenith. "_Now_
+do you understand?"
+
+"Oh, my dear, my dear," he said, and smiled into my eyes.
+
+I laughed out in triumph at the success of my device. And he laughed
+too, as if in a conspiracy with me--and with Misery, I could see,
+sitting like an old hag at the door from which the sound came. And out
+of the distance the nightjar set again to its churring.
+
+"Then I have made you a little--a little less unhappy?" I asked him, and
+hid my face in my hands in a desolate peace and solitude.
+
+He knelt beside me, held out his hand as if to touch me, withdrew it
+again. All presence of him distanced and vanished away in that small
+darkness. I prayed not to think any more, not to be exiled again
+into--how can I explain my meaning except by saying--Myself? Would some
+further world have withdrawn its veils and have let me in then and for
+ever if that lightless quiet could have continued a little longer? Is it
+the experience of every human being seemingly to trespass at times so
+close upon the confines of existence as that?
+
+It was his own harsh voice that broke the spell.
+
+"Wake, wake!" it called in my ear. "The woman is looking for you. We
+must go."
+
+My hands slipped from my face. A slow, sobbing breath drew itself into
+my body. And there beneath evening's vacancy of twilight showed the
+transfigured scene of the garden, and, near me, the anxious, suffering
+face of this stranger, faintly greened by the light of the worm.
+
+"Wake!" he bade me, rapping softly with his bony finger on my hand. I
+stared at him out of a dream.
+
+
+
+
+Chapter Thirty-Seven
+
+
+Time and circumstance have strangely divided me from the Miss M. of
+those days. I look back on her, not with shame, but with a shrug of my
+shoulders, a sort of incredulous tolerance--almost as if she too were a
+stranger. Perhaps a few years hence I shall be looking back with an
+equal detachment on the Miss M. seated here at this moment with her
+books and her pen in the solitude of her thoughts, vainly endeavouring
+to fret out and spin together mere memories that nobody will ever have
+the patience to read. Shall I then be able to tell myself what I want
+now, give words to the vague desires that still haunt me? Shall I still
+be waiting on for some unconceived eventuality?
+
+There is, too, another small riddle of a different kind, which I cannot
+answer. In memory and imagination, as I steadily gaze out of this
+familiar room recalling the past, I am that very self in that distant
+garden of Wanderslore. But even as I look, I am not only _within_ myself
+there, but also outside of myself. I seem, I mean, actually to be
+contemplating, as if with my own eyes, those two queer, silent figures
+returning through the drowsying, moth-haunted flowers and grasses to the
+black, vigilant woman awaiting them beside the garden house. "Alas, you
+poor, blind thing," I seem, like a ghost, to warn the one small
+creature, "have a care; seize your happiness; it is vanishing!"
+
+All that I write, then, is an attempt only to tell, not to explain. I
+realize that sometimes I was pretending things, yet did not know that I
+was pretending; that often I acted with no more conscience or
+consciousness, maybe, than has a carrion crow that picks out the eyes of
+a lamb, or a flower that draws in its petals at noon. Yet I know--know
+absolutely, that I was, and am, responsible not only for myself, but for
+everything. For my whole world. And I cannot explain this either. At
+times, as if to free myself, I had to stare at what appalled me. I am
+sure, for instance, that Mrs Monnerie never dreamed that her mention of
+Mr Crimble sent me off in fancy at the first opportunity to that woeful
+outhouse in his mother's garden to look in on him there--again. But I
+did so look at him, and was a little more at peace with him after that.
+Why, then, cannot I be at peace with one who loved me?
+
+Maybe if I could have foreseen how I was to come to Wanderslore again, I
+should have been a less selfish, showy, and capricious companion to him
+that June evening. But I was soon lapped back into my life in London;
+and thought only of Mr Anon, as I am apt to think of God: namely, when I
+needed his presence and his help. As a matter of fact, I had small time
+to think. Even the doubts and misgivings that occasionally woke me in
+the night melted like dreams in the morning. Every morrow blotted out
+its yesterday--as faded flowers are flung away out of a vase.
+
+In that vortex of visits and visitors, that endless vista of amusements
+and eating and drinking--some hidden spring of life in me began to fail.
+What a little self-conscious affected donkey I became, shrilly
+hee-hawing away; the centre of a simpering throng plying me with
+flattery. What airs I put on.
+
+If this Life of mine had been a Biography, the author of it would have
+had the satisfaction of copying out from a pygmy blue morocco diary the
+names of all the celebrated and distinguished people I met at No. 2. A
+few of them underlined in red! The amusing thing is that, like my
+father, I was still a Radical at heart and preferred low life--flea-bane
+and chickweed--to the fine flowers of culture; which only means, of
+course, that in this I am a snob inside out. Nevertheless, the attention
+I had shunned I now began to covet, and, like a famous artist or dancer,
+would go sulky to bed, if I had been left to blush at being unseen. I
+forced myself to be more and more fastidious: and tried to admire as
+little as possible. I would even imitate and affect languid
+pretentiousnesses and effronteries; and learned to be downright rude to
+people in a cultivated way. As for small talk, I soon accumulated a
+repertory of that, and could use the fashionable slang and current
+"conversations" like a native. All this intensely amused Mrs Monnerie.
+For, of course, the more like the general run of these high livers I
+was, the more conspicuous I became.
+
+The truth is, the Lioness's head was in peril of being turned, and,
+like a blind kitten in a bucket of water, I came very near to being
+drowned in the social cream-bowl. For what little I gained in public by
+all this silly vanity I paid a heavy price when alone. I began to be
+fretful and utterly useless to myself--just lived on from excitement to
+excitement. And Fleming soon had better reasons for detesting me than
+merely because I was horribly undersized.
+
+Perhaps I am exaggerating; but the truth is I find it extremely
+difficult to keep patience with Mrs Monnerie's pampered _protegee_. She
+was weak and stupid. Yet learning had not lost its charm. My mind
+persisted in being hungry, however much satiated were my senses and fine
+feelings. I even infected Susan with my enthusiasm for indigestible
+knowledge. For since Mrs Monnerie had begun to find my passion for
+shells, fossils, flints, butterflies, and stuffed animals a little
+wearisome, it was her niece who now accompanied me to my many Meccas in
+her stead. By a happy chance we often met on these pilgrimages the dark,
+straight-nosed young man whom I had looked down upon at my first ballet,
+and who also apparently was a fanatic.
+
+However deeply engrossed in mementoes of the Dark or Stone Ages he might
+be, he never failed to see us the moment we entered his echoing gallery.
+He would lift his eyebrows; his monocle would drop out; and he would
+come sauntering over to meet us, looking as fresh as apples cold with
+dew. I liked Captain Valentine. So much so that I sent an almost
+rapturous description of him to Mr Anon.
+
+He did not seem in the least to mind being seen in my company. We had
+our little private jokes together. We both enjoyed the company of Susan.
+He was so crisp and easy and quick-witted, and yet--to my unpractised
+eye--looked delightfully domesticatable. Even the crustiest old
+caretaker, at a word and a smile from Captain Valentine, would allow me
+to seat myself on the glass cases. So I could gloat on their contents at
+leisure. And certainly of the three of us I was by far the most diligent
+student.
+
+Long hours, too, of the none too many which will make up my life would
+melt away like snow in Mrs Monnerie's library. A button specially fixed
+for me in the wainscot would summon a manservant. Having ranged round
+the lofty walls, I would point up at what books I wanted. They would be
+strewn around me on the floor--gilded and leathery volumes, some of
+them almost of my own height, and many times my weight. I would open the
+lid, turn the great pages, and carefully sprawling on my elbows between
+them, would pore for hours together on their coloured pictures of birds
+and flowers, gems and glass, ruins, palaces, mountains--hunting,
+cock-fighting, fashions, fine ladies, and foreign marvels. And I dipped
+into novels so like the unpleasanter parts of my own life that they
+might just as well have been autobiographies.
+
+The secret charm of all this was that I was alone; and while I was
+reading I ceased to worry. I just drugged my mind with books. I would go
+rooting and rummaging in Mrs Monnerie's library, like a little pig after
+truffles. There was hardly a subject I left untasted--old plays, and
+street ballads; Johnson's enormous dictionary, that extraordinary book
+on Melancholy with its borage and hellebore and the hatted young man in
+love; _Bel and the Dragon_, the _Newgate Calendar_. I even nibbled at
+Debrett--and clean through all its "M's." The more I read, the more
+ignorant I seemed to become; and quite apart from this smattering jumble
+of knowledge, I pushed my way through memoirs and romances at the very
+sight of which my poor godmother would have fainted dead off.
+
+They may have been harmful; but I certainly can't say that I regret
+having read them--which may be part of the harm. You could tell the
+really bad ones almost at a sniff. They had bad smells, like a beetle
+cupboard or a scented old man. I read on of witchcraft and devils, yet
+hated the cloud they cast over me--like some horrible treacle in the
+mind. But as for the authors who just reasoned about Time and God and
+Miracles, and so on, I poked about in them willingly enough; but my
+imagination went off the other way--with my heart in its pocket.
+Possibly without knowing it. But I do know this: that never to my dying
+day shall I learn what a common-sized person with a pen or a pencil, can
+_not_ make shocking, or be shocked at. It seemed to me that to some of
+these authors the whole universe was nothing better than a Squid, and a
+very much scandalized young woman would attempt to replace their works
+on the shelves.
+
+When in good faith I occasionally ventured to share (or possibly to
+show off) some curious scrap of information with Mrs Monnerie, I thought
+her eyes would goggle out of her head. It was perhaps my old _mole_
+habit that prevented me from dividing things up into the mentionable and
+unmentionable. Possibly I carried this habit to excess; and yet, of
+course, remained the slave of my own small pruderies. Still, I don't
+think it was either Mrs Monnerie's or Percy's pruderies that I had to be
+careful about. To make _him_ laugh was one of the most hateful of my
+experiences at No. 2.
+
+I have read somewhere that the human instincts are "unlike Apollyon,
+since they always degrade themselves by their disguises. They dress
+themselves up as Apes and Mandrils; he as a ringed, supple,
+self-flattering, seductive serpent." Possibly that has something to do
+with it. Or is it that my instincts are also on a petty scale? I don't
+know. I hate and fear pain even more than most people, and have fought
+pretty hard in the cause of self-preservation. On the other hand, I
+haven't the faintest wish in the world to "perpetuate my species." Not
+that I might not have been happy in a husband and in my children. I
+suppose that kind of thing comes on one just as naturally as breathing.
+Nevertheless, I suspect I was born to be an Old Maid. Calling up Spirits
+from the vasty deep has always seemed to me to be a far more dreadful
+mystery than Death. It is not, indeed, the ghosts of the dead and the
+past which I think should oppress the people I see around me, but those
+of the children to come. I thank God from the bottom of my heart for the
+happiness and misery of having been alive, but my small mind reels when
+I brood on what the gift of it implies.
+
+Well, well, well; of one burden at least I can absolve Mrs
+Monnerie--that of making me so sententious. Somehow or other, but ever
+more sluggishly, those few crowded summer months of my twentieth year
+wore away. It is more of a mercy than a curse, I suppose, that Time
+never stands still.
+
+Meanwhile two events occurred which, for the time being, sobered and
+alarmed me. A few days before I had actually planned to pay a second
+visit to Mrs Bowater's, the almost incredible news reached me that she
+was sailing for South America. It would hardly have surprised me more to
+hear that she was sailing for Sirius. She came to bid me good-bye. It
+was _Mr_ Bowater, she told me. She had been too confident of the "good
+nursing." Far from mending in this world, his leg threatened "to carry
+him off into the next." At these tidings Shame thrust out a very ugly
+head at me from her retreat. I had utterly forgotten the anxiety my poor
+old friend was in.
+
+She put on her spectacles with trembling fingers, and pushed her
+husband's letter across to me. The handwriting was bold and thick, yet I
+fancied it looked a little weak in the loops:--
+
+
+     "DEAR EMILY,--The leg's giving me the devil in this hole of a
+     place. It looks as if I shouldn't get through with it. I should be
+     greatly obliged if you would come out to me. They'll give you all
+     the necessary information at the shipping office. Ask for Pullen.
+     My love to Fanny. What's she looking like now? I should like to see
+     her before I go; but better say nothing about it. You've got about
+     a month or three weeks, I should think; if that.
+
+     "I remain, your affec. husband,
+
+     "JOSEPH BOWATER."
+
+
+"Easy enough in _appearance_," was Mrs Bowater's comment, as she folded
+up this stained and flimsy letter again, and stuffed it into her purse,
+"but it's past even Mr Bowater to control what can be read between the
+lines."
+
+She looked at me dumbly; the skin seemed to hang more loosely on her
+face. In vain I tried to think of a comforting speech. The tune of
+"Eternal Father," one of the hymns we used to sing on windy winter
+Sunday evenings together, had begun droning in my head. The thought,
+too, was worrying me, though I did not put it into words, that Mr
+Bowater, far rather than in Buenos Ayres, would have preferred to find
+his last resting-place in Nero Deep or the Virgin's Trough--those
+enormous pits of blue in the oceans which I myself had so often gloated
+on in his Atlas. We were old friends now, he and I. He was Fanny's
+father. The very ferocity of his look had become a secret understanding
+between us. And now--at this very moment perhaps--he was dying. The
+jaunty "_devil_" in his letter, I am afraid, affected me far more than
+Mrs Bowater's troubled face or even her courage.
+
+Without a moment's hesitation she had made up her mind to face the
+Atlantic's thousands of miles of wind and water to join the husband she
+had told me had long been "worse than" dead. The very tone in which she
+uttered the word "steamer," was even more lugubrious than the enormous,
+mocking hoot of a vessel that had once alarmed me out of the sea one
+still evening at Lyme Regis. It was a horrifying prospect, yet she just
+quietly said, "steamer," and looked at me over her spectacles.
+
+While she was away, the little house on Beechwood Hill, "bought, thank
+God, with my own money," was to be shut up, but it was mine if I cared
+to return to it, and would ask a neighbour of hers, Mrs Chantry, for the
+key. It would be Fanny's if anything "happened" to herself. So dismal
+was all this that Mrs Bowater seemed already lost to me, and _I_ twice
+an orphan. We talked on together in low, cautious voices. After a single
+sharp, cold glance at my visitor, Fleming had left us to ourselves over
+an enormous silver teapot. I grew so nervous at last, watching Mrs
+Bowater's slow glances of disapproval at her surroundings; her hot,
+tired face; and listening to her long drawn sighs, that again and again
+I lost the thread of what she was saying, and could answer Yes, or No,
+only by instinct.
+
+What with an antiquated time-table, a mislaid railway ticket, and an
+impudent 'bus-conductor, her journey had been a trying experience. I
+discovered, too, that Mrs Bowater disliked the West End. She had first
+knocked at No. 4 by mistake. Its butler had known nothing whatever at
+all about any Miss M., and Mrs Bowater had been too considerate to
+specify my dimensions. She had then shared a few hot moments in the
+porch of No. 2 with a more fashionable visitor--to neither's
+satisfaction. A manservant had admitted her to Mrs Monnerie's marble
+halls and "barefaced" statuary, and had apparently thought the large
+parcel she carried in her arms should have been delivered in the area.
+
+She bore no resentment, though I myself felt a little uneasy. Life was
+like that, she seemed to imply, and she had been no party to it. There
+was no doubt a better world where things would be different--it was
+extraordinary what a number of conflicting sentiments she could convey
+in a pause or a shut of her mouth. Black and erect, she sat glooming
+over that alien teapot, sipping Mrs Monnerie's colourless China tea,
+firmly declining to grimace at its insipidity, until she had told me
+all there was to tell.
+
+At last, having gathered herself together, she exhorted me to write to
+that young Mr Anon. "I see a fidelity one might almost say dog-like,
+miss, on that face, apart, as I have reasons for supposing, from a
+sufficiency in his pocket. Though, the Lord knows, you are young yet and
+seemingly in no need of a home."
+
+Parcel, reticule, umbrella--she bent over me with closed eyes, and
+muttered shamefacedly that she had remembered me in her Will, "and may
+God bless you, miss, I'm sure."
+
+I clutched the gloved hand in a sudden helpless paroxysm of grief and
+foreboding. "Oh, Mrs Bowater, you forgive----" I choked, and still no
+words would come.
+
+She was gone, past recall; and all the love and gratitude and remorse I
+had longed to express flooded up in me. Yet, stuck up there in my chair,
+my chief apprehension had been that Fleming might come in again, and
+cast yet another veiled, sneering glance at my visitor.
+
+Peering between the gilded balusters, I watched my old friend droop away
+stiffly down the mild, lustrous staircase, bow to the man who opened the
+door for her, and emerge into the sunny emptiness.
+
+Maybe the thought had drifted across her mind that I had indeed been
+dipped in the dye-pot. But now--these many years afterwards--there is no
+more risk of misunderstanding. It is eight o'clock; the light is fading.
+Chizzel Hill glows green. I hear her feebling step on the stairs. She
+will peer at me over spectacles that now always straddle her nose. I
+must put my pen and papers away; and I, too, have made my Will.
+
+
+
+
+Chapter Thirty-Eight
+
+
+Mrs Bowater's departure from England--and it seemed as if its very map
+in my mind had become dismally empty--was not my only anxiety. My
+solicitors had hitherto been prompt; their remittances almost
+monotonously identical in amount. But my quarterly allowance on
+Midsummer Day, had been followed by a letter a week or two after her
+good-bye. It seemed to be in excellent English, and yet it was all but
+unintelligible to me. Every re-reading of it--the paper had apparently
+been dipped in water and dried--increased its obscurity and my alarm. I
+knew nothing about money matters, and the encyclopaedia I consulted only
+made me more dejected and confused. I remembered with remorse my poor
+father's last troubles. To answer the Harrises was impossible, and
+further study of their letter soon became unnecessary, for I had learned
+it by heart.
+
+The one thing certain was that Fanny's wolf had begun scratching at my
+door: that my income was in imminent danger. I had long since squandered
+the greater part of what remained out of my savings (after Fanny had
+helped herself) on presents and fal-lals; merely, I am afraid, to show
+Mrs Monnerie that I, too, could be extravagant. How much I owed her I
+could not even conjecture, and had not dared to inquire. To ask her
+counsel was equally impossible. She was almost as remote from me in this
+respect as Mrs Bowater, now in the centre of the Atlantic. As for Fanny,
+I had returned her postal orders and had heard no more.
+
+For days and days gloom hung over me like a thundercloud. Wherever I
+went I was followed by the spectres of the Harrises. Then, for a time,
+as do all things, foreboding and anxiety gradually faded off. I plunged
+back into the cream-bowl with the deliberate intention of drowning
+trouble.
+
+Meanwhile, I had not forgotten Fanny's "sinecure." One mackerel-skied
+afternoon, Mrs Monnerie and I and Susan were returning across the Park
+from an "At Home"--"to meet Miss M." A small child of the house had
+richly entertained the company by howling with terror at sight of me,
+until he had been removed by his nurse. I bear him no grudge; he made a
+peg on which to hang Fanny's proposal.
+
+"And what can Miss Bowater do? What are her qualifications?" Mrs
+Monnerie inquired pleasantly.
+
+"She is--dark and--pale," I replied, staring a little giddily out of the
+carriage at the sheep munching their way over the London grass.
+
+"Dark and pale?" mused Mrs Monnerie. "Well, that goes nearer the bone,
+perhaps, than medals and certificates and that sort of thing. Still, a
+rather Jane Eyreish kind of governess, eh, Susan?"
+
+Unfortunately I was acquainted with only one of the Miss Brontes, and
+that not Charlotte.
+
+"Miss Bowater is immensely _clever_, Mrs Monnerie," I hurried on, "and
+extremely popular with--with the other mistresses, and that sort of
+thing. She's not a bit what you might guess from what you might
+suppose."
+
+"Which means, I gather," commented Mrs Monnerie affably, "that Miss
+Bowater is the typical landlady's daughter. A perfect angel in--or out
+of--the house, eh, Miss Innocent?"
+
+"No," said I, "I don't think Miss Bowater is an angel. She is so
+interesting, so _herselfish_, you know. She simply couldn't be happy at
+Miss Stebbings's--the school where she's teaching now. It's not salary,
+Mrs Monnerie, she is thinking of--just two nice children and their
+mother, that's all."
+
+This vindication of Fanny left me uncomfortably hot; I continued to gaze
+fixedly into the green distances of the park.
+
+Yet all was well. Mrs Monnerie appeared to be satisfied with my
+testimonial. "You shall give me her address, little Binbin; and we'll
+have a look at the young lady," she decided.
+
+Yet I was none too happy at my success. Those familiar old friends of
+mine--motives--began worrying me. Would the change be really good for
+Fanny? Would it--and I had better confess that this troubled me the
+most--would it be really good for me? I wanted to help her; I wanted
+also to show her off. And what a joy it would be if she should change
+into the Fanny of my dreams. On the other hand, supposing she didn't On
+the whole, I rather dreaded the thought of her appearance at No. 2.
+
+
+Susan followed me into my room. "Who _is_ this Miss Bowater?" she
+inquired, "besides, I mean, being your landlady's daughter, and that
+kind of thing?"
+
+But my further little confidences failed to satisfy her.
+
+"But why is she so _not_ an angel, then? Clever and lovely--it's a
+rather unusual combination, you know. And yet"--she reflectively smiled
+at me, all candour and gentleness--"well not unique."
+
+I ran away as fast as ever I could with so endearing a compliment--and
+tossed it back again over my shoulder: "You don't mean, Susan, that
+_you_ are not clever?"
+
+"I do, my dear; indeed I do. I am so stupid that unless things are as
+plain and open as the nose on my face, I feel like suffocating. I'm
+dreadfully out of the fashion--a horrible discredit to my sex. As for
+Miss Bowater, I was merely being odious, that was all. To be quite
+honest and hateful--I didn't like the sound of her. And Aunt Alice is so
+easily carried away by any new scent. If a thing's a novelty, or just
+good to look at, or what they call a work of art--why, the hunt's up.
+There wouldn't have been any use for the Serpent in _her_ Eden. Mere
+things, of course, don't matter much: except that they rather lumber up
+one's rooms; and I prefer not to live in a museum. It's when it comes to
+persons. Still, it isn't as if Miss Bowater was coming here."
+
+I remained silent, thinking this speech over. Had it, I speculated,
+"come to" being a "person" in my own case?
+
+"Did you meet any other interesting people there?" Miss Monnerie went
+on, as if casually, turning off and on the while the little cluster of
+coloured electric globes that was on my table. "I mean besides Miss
+Bowater and that poor, dreadful--you know?"
+
+"No," I said bluntly, "not many."
+
+"You don't mind my asking these questions? And just in exchange, you
+solemn thing, I'll tell _you_ a secret. It will be like shutting it up
+in the delightfullest, delicatest little rosebud of a box!" In that
+instant's pause, it was as if a dream had passed swiftly, entrancingly,
+across the grave, smiling face.
+
+"Look!" she said, stooping low, and laying her slim left hand, palm
+downwards, across my table. I did look; and the first thing I noticed
+was how like herself that hand was, and how much less vigorous and
+formidable than Fanny's. And then I caught her meaning.
+
+"Oh, Susan," I cried in a woeful voice, gazing at the smouldering stones
+ringing that long slim third finger, "wherever I turn, I hear that."
+
+"Hear what?"
+
+"Why, of love, I mean."
+
+"But why, why?" the narrow brows lifted in faint distress, "I am going
+to be ever so happy."
+
+"Ah, yes, I know, I know. But why can't you be happy alone?"
+
+She looked at me, and a faint red dusked the delicate cheek. "Not _so_
+happy. Not _me_, I mean."
+
+"You do love him, then?" the words jerked out.
+
+"Why, you strange thing, how curiously you speak to me. Of course I love
+him. I am going to marry him."
+
+"But how do you know?" I persisted. "Does it mean more to
+you--well--than the secret of everything? I mean, what comes when one is
+almost nothing? Does it make you more yourself? or just break you in
+two? or melt you away?--oh, like a mist that is gone, and to every petal
+and blade of grass its drop of burning water?"
+
+A shade of dismay, almost of fear--the look a timid animal gives when
+startled--stole into her eyes. "You ask such odd questions! How can I
+answer them? I know this--I would rather die than _not_. Is that what
+you mean?"
+
+"Oh," my voice fainted away--disappointment, darkness, ennui; "only
+that!"
+
+"But what do you mean? What are you saying? Have you been told all this?
+It disturbs me; your face is like----"
+
+"Yes! what is it like?" I cried in distress, myself sinking back into
+myself, as if hiding in a lair.
+
+"I can't say," she faltered. "I didn't know...."
+
+We talked on. But though I tried to blur over and withdraw what I had
+said, she remained dissatisfied. A thin edge of formality had for the
+moment pushed in between us.
+
+That night I addressed a belated letter to Wanderslore, reproaching Mr
+Anon for not writing to me, telling him of Mrs Bowater's voyage, and
+begging him to assure the garden-house and the fading summer flowers
+that they had not been deserted in my dreams.
+
+
+At a quarter to twelve one morning, soon after this, I was sitting with
+Mrs Monnerie on a stool beneath Chakka's cage, and Susan was just about
+to leave us--was actually smoothing on the thumb of her glove; when
+Marvell announced that a Miss Bowater had called. I turned cold all over
+and held my breath.
+
+"Ah," whispered Mrs Monnerie, "your future Mrs Rochester, my pet."
+
+Every thought scuttled out of my head; my needle jerked and pricked my
+thumb. I gazed at the door. Never had I seen anything so untransparent.
+Then it opened; and--there was Fanny. She was in dark gray--a gown I had
+never seen before. A tight little hat was set demurely on her hair. In
+that first moment, she had not noticed me, and I could steal a long,
+steady look at the still, light, vigilant eyes, drinking in at one
+steady draught their new surroundings. Her features wore the thinnest,
+unfamiliar mask, like a flower seen in an artificial light. What wonder
+I had loved her. My hands went numb, and a sudden fatigue came over me.
+
+Then her quiet, travelling glance descended and hovered in secret
+colloquy with mine. She dropped me a little smiling, formal nod,
+moistened her lips, and composed herself for Mrs Monnerie. And it was
+then I became conscious that Susan had quietly slipped out of the room.
+
+It was a peculiar experience to listen to the catechism that followed.
+From the absorption of her attitude, the large, sidelong head, the
+motionless hands, it was clear that Mrs Monnerie found a good deal to
+interest her in the dark, attentive figure that stood before her. If
+Fanny had been Joan of Arc, she could not have had a more single-minded
+reception. Yet I was enjoying a duel: a duel not of wits, but of
+intuitions, between the sagacious, sardonic, watchful old lady, soaked
+in knowledge of humanity but, as far as I could discover, with
+extraordinarily small respect for it, and--Fanny. And it seemed to me
+that Fanny easily held her own; just by being herself, without revealing
+herself. Face, figure, voice; that was all. I could not take my eyes
+away. If only, I thought, my own ghost would keep as quiet and hidden as
+that in the presence of others.
+
+Perhaps I exaggerate. Love, living or dying, even if it is not blind,
+cannot, I suppose, focus objects very precisely. It sees only itself or
+disillusionment. Whether or not, the duel was interrupted. In the full
+light of the window, Fanny turned softly at the opening of the door.
+Marvell was announcing another caller. At his name my heart leapt up
+like William Wordsworth's at the rainbow. It was Sir Walter Pollacke.
+
+"This is _your_ visitor, Poppet," Mrs Monnerie waggishly assured me,
+"you shall have half an hour's _tete-a-tete_."
+
+
+
+
+Chapter Thirty-Nine
+
+
+So it was with a deep sigh--half of regret at being called away, and all
+of joy at the thought of seeing my old friend again--that I followed
+Marvell's coat-tails over the threshold. With a silly, animal-like
+affection I brushed purposely against Fanny's skirts as I passed her by;
+and even smirked in a kind of secret triumph at Percy Maudlen, who
+happened to be idling on the staircase as I hastened from room to room.
+
+The door of the library closed gently behind me, as if with a breath of
+peace. I paused--looked across. Sir Walter was standing at the further
+end of its high, daylit, solemn spaciousness. He was deep in
+contemplation of a white marble bust that graced the lofty
+chimney-piece--so rapt, indeed, that until I had walked up into the full
+stream of sunshine from a nearer window and had announced my approach
+with a cough, he did not notice my entrance. Then he flicked round with
+an exclamation of welcome.
+
+"My dear, dear young lady," he cried, beaming down on me from between
+his peaked collar-tips, over his little black bow, the gold rim of his
+large eye-glasses pressed to his lip, "a far--far more refreshing sight!
+Would you believe it, it was the pleasing little hobby of that oiled and
+curled monstrosity up there--Heliogabalus--to smother his guests in
+roses--literally, smother them? Now," and he looked at me quizzically as
+if through a microscope, "the one question is how have _you_ survived
+what I imagine must have been a similar ordeal? Not quite at the last
+gasp, I hope? _Comparatively_ happy? It's all we can hope for, my dear,
+in this world."
+
+I nodded, hungrily viewing him, meeting as best I could the bright blue
+eyes, and realizing all in a moment the dark inward of my mind.
+
+Those other eyes began thinking as well as looking. "Well, well, that's
+right. And now we must have a little quiet talk before his Eminence
+reappears. So our old friend Mrs Bowater has gone husband-hunting?
+Gallant soul: she came to see me."
+
+Squatted up on a crimson leather stool, I must have looked the picture
+of astonishment.
+
+"Yes," he assured me, "there are divinities that shape our ends; and Mrs
+Bowater is one of them. If anything can hasten her husband's
+recovery---- But never mind that. She has left me in charge. And here I
+am. The question is, can we have too many trustees, guardians? Perhaps
+not. Look at the Koh-i-Noor, now."
+
+I much preferred to continue to look at Sir Walter, even though, from
+the moment I had entered the room, at least five or six voices had begun
+arguing in my mind. And here, as if positively in answer to them, was
+his very word--_trustee_. I pounced on it like a wasp on a plum. It was
+a piece of temerity that saved me from--well, as I sit thinking things
+over in quiet and leisure in my old Stonecote, the house of my
+childhood, I don't know what it hasn't saved me from.
+
+"Too many trustees, Sir Walter?" I breathed. "I suppose, not--if they
+are _honest_."
+
+"But bless me, my dear young lady," his face seemed to be shining like
+the sun's in mist; "whose heresies are these? Have they given you a
+French maid?"
+
+"Fleming; oh, no," I replied, laughing out, "she's a Woman of Kent, all
+_but_. What I was really thinking is, that I would, if I may--and please
+forgive me--very much like to show you a letter. I simply can't make
+head or tail of it. But it's dreadfully--suggestive."
+
+"My dear, I came in certain hope of being shown nothing less vital than
+your heart," he retorted gallantly.
+
+So off I went--with my visitor all encouraging smiles as he opened the
+door for me--to fetch my lawyer's bombshell.
+
+Glasses on tip of his small, hawklike nose, Sir Walter's glittering eyes
+seemed to master this obscure document at one swoop.
+
+"H'm," he said cautiously, and once more communed with the bust of
+Heliogabalus. "Now what did you think of it all? Was it _worth_ six and
+eightpence, do you think?"
+
+"I couldn't think. It frightened me. 'The Shares,' you know. Whose
+Shares? Of what? I'm terribly, terribly ignorant."
+
+"Ah," he echoed, "the Shares--as the blackbird said to the Cherry Tree.
+And there was nobody, you thought, to discuss the letter with? You
+didn't answer it?"
+
+"Nobody," said I, with a shake of my head, and smoothing my silk skirts
+over my knees.
+
+"Why, of course not," he sparkled. "You see how admirably things work
+out. Miss Fenne, Mr Pellew, Mrs Bowater, my wife, Tom o' Bedlam, Hypnos,
+Mrs Monnerie, Mr Bowater, Mrs Bowater, the Harrises, _Me_. 'Pon my word,
+you'd think it was a plot. Now, supposing I keep this letter--could you
+trust it with me for a while?--and supposing I see these gentlemen, and
+make a few inquiries; and that in the meantime--we--we bottle the
+Cherries? But first, I must have a little more information. Your father,
+my dear. Let's just unbosom ourselves of all this horrible old
+money-grubbing, and see exactly how we stand."
+
+I needed no second invitation, and poured out helter-skelter all (how
+very little, in my girlish folly) that I knew about my father's affairs,
+and of how I had been "left."
+
+"And Miss Fenne, now?" he peered out, as if at my godmother herself.
+"Why didn't she send word to France? Where is this providential
+step-grandfather, Monsieur Pierre de Ronvel, all this time? Not dead
+too?"
+
+Shamefully I had to confess that I did not know; had not even inquired.
+"It is my miserable ingratitude. I just blow hot and cold; that is my
+nature."
+
+"Well, well, it may be so." He smiled at me, as if out of the distance,
+with the serenest kindliness. "But you and I are going to share the
+temperate zone--a cool, steady, Trade Wind."
+
+"If only," I smiled, taking him up on this familiar ground, "if only I
+could keep clear of the Tropics--and that Sargasso Sea!"
+
+At this little sally he gleamed at me as goldenly as the spade guinea
+that dangled on his waistcoat. Then he rose and surveyed one by one a
+row of silent, sumptuous tomes in their glazed retreat: "The Sargasso
+Sea; h'm, h'm, h'm; and one might suppose," he cast a comprehensive
+glance at the taciturn shelves around and above us, "one might suppose
+the tuppenny box would afford some of these a more sociable haven."
+
+But this was Greek to me. "Mrs Monnerie is generous?" he went on,
+"indulgent? Groundsel, seed, sugar, _and_ a Fleming. Yet perhaps the
+door might be pushed just an inch or two farther open, eh? What I'm
+meaning, my dear, is, will you perhaps wait in patience a little? And if
+anything should go amiss, will you make me a promise to send just a wisp
+of a word and a penny stamp to an old friend who will be doing his best?
+The first lawyer, you know, was a waif that was adopted by a tortoise
+and a fox. Now _I_'m going to be a mole--with its fur on the bias, as
+Miss Rossetti happened to notice--and burrow. So you see, all will come
+well!"
+
+I must have been sitting very straight and awkward on my stool, and not
+heeding what my face was telling.
+
+"Is there anything else distressing you, my dear?" he asked anxiously,
+almost timidly.
+
+"Only myself," I muttered. "There doesn't seem to be any end to it all.
+I grope on and on, and--the kindness only makes it worse. _Can_ there be
+a riddle, Sir Walter, that hasn't any answer? I remember reading in a
+book that was given me that Man 'comes into the world like morning
+mushrooms.' Don't you think that's true; even, I mean, of--everybody?"
+
+
+But his views on this subject were not to be shared with me for many a
+long day. Our half-hour was over; and there stood Mrs Monnerie,
+mushroom-shaped, it is true, but suggesting nothing of the evanescent,
+as she looked in on us from the mahogany doorway.
+
+"How d'ye do, Sir Walter," she greeted him. "If it hadn't been for an
+exceedingly interesting young creature disguised, I understand, as a
+Miss Bowater, I should have had the happiness of seeing you earlier. And
+how is our Peri looking, do you think?"
+
+"How is our Peri looking?" he repeated musingly, poising himself, and
+eyeing me, on his flat, gleaming boots; "why, Mrs Monnerie, as I suppose
+a Peri _should_ be looking--into Paradise."
+
+"Then, my Peri," said Mrs Monnerie blandly, "ask Sir Walter to be a
+complete angel, and stay to luncheon."
+
+Mrs Monnerie, I remember, was in an unusually vivacious humour at that
+meal; and devoured immense quantities of salmon mayonnaise. One might
+have supposed that Fanny's influence had added a slim crescent of
+silvery light to her habitual earthshine. None the less, when our guest
+was gone, she seemed to subside into a shallow dejection; and I into a
+much deeper. We sate on together in an uneasy silence, she pushing out
+her lips, restlessly prodding Cherry with her foot, and occasionally
+uttering some inarticulate sound that was certainly not intended as
+conversation.
+
+I think Mrs Monnerie was in secret a more remarkable woman than she
+affected to be. However thronged a room might be, you could never be
+unaware that she was in it. And in the gentle syllabub of polite
+conversation her silence was like that of an ancient rock with the
+whispering of the wavelets on the sands at its base. I remember once
+seeing a comic picture of an old lady with a large feather in her bonnet
+placidly sitting on a camp-stool beneath a pollard willow on one side of
+a stream, while a furious, frothing bull stood snorting and rampaging on
+the other. I think the old lady in the picture was meant to be
+Britannia; but, whoever or whatever the bull might represent, Mrs
+Monnerie reminded me of her. She sat more heavily, more passively, in
+her chair than any one I have ever seen.
+
+Of course--quite apart from intelligence--there must be many, many
+_layers_ in society, and I cannot say at all how far Mrs Monnerie was
+from the topmost. But I am sure she was able to look down on a good many
+of them; while I was born always to be "looking up." I was looking up at
+Mrs Monnerie now from my stool. Widespread in her chair, she had closed
+her eyes, and to judge from her face, she was dreaming. It looked more
+faded than usual. The puckers gave it a prunish look. Queer, contorting
+expressions were floating across her features. Her soul seemed gently to
+rock in them, like an empty boat at night on a dark river. In the pride
+of my youth--and a little uneasy over my confidences with Sir Walter--I
+examined my patroness with a slight stirring of dismay.
+
+"Oh, no, no! never to grow old, not me," a voice was saying in me. Yet,
+after all, I reminded myself, I was looking only at Mrs Monnerie's
+outer case. But then, after all, _was_ it only that? "The Resurrection
+of the body." One may see day at a little hole; says an old proverb--I
+hope a Kentish proverb. And from Mrs Monnerie, my thoughts drifted away
+to Fanny. She would grow old too. Should we know one another then?
+Should we understand, and remember what it was to be young? We had had
+our secrets.
+
+I came out of these reflections to find Mrs Monnerie's sleepy eyes fixed
+full upon me; and herself marvellously cheered up by her nap. She had
+thought very well of Miss Bowater, she told me. So well that she not
+only very soon found her a charming engagement as a morning governess to
+the two little girls of a rich fashionable widow--just Fanny's
+"sinecure"--but invited her to stay at No. 2 as a "companion" to
+herself, until a more permanent post offered itself.
+
+"You and I want more company," she assured me; "otherwise the flint will
+use up all the tinder, or vice versa, my dear. A pretty creature and no
+fool. She sings a little, too, she tells me. So we shall have music
+wherever she goes."
+
+That afternoon both flint and tinder--whichever of us was which--were
+kept very busy. Mrs Monnerie fell into one of her long monologues,
+broken only by Chakka's griding on his bars, and Cherry's whimpering in
+his dreams. It was another kind of "white meat" for me: and though, no
+doubt, I was incapable of digesting _all_ Mrs Monnerie's views on life,
+society, and the world at large, I realized that if in the course of
+time it might be my fate to wither and wizen away, I should still have
+my own company and plenty of internal entertainment. I actually saw
+myself a little bent-up, old, midget woman creeping down some stone
+steps out of a porch, with a fanlight, under a street lamp. It curdled
+my blood, that picture. And yet, I thought, what must be, must be. I
+will _endure_ to be a little, bent-up, old, midget woman, creeping down
+stone steps out of a porch with a fanlight. And I even nodded up at the
+street lamp.
+
+In response to a high-spirited scrawl from Fanny, I sent her all that
+was left of my savings to purchase "those horrible little etceteras that
+just feather down the scales, Midgetina. It would be saintlike of you,
+and you won't miss it _there_." It was a desperate wrench to me to see
+the last of my money disappear. I knew no more than the Man in the Moon
+where the next was to come from.
+
+I counted the days to Fanny's coming; and dressed myself for the
+occasion in the most expensive gold and blue afternoon gown I possessed.
+It must have been with a queer, mixed motive in my head. I sat waiting
+for her, while beyond the gloom-hung window raged a London thunderstorm,
+with dense torrents of rain. My little silver clock struck three, and
+she entered my room like a black swan, tossing from her small, velveted
+head, as she did so, a few beads of rain. From top to toe in deadest
+black. She must have noticed my glance of wonderment.
+
+"When you want to make a favourable impression on your social superiors,
+Midgetina, the meeker you look the better," she said.
+
+But this was not the only reason for her black. Only a day or two
+before, she told me, a letter had come from her mother.... "My father is
+dead." The words dropped out as if they were quite accustomed to one
+another's company. But those which followed--"blood-poisoning,"
+"mortification," hung up in my mind--in that interminable gallery--a
+hideous picture. I could only sit and stare at the motionless figure
+outlined against the sepulchral window.
+
+"It is awful, awful, Fanny!" I managed to whisper at last. "It never
+stops. One after another they all go. Think how he must have longed to
+be home. And now to be buried--out there--nothing but strangers."
+
+A vacancy came over my mind in which I seemed to see the dead Mr Bowater
+of my photograph rising like Lazarus in his grave-cloths out of his
+foreign tomb, and looking incredulously around him.
+
+"And your mother, Fanny! Out there, too--those miles and miles of sea
+away!"
+
+Fanny made no movement, though I fancied that her eyes wandered uneasily
+towards the door. "I quite agree, Midgetina; it's awful!" she said. "But
+really and truly, it's worse for me. I think I am like my father in some
+ways. Mother never really understood him. You can't _talk_ a man
+different; and for that matter holding your tongue at him is not much
+good either. You must just lie in wait for him with--well, with your
+charms, I suppose."
+
+The word sounded like a sneer. "Still, I don't mean to say that it was
+all pure filial bliss for me when he _was_ at home, until, at least, I
+grew up. Then he and I quarrelled too; but that's pleasure itself by
+comparison with listening to other people at it. He did his best to
+spoil me, I suppose. He wanted to make a lady of me." She turned and
+smiled out of the window; her under-lip quivering and casting a faint
+shadow on the smooth skin beneath. "So here I am; though I fear you
+can't make ladies of _quite_ the correct consistency out of dressmaker's
+clothes and a smatter of Latin. The salt will out. But there," she flung
+a little gesture with her glove, "as I say, here I am."
+
+And as if for welcome, a gleam of lightning danced at the window,
+illumining us there, and a crackling peal of thunder rolled hollowly off
+over the roof-tops of the square. We listened until the sound had
+emptied itself into quiet; and only the rain in the gutters gurgled and
+babbled.
+
+"Do you know," she went on, with a far-away challenging thrill in her
+low, mournful voice, "I don't think I have a solitary relation left in
+the world now--except mother. 'They are all gone into a world of
+light'--though I've now and then suspected that a few of the
+disreputable ones have been buried alive. There's nothing very dreadful
+in that. Life consists, of course, in shedding various kinds of
+skin--and tanning the remainder."
+
+Fanny, then, _was_ unaware that Mrs Bowater was not her real mother. And
+I think she never guessed it.
+
+"Nor have I," I said, "not one." As I looked at it there, it seemed a
+fact more curious than tragic. Besides, in the brooding darkness of that
+room it was Fanny and I who were strange, external beings, not the
+memoried phantoms of my mother and father. We had still to go on, to
+live things out. "So you see, Fanny," I continued, after a pause, "I do
+know what it means--a little; and we must try more than ever to be
+really one another's friend, mustn't we? I mean, if you think I can be."
+
+"Why, I owe you pounds and pounds," cried Fanny gaily, pushing back her
+handkerchief into her bodice. "Here we are--not quite in the same box,
+perhaps; still strangers and pilgrims. Of course we must help one
+another.... Just think of this house! The servants! The folly of it, and
+all for Madame Monnerie--though I wouldn't mind being in her shoes, even
+for one season. Socialism, my dear, is all a question of shoes. And this
+is Poppetkin's little boudoir? A pygmy palace, my dear, and if only the
+lightning would last a little longer I might get a real glimpse of that
+elfin little exquisite over there in her beautiful blue brocade. But
+then; it will be roses all the way with you, Miss M. You are
+independent, and valued for yourself alone."
+
+"How different people are, Fanny. You always think first of the use of a
+thing, and I, stupidly, just of it--itself."
+
+"Do we?" she said indifferently, and rose from her chair. "Anyhow I'm
+here to be of use. And who," she remarked, with a little yawn, as she
+came to a pause again beside the streaming window. "Who was that prim,
+colourless girl with the pale blue eyes? Engaged to be married."
+
+"But Fanny, she had her gloves on that morning, I remember it as clearly
+as--as I always remember everything where you are: how could you
+possibly tell that Susan Monnerie was engaged?"
+
+It was quite a simple problem, Fanny tranquilly assured me: "The ring
+bulged under the suede."
+
+Her scornfulness piqued me a little. "Anyhow," I retorted, "Susan's eyes
+are not _pale_ blue. They are almost cornflower--chicory colour; like
+the root of a candle-flame."
+
+"Please, Midgetina," Fanny begged me, "don't let me canker your new
+adoration. Perhaps you preened your pretty feathers in them when they
+were fixed on the demigod. 'Susan'! I thought all the Susans perished in
+the 'sixties, or had fled down the area. And who is _he_?" But she did
+not follow up her question. All things come to him who waits, she had
+rambled on inconsequently, if he waits long enough; and no doubt God
+would temper the wind to the shorn orphan even if she did look a perfect
+frump in mourning.
+
+"You know you could never look a frump," I replied indignantly, "even if
+you hadn't a rag on."
+
+Fanny shrugged her dainty shoulders. "Alas!" she said.
+
+But her "orphan" had brought me back with a guilty shock to what, no
+doubt, was an extremely fantastic panorama of Buenos Ayres; and that
+swiftly back again to Mr Crimble. For an instant or two I looked away.
+Perhaps it was my caution that betrayed me.
+
+"It's no use, Midgetina," she sang across at me from her window.
+"Whether it's because the chemical reactions of your pat little brain
+are more intense than ordinary people's, or because you and I are _en
+rapport_, I can't say. But there's one thing we must agree upon at once:
+never, never again to mention his name--at least in _this_ house. The
+Crimble chapter is closed."
+
+Closed indeed. But so sharp were her tones I hadn't the courage to warn
+her that even Susan had read most of it. Fanny came near, and, stooping
+as Susan had stooped, began fidgeting with the button of my electric
+chandelier. The little lamps shone wanly in our faces in the
+cloud-darkened room.
+
+"You see, my dear," she said playfully, "you think me all mockery and
+heartlessness. And no doubt you are right. But I want ease and security:
+just like that--as if I were writing an essay--'ease and security.' I
+don't care a dash about affection--at least without the aforesaid E. and
+S. I intend to please Mrs Monnerie, and she is going to be grateful to
+me. Don't think I am being 'candid.' I should have no objection to
+saying just the same thing to Mrs Monnerie herself: she'd enjoy it.
+Wait, you precious inchy image--wait until you need a sup of fatted
+calf's-foot jelly, not because you are sick of husks, but because you
+are deadly poor. Then you will understand. These sumptuosities! Wait
+till they haven't a ha'penny in their pockets, real or moral, for their
+next meal. They only look at things--if that; they can't know what they
+are. Even to be decently charitable one must have been a beggar--and
+cursed the philanthropists. Oh, I know: and Fanny's race is for
+Success."
+
+"But surely, Fanny, a thing is its looks, if only you look long enough.
+And I should just like to hear you talking if you were in my place.
+Besides, what is the use of success--in the end, I mean? You should see
+some of the actresses and singers and authors and that kind of thing Mrs
+Monnerie knows? You wouldn't have realized the actresses were even
+beautiful unless you had been told so. Why, you couldn't even say the
+_World_ is a success, except in the country. What is truly the use of
+it, then?" I had grown so eager in my argument that I had got up from
+my chair.
+
+"The use, you poor thing?" laughed Fanny; "why, only as a kind of
+face-cream to one's natural pride."
+
+The day was lightening now; but at that the whole darkness of my own
+situation drew close about me. Success, indeed. What was I? Nothing but
+a halfpennyless, tame pet in No. 2. What salve could restore to me _my_
+natural pride?
+
+
+
+
+Chapter Forty
+
+
+In happier circumstances, the next morning's post might have reassured
+me. Two letters straddled my breakfast tray, for I always had this meal
+in my own room. One of them was from Wanderslore--a long, crooked,
+roundabout letter, that seemed to taunt, upbraid, and entreat me, turn
+and turn about. It ended with a proposal of marriage.
+
+In most of the novels I have read, the heroine simply basks in such a
+proposal, even though scarcely her finger-tips are warmed by its rays.
+For my part, this letter, far from making me happy or even complacent,
+produced nothing but a feeling of fretfulness and shame. Thrusting it
+back into its envelope, I listened a while as if an eavesdropper might
+have overheard my silent reading of it--as if I must hide. Then, with
+eyes fixed on my small coffeepot, I sank into a low, empty reverie.
+
+The world had not been so tender to my feelings as to refrain from
+introducing me to General Tom Thumb and Miss Mercy Lavinia Bump Warren.
+
+"A pair of them! how quaint! how romantic! how _touching_!" I saw
+myself--gossamer veil, dwarfed orange-blossom, and gypsophila bouquet,
+all complete. Perhaps Mr. Pellew--perhaps even Miss Fenne's bishop,
+would officiate. Possibly Percy would be persuaded to "give me away."
+And what a gay little sniggling note in the _Morning Post_.
+
+I came out of these sardonic thoughts with cold hands and a sneer on my
+lips, and the thought that I had seen quite as conspicuously paired
+human mates even though their size was beyond reproach. Thank goodness,
+when I read my letter again, slightly better feelings prevailed. After
+all, the merest cinder of love would have made my darkness light. I
+shouldn't have cared for a thousand "touching's" then. I was still
+myself, a light-headed, light-hearted, young woman, for all my troubles
+and follies. If I had loved him, the rest of the world--much truer and
+sweeter within than it looks from without--would have vanished like a
+puff of smoke. But not even love's ashes were in my heart, except,
+perhaps, those in which Fanny had scrawled her name.
+
+I beat about, bruising wings and breast, hating life, hating the friend
+who had suddenly slammed-to another door in my gilded cage. "You can
+never, never go back to Wanderslore now," muttered my romantic heart.
+Friends we could have remained--only the closer for adversity. Now all
+that was over; and two human beings who might have been a refuge and
+reconciliation to one another, amused--as well as amusing--observers of
+the world at large, had been by this one piece of foolish excess divided
+for ever. I simply couldn't bear to look ridiculous in my own eyes.
+
+My other letter was from Sir W. P. He had seen the Harrises. Those foxy
+tortoises had advanced a ridiculous L1 19s. 7d. of my September
+allowance--the price of a pair of Monnerie bedroom slippers! It was
+enclosed--and Sir Walter begged me not to worry. Might he be my bank?
+Would I be so kind as to break it as soon as ever I wished? Meanwhile he
+would be making further inquires into my affairs.
+
+Perhaps because Sir W. P. was a business man, he was less persuasive
+with his pen than with his tongue. I thought he was merely humouring me,
+fell into a violent rage, and tore up not only his letter, but--noodle
+that I was--the Harris Order too--into the tiniest pieces, and heaped
+them up, like a souffle, on my tray. Mr Anon's I locked up in my old
+money-box, with the nightgown and the Miss Austen. Both letters wore
+like acid into my mind. From that day on--except for a few half-stifled
+or excited hours--they were never out of remembrance.
+
+
+Even the most valuable and expensive pet may become a vexation if it is
+continually showing ill-temper and fractiousness. Mrs Monnerie merely
+puckered her lips or shrugged her shoulders at my outbursts of vanity
+and insolence. But drops of water will wear away a stone. From being
+Court Favourite I gradually sank to being Court Fool. In sheer ennui and
+desperation I waggled my bells and brandished my bladder. A cat may look
+at a Queen, but it should, I am sure, make faces only at her
+Ladies-in-waiting.
+
+Fanny inherited yet another sinecure; and it was not envy on my side
+that helped her to shine in it, though I had my fits of jealousy. She
+was determined to please; and when Fanny made up her mind, circumstances
+seemed just to fawn at her feet. Life became a continuous game of chess,
+the moves of which at times kept me awake and brooding in a far from
+wholesome fashion in my bed. Pawn of pawns, and one at the point of
+being sacrificed, I could only squint at the board. Indeed, I
+deliberately shut my eyes to my own insignificance, strutted about,
+sulked, sharpened my tongue like a serpent, and became a perfect pest to
+myself when alone. Yet I knew in my heart that those whom I hoped to
+wound merely laughed at me behind my back, that I was once more proving
+to the world that the smaller one is the greater is one's vanity.
+
+In the midst of this nightmare, by a curious coincidence rose like a
+Jack-in-the-box from out of my past the queerest of phantoms--and proved
+himself real.
+
+I was sullenly stewing in my thoughts in the library one morning over a
+book which to this day I never weary of reading; Gilbert White's
+_Natural History of Selborne_. It was the nearest I could get to the
+country. The whim took me to try and become a little better acquainted
+with "William Markwick, Esq., F.L.S.," who had himself seen the _sphinx
+stellatarum_ inserting its proboscis into the nectary of a flower while
+"keeping constantly on the wing." There seemed to be something in
+common, just then, between myself and the _Sphinx_.
+
+I pressed my wainscot bell. After an unusual delay in a drastically
+regulated household, the door behind me gently opened. I began simpering
+directions over my shoulder in the Percy way with servants--and
+presently realized that all was not quite as it should be. I turned to
+look, and saw thrust in at the doorway an apparently bodiless,
+protuberant head, with black, buttony eyes on either side a long, long
+nose. Then the remainder of this figure squeezed reluctantly in. It was
+Adam Waggett.
+
+Guy Fawkes himself, caught lantern in hand among his powder barrels,
+must have looked like Adam Waggett at this moment. For a while I could
+only return his stare from the midst of a vortex of memories. When at
+last I found my tongue and inquired peremptorily how he came there, and
+what he was doing in the house, he broke into a long, gurgling,
+strangulated guffaw of laughter. I was already in a sour temper--in
+spite of the sweetness of Selborne. As a boy he had been my acute
+aversion; and here he was a grown man and as doltish and ludicrous as
+when he had roared at me in the moonlight from outside the kitchen
+window at Stonecote. His stupidity and disrespect made me almost
+inarticulate with rage.
+
+Maybe the foolish creature, feeling as strange as a cat in a new house,
+was only expressing his joy and affection at sight of a familiar face.
+But I had no time to consider motives. In a fever of apprehension that
+his noise might be overheard, my one thought now was to bring him to his
+senses. I shook my fists at him! and stamped my foot on the Turkey
+carpet--as if in snow. He watched me in a stupefaction of admiration,
+but at length his face solemnified, and he realized that my angry
+gestures were not intended for his amusement.
+
+His mouth stood open, he shook his head, and, unless my eyes deceived
+me, set back his immense ears.
+
+"Beg pardon, miss, I'm sure," he stuttered, "it was the sc-hock, and you
+inside the book there, and the old times like; and even though they was
+telling me that there was such a--such a young lady in the house.... But
+I won't utter a word, miss, not me. Only," he stared round at the closed
+door and lowered his voice to an even huskier whisper, "except to tell
+you that Pollie's doing very nicely, and whenever I sees her--well,
+miss, that thunderstorm and the old cow!"
+
+At this his features gathered together for another outburst, which I
+succeeded in stifling only by warning him that so long as he remained at
+Mrs Monnerie's he must completely forget the old cow and the
+thunderstorm, and never address me in company, or even glance in my
+direction if we happened to be together in the same room.
+
+"Mrs Monnerie would be extremely angry, Adam, to hear you laughing in
+the library; and I am anxious that you should be a credit to Lyndsey in
+your new situation."
+
+"But you rang, miss--at least the library did," he replied, now
+thoroughly contrite, "and Mr Marvell said, 'You go along, there,
+Waggett, second door right, first staircase,' so I come."
+
+"Yes," I said, "but it was a mistake. A mistake, you understand. Now go
+away; and remember!"
+
+A few minutes afterwards, Marvell himself discreetly entered the room;
+merely, as it would appear, to adjust the angles of a copy of the
+_Spectator_ that lay on the table.
+
+"It's very close this morning," I remarked, with as much dignity as I
+could muster.
+
+"It is indeed, miss," said Marvell, stooping sedately to examine my
+bell-push. He rose and brushed his fingers.
+
+"They say, miss, the electricity gets into the wires, when thunder's in
+the air. A wonderful invention, but not, as I am told, entirely
+independent of changes in the weather. I hope, miss, you haven't been
+disturbed...."
+
+
+When Susan, even paler and quieter than usual, presently looked into the
+library, she found its occupant still on the floor and brooding over the
+browns and greys, the roses and ochres, of a complete congregation of
+_Sphingidae_. She stooped over me, sprawling in so ungainly a fashion
+across my book.
+
+"Moths, this morning? What a very learned person you will become." Her
+voice was a little flat, yet tender; but I was still in the sulks, and
+made no answer.
+
+"I suppose," she began again, as if listlessly, and straying over to the
+window, "I suppose it is very pleasant for you, seeing so much of your
+friend, Miss Bowater?"
+
+Caution whispered a warning, and I tried to wriggle out of an answer by
+remarking that Fanny's mother was the kindest woman in the whole world.
+
+"Where is she now?"
+
+"In Buenos Ayres."
+
+"Really? How curious family traits are. The very moment I saw Miss
+Bowater I was quite certain that she was intended for an adventurous
+life; and didn't you say that her father was an officer in the merchant
+service? What is he like?"
+
+"Mr Bowater? He died--out there, only a week or two ago."
+
+"How very, very sad," breathed Susan. "And for Miss Bowater. I never
+even guessed from her manner that she was in trouble of that kind. And
+that, I suppose, shows a sort of courage. You were perfectly right; she
+is lovely and clever. The face a little hard, don't you think, but
+_very_ clever. She seems to be prepared for what Aunt Alice is going to
+say long before she says it. And I, you know, sometimes don't notice
+even the sting till--till the buzzing is over." She paused. "And you
+were able to make a real friend of her?"
+
+Susan had not the patience to wait until I could sort out an answer to
+this question. "I don't want to be intrusive," she went on hurriedly,
+"to--to ask horrid questions; but is it true, you dear thing, that you
+may some day be leaving us?"
+
+"Leaving you?" I echoed, my thoughts crouching together like chicks
+under a hen.
+
+The reply came softly and reluctantly in that great cistern of air.
+
+"Why, I understood--to be married."
+
+I leant heavily on my hands, seeing not the plumes and colours of the
+Sphinxes that swam up at me from the page, but, as if in a mist between
+them and me, the softly smiling face of Fanny. At last I managed to
+overcome the slight physical sickness that had swept over me. "Susan"; I
+said, "if a friend betrayed the very soul out of your body, what would
+you do? where would you go?"
+
+"Betray! I, my dear?" and she broke into a confused explanation.
+
+It was a remark of Percy's she had been referring to, a silly, trivial
+remark, not, she was sure, intended maliciously. Why, every one teased
+every one. Didn't she know it? And especially about the things that were
+most personal, "and, well, sacred." It was nothing. Just that; and she
+should not have repeated it.
+
+"Tell me exactly, please," said I.
+
+"Well, Aunt Alice was talking of marriage; and Miss Bowater smiled. And
+Aunt Alice--you know her mocking way--asked how, at her age--Miss
+Bowater's--she had learned to look at the same time both charming and
+cynical. 'Don't forget, my dear,' they were her very words, 'that the
+cynicism wears the longer.' But Miss Bowater laughed, and changed the
+subject by asking if she could do anything for your headache. It was the
+afternoon, you remember, when you were lying down. That was all."
+
+"And Mr Maudlen?"
+
+The fair cheek reddened. "Oh, Percy made a joke--about you. Just one of
+his usual horrid jokes. My dear"--she came and knelt down beside me and
+laid her gentle hand on my shoulder; "don't look so--so awful. It's only
+how things go."
+
+I drew the hand down. It smelled as fresh and sweet as jessamine.
+
+"Don't bother about me, Susan," I said coldly. "Just leave me to my
+moths. I could show you scorpions and hornets ten times more dangerous
+than a mere Death's Head. You don't suppose I care? Why, as you say,
+even God has His little joke with some of us. I'm quite used to it."
+
+"Don't, don't," she implored me. "You are over-tired, you poor little
+thing. You go on reading and reading. Why, your teeth are chattering."
+
+A faint brazen reverberation from out of the distance increased in
+intensity and died away. It was Adam performing on the gong. Susan had
+tried to be kind to me, to treat me as if I were a normal fellow-being.
+I pressed the cool fingers to my lips.
+
+"There, Susan," I said, with cheerful mockery, "except for my father and
+mother, I do believe you are the first life-size or any-size person I
+have ever kissed. A midget's gratitude!"
+
+Ever so slightly the fingers constricted beneath my touch. No doubt
+there was a sensation of the spidery in my embrace.
+
+
+
+
+Chapter Forty-One
+
+
+But a devil of defiance had entered into me. With a face as snakily
+sweet as I could make it, I made my daintiest bow to Mrs Monnerie's
+guests--to Lord Chiltern, a tall, stiffish man, who blinked at our
+introduction almost as solemnly and distastefully as had Mrs Bowater's
+Henry, and to Lady Diana Templeton. A glance at this lady reminded me
+spitefully of an old suspicion of mine that Mrs Monnerie usually invited
+her duller friends to luncheon and the clever to dinner. Not that she
+failed to enjoy the dull ones, but it was in a different way.
+
+A long, gilded Queen Anne mirror hung opposite my high chair, so that
+whenever I glanced across I caught sight not only of myself with cheeks
+like carnations above my puffed blue gown, but also of Adam Waggett.
+Ever and again his red hand was thrust over my shoulder--the hand that
+had held the wren. And I was so sick at heart--on yet another wren's
+behalf--that I could hardly repress a shudder. Poor Adam; whenever I
+think of him it is of a good, yet weak and silly man. He has found his
+Eden, so I have heard, in New Zealand now, and I hope he has forgiven my
+little share in his life.
+
+Throughout that dull luncheon my tongue went mincing on and on--in sheer
+desperation lest any one should detect the state of mind I was in. With
+pale eyes Percy sniggered over his soup. Susan was silent and
+self-conscious. Captain Valentine frowned and nibbled his small
+moustache. Lady Diana Templeton smiled like a mauve-pink snapdragon, and
+Mrs Monnerie led me on. It was my last little success. Luncheon over, I
+was helped down from my chair, and allowed "to run away."
+
+What was it Lord Chiltern was saying? I paused on the threshold: "An
+exquisite little performance. But isn't it a little selfish to hide her
+light under your admirable bushel, Mrs Monnerie? The stage, now?"
+
+"The stage!" exclaimed Mrs Monnerie in consternation. "The child's as
+proud as Lucifer. She would faint at the very suggestion. You have heard
+her deliciously sharp little tongue, but her tantrums! Still, she's a
+friendly and docile little creature, and I am very well satisfied with
+her."
+
+"And not merely that"; paced on the rather official voice. "I was
+noticing that something in the eyes. Almost disconcertingly absent yet
+penetrating. She thinks. She comes and goes in them. I noticed the same
+peculiarity in poor Willie Arbuthnot's. And this little creature is
+scarcely more than a child."
+
+"I think it is _perfectly_ sad, Lord Chiltern," broke in a reedy,
+vibrating voice. "In some circumstances it would be _tragic_. It's a
+mercy she does not realize ... _habit_, you know...."
+
+Listeners seldom hear such good things of themselves. Why, then, was it
+so furious an eavesdropper that hastened away with a face and gesture
+worthy of a Sarah Siddons!
+
+No: my box remained locked. Yet, thought I, as I examined its contents,
+any dexterous finger could have opened that tiny lock--with a hairpin.
+And how else could my secret have been discovered? Fleming or Fanny--or
+both of them: it maddened me to think of them in collusion. I would take
+no more risks. I tore Mr Anon's letter into fragments, and these again
+into bits yet smaller, until they were almost like chaff. These I
+collected together and put into an envelope, which I addressed in
+sprawling capitals to Miss Fanny Bowater, at No. 2.
+
+Then for a sombre half-hour I communed intensely at the window with my
+Tank. It was hot and taciturn company--not a breath of air stirred my
+silk window-blind--yet it managed to convey a few home truths, and even
+to increase the light a little in which I could look at the "bushel."
+There _were_ "mercies," I suppose. Out of the distance rolled the vague
+reverberation of the enormous city. I watched the sparrows, and they me.
+When the time came for my afternoon walk, I put on my hat, with eyes
+fixed on my letter, and, finally--left it behind me.
+
+Was it for discretion's sake, or in shame? I cannot say, but I remember
+that during my slow descent to the empty hall I kept my eyes fixed with
+peculiar malignity on the milk-white figure of a Venus (not life-size,
+thank Heaven), who had been surprised apparently in the very act of
+entering the water for a bathe. Why I singled her out for contempt I
+cannot say; for she certainly looked a good deal more natural and
+modest than many of the fine ladies who heedlessly passed her by. It was
+merely my old problem of the Social Layers over again. And my mind was
+in such a state of humiliation and discomfort that I hadn't the energy
+even to smile at a marble goddess.
+
+
+Fanny was awaiting me on my return. A strand of hair was looped demurely
+and old-fashionedly round each small ear; her clear, unpowdered skin had
+the faint sheen of a rose. She stood, still and shimmering, in the
+height of pleasant spirits, yet, I thought, watchful and furtive through
+it all. She had come, she said, to congratulate me on my "latest
+conquest."
+
+Mrs Monnerie, she told me, had been pleased with my entertainment of the
+late First Commissioner of--was it Good Works? But I must beware. "Once
+a coquette, Midgetina, soon _quite_ heartless," she twitted me.
+
+To which I called sourly, as I stood drying my hands, that pretty
+compliments must be judged by where they come from.
+
+"Come from, indeed," laughed Fanny. "He's a positive Peer of the Realm,
+and baths, my dear, every morning in the Fount of Honours. You wouldn't
+be so flippant if ... hallo! what's this? A letter--addressed to Me!
+Where on earth did this come from?"
+
+Heels to head, a sudden heat swept over me. "Oh," said I hollowly,
+"that's nothing, Fanny. Only a little joke. And now you are here---- But
+surely," I hurried on, "you don't really like that starched-up
+creature?"
+
+But Fanny was holding up my envelope between both her thumbs and
+forefingers, and steadily smiling at me, over its margin. "A joke,
+Midgetina; and one of your very own. How exciting. And how bulgy. May I
+open it? I wouldn't miss it for the world."
+
+"Please, Fanny, I have changed my mind. Let me have it. I don't feel
+like jokes now."
+
+"But honestly, _I_ do. Some jokes have such a deliciously serious side.
+Besides, as you have just come in, why didn't this go out with you?" To
+which I replied stubbornly that it was not her letter; that I had
+thought better of it; and that she had no right to question me if I
+didn't want to answer.
+
+"I see." Her voice had glided steadily up the scale of suavity. "It's a
+bit more of the dead past, is it? And you don't like the--the
+fragrance. But surely, if we are really talking about rights--and,
+according to my experience, there are none too many of them knocking
+about in this world--surely I have the right to ask what pulpy mysteries
+are enclosed in an envelope addressed to me in what appears to be a
+feigned ca--calligraphy? Look. I am putting the thing on the floor so
+that we shall be on--well--fairly equal terms. Even your sensitive Sukie
+could not be more considerate than that, could she? All I want to know
+is, what's inside that envelope? If you refuse to say, well and good. I
+shall retire to my maidenly couch and feed on the blackest
+suppositions."
+
+It was a cul-de-sac; and the only thing to do was to turn back boldly
+and get out of it.
+
+"Well, Fanny; I have told you that I thought better of sending it. But I
+am not ashamed. Even if I am wrong, I suppose you are at liberty to have
+your little jokes too, and so is Percy Maudlen. It's a letter, torn up;
+that's all."
+
+"A letter--so I guessed. Who from?"
+
+I gazed at her silently.
+
+"Yes?"
+
+"It's hateful of you, Fanny.... From the hunchback."
+
+Her astonishment, surely, could not have been pretence. "And what the
+devil, you dear, stammering little midgelet, has your miserable little
+hunchback to do with me? Why send his scrawls to _me_--and in bits?"
+
+"Because," said I, "I thought you had been making fun of him and me
+to--the others."
+
+The light hands lifted themselves; the dark head tilted a little back
+and askew. "_What_ a roundabout route," she sighed. But her face was
+false to the smooth, scornful accents. "So you suspected me of spying on
+you? _I_ see. And gentle Susan Monnerie was kind enough to smear a
+little poison on the fangs. Well, Midgetina love, I tell you this. It's
+safer sometimes to lose your reputation than your temper. But there's a
+limit----"
+
+"Hush," I whispered, for I had sharper ears than Fanny even when rage
+had not deafened her own. I pounced on the envelope--but only just in
+time.
+
+"It's Mr Percy, miss," announced Fleming, "and may he come in?"
+
+"Hallo!" said that young man, lounging greyly into view, "a bad penny,
+Miss M. I happened to be passing Buszard's just now, and there was the
+very thing! Miss Bowater says you have a sweet tooth, and they really
+are rather neat." He had brought me the daintiest little box of French
+doll bonbons. I glared at it; I glared at him--hardly in the mood for
+any more of his little jokes--not even one tied up with pale-blue
+ribbon.
+
+"There's another thing," he went on. "Susan told us that your birthday
+was coming along--August 25th, isn't it? And I have proposed a Grand
+Birthday Party, sort of general rag. Miss M. in the Chair. Don't you
+think it's a ripping idea of mine, Miss Bowater?"
+
+"_Most_ ripping," said Fanny, meeting his long, slow, sneaking glance
+with a slight and seemingly involuntary lift of her narrow shoulder. A
+long look I could not share passed between them; I might have been a toy
+on the floor.
+
+"But you don't look positively in the pink," he turned to me. "Now, does
+she? Late hours, eh? You look crumpled, doesn't she? Cherry, too: we
+must have in another Vet." The laugh died on his long lips. His eyes
+roved stealthily from point to point of the basking afternoon room, then
+once more sluggishly refastened on Fanny. I sat motionless, watching his
+every turn and twist, and repeating rapidly to myself, "Go away, my
+friend; go away, go away." Some nerve in him must have taken the message
+at last, or he found Fanny's silence uneasy. He squinnied a glinting,
+curious look at me, and as jauntily as self-consciousness permitted,
+took his departure.
+
+The door shut. His presence fainted out into a phantasm, and that into
+nothing at all. And for sole evidence of him basked on my table, beneath
+a thread of sunlight, his blue-ribboned box.
+
+"_Is_n't he a ninny?" sighed Fanny. "And yet, my dear: there--but for
+the grace of God--goes Mr Fanny Bowater."
+
+Her anger had evaporated. There stood my familiar Fanny again, slim as a
+mast, her light eyes coldly shining, her bearing, even the set of her
+foot showing already a faint gilding of Mrs Monnerie. She
+laughed--looking straight across at me, as if with a challenge.
+
+"Yes, my dear, it's quite true. I'm not a bit cross now. Milk and Honey.
+So you see even a fool may be a lightning conductor. I forgive," she
+pouted a kiss from the tips of her fingers, "I forget."
+
+And then she was gone too, and I alone. What an easy, consoling
+thing--not to care. But though Fanny might forgive, she must have found
+it unamusing to forget. The next evening's post brought me an
+exquisitely written little fable, signed "F. B.," and entitled
+_Asteroida and the Yellow Dwarf_. I couldn't enjoy it very much; though
+no doubt it must have been exceedingly entertaining when read aloud.
+
+Still Fanny did not _care_. While I myself was like those railway lines
+under the green bank I had seen on my journey to Lyme Regis. A day's
+neglect, a night's dews, and I was stained thick with rust. A dull and
+heedless wretchedness took possession of me. The one thought that kept
+recurring in every instant of solitude, and most sharply in those
+instants which pounced on me in the midst of strangers, was, how to
+escape.
+
+I put away the envelope and its contents into my box again. And late
+that night, when I was secure from interruption, I wrote to Wanderslore.
+Nibbling a pen is no novelty to me, but never in all my life have I
+spent so blank and hideous an hour merely in the effort to say No to one
+simple question so that it should sound almost as pleasant as Yes, and
+far more unselfish. "Throw the stone," indeed; when my only desire was
+to heal the wound it might make.
+
+Thank goodness my letter was kinder than I felt. My candelabra burned
+stilly on. Cold, in the blues, I stood in my dressing-gown and
+spectacling my eyes with my hands, looked out of the chill glass into
+the London night. Only one high garret window shone out in the dark face
+of the houses.... Who, where, was Willie Arbuthnot with the peculiar
+eyes? Had Lord Chiltern a tank on his roof--his back-yard? What a fool I
+had been to abandon myself and come here. If they only knew how I
+despised them. And the whole house asleep. So much I despised them that
+not until I was dressing the following morning did I stoop into my
+Indian mirror to see if I could discover what Lord Chiltern had meant.
+
+During the next few weeks Mrs Monnerie--with ample provocation--almost
+yawned at sight of me. In a bitter instant of rebellion our eyes met.
+She detected the "ill-wish" in mine, and was so much taken aback by it
+that I should hardly have recognized the set face that glared at me as
+hers at all. Well, the fancier had wearied of her fancy--that was all.
+If I had been just an ordinary visitor, she would soon have washed her
+hands of me. But I was notorious, and not so easily exchanged as
+bronchitic Cherry had been for her new Pekinese, Plum.
+
+Possibly, too, the kind of aversion she now felt against me was a closer
+bond than even virtuosity or affection. She would sit with a sullen
+stare under her heavy eyelids watching me grow more and more heated and
+clumsy over my scrap of embroidery or my game of Patience. Meanwhile
+Chakka would crack his nut, and with stagnant eye sidle thievishly up
+and down the bars of his cage; while Plum gobbled up dainties or snored
+on his crimson cushion. We three.
+
+Usually I was left pretty much alone; and what plans Mrs Monnerie was
+turning over to dispose of me were known only to herself. What to do;
+where to hide; how to "make myself small" during those torpid August
+days, I hardly knew. My one desire was to keep out of sight. One
+afternoon, I remember, after brooding for some hours under a dusty lilac
+bush in the Square garden, I strayed off--my eyes idly glancing from
+straw to hairpin to dead match in the dust--down a narrow deserted side
+street that led to a Mews. A string of washing hung in the sunlight from
+the windows. Skirting a small public house, from which the smell of beer
+and spirits vapoured into the sunshine, I presently found myself in a
+black-green churchyard among tombstones.
+
+A clear shadow slanted across the porch, the door of the church stood
+open, and after pausing for a moment on its flagstones, I went in. It
+was empty. Stone faces gazed sightlessly from its walls. Two red
+sanctuary lamps hung like faint rubies in the distant chancel. I dragged
+out a cushion and sat down under the font. The thin, cloudy fragrance
+that hung in the gloom of the coloured windows stole in through my
+nostrils, drugged my senses. Propping my chin on my hands, I looked up
+through the air into the dark roof. A pendulum ticked slowly from on
+high. Quiet began to steal over me--long centuries of solitude had
+filled this vacancy as with a dream.
+
+It was as if some self within me were listening to the unknown--but to
+whom? I could not answer; I might as well have been born a pagan. Was
+this church merely the house of a God? There were gods and temples all
+over the world. Was it a house of _the_ God? Or only of "their" God? In
+a sense I knew it was also _my_ God's, but how much more happily
+confident of His secret presence I had been in wild-grown Wanderslore.
+Did this mean that I was actually so much alone in my world as to be
+different from all other human beings?
+
+A fluttering panic swept through my mind at the muffled thumping of the
+invisible pendulum. I had forgotten that time never ceased to be
+wasting. And the past stretched its panorama before my eyes: No. 2; the
+public house with the solitary thinking man I had seen, pot in hand,
+staring into the sawdust; and this empty, cavernous silence. Then back
+and back--Lyme Regis, Mrs Bowater's--and Fanny, Lyndsey, my mother and
+father, the garden. No sylphs of the air, no trancing music out of the
+waters now! It was as if the past were surrounded with a great wall; and
+the future clear and hard as glass. You might explore the past in
+memory: you couldn't scale its invisible walls.
+
+And there was Mr Crimble--an immeasurable distance away; yet he had
+still the strange power to arrest me, to look out on me in my path. Must
+the future be all of its piece? I stopped thinking again, and my eyes
+wandered over my silk skirt and shoes.
+
+My ghost! there was no doubt I was an exceedingly small human being. It
+may sound absurd, but I had never _vividly_ realized it before. And how
+solemnly sitting there--like a spider in wait for flies. "For goodness'
+sake, Miss M.," I said to myself, "cheer up. You are being deadly dull
+company--always half afraid. They daren't really do anything to you, you
+know. Face it out." And even while I was muttering, I was reading the
+words cut into a worn tombstone at my feet: "Jenetta Parker"--only
+two-and-twenty, a year older than I. Yet she had lain here for two whole
+centuries and more. And beneath her name I spelled out her epitaph:--
+
+
+     "Ah, Stranger, breathe a sigh:
+        For, where I lie,
+     Is but a handful of bright Beauty cast:
+        It was; and now is past."
+
+
+I repeated the words mechanically again and again; and, as if in
+obedience to her whisper, a much more niggardly handful of none too
+bright a beauty did breathe a sigh and a prayer--part pity, part
+melancholy, and all happiness and relief. I kissed my hand to Jenetta;
+crossed myself and bowed to the altar--dulled gems of light the
+glass--and emerged into the graveyard. A lamp had been lit. An old man
+was shuffling along behind me; he had come to lock up the church. For an
+instant I debated whether or not to scuttle off down the green-bladed
+cobbles of the Mews and--trust my luck. No: the sight of a Punch and
+Judy man gobbling some food out of a newspaper at the further corner
+scared me out of _that_ little enterprise. Dusk was settling; and I
+edged back as fast as I could to No. 2.
+
+But it did me good--that visit. It was as if I had been looking back and
+up at my own small skull on a high shelf in some tranquil and dingy old
+laboratory--a few bottles, a spider's web, and an occasional glint of
+moonlight. How very brief the animation for so protracted a peace.
+
+
+
+
+Chapter Forty-Two
+
+
+Susan's visits to her aunt were now less frequent. Percy's multiplied.
+Duty seemed to have become a pleasure to him. Mrs Monnerie's gaze would
+rest on him with a drowsy vigilance which it was almost impossible to
+distinguish from mere vacancy of mind. He was fortunate in being her
+only nephew; unfortunate in being himself, and the son of a sister to
+whom Mrs Monnerie seemed very little attached. Still, he appeared to be
+doing his best to cultivate his aunt's graces, would meander "in
+attendance" round and round the Square's square garden, while Fanny's
+arm had now almost supplanted Mrs Monnerie's ebony cane. When Mrs
+Monnerie was too much fatigued for this mild exercise, or otherwise
+engaged, there was still my health to consider. At least Fanny seemed to
+think so. But since Percy's conversation had small attractions for me,
+it was far rather he who enjoyed the experience; while I sat and stared
+at nothing under a tree.
+
+At less than nothing--for I was staring, as usual, chiefly at myself. I
+seemed to have lost the secret of day-dreaming. And if the quantity of
+aversion that looked out of my eyes had matched its quality, those
+piebald plane-trees and poisonous laburnums would have been scorched as
+if with fire. I shall never forget those interminable August days,
+besieged by the roar and glare and soot and splendour and stare of
+London. All but friendless, absolutely penniless, I had nothing but bits
+of clothes for bribes to keep Fleming from mutiny. I shrank from making
+her an open enemy; though I knew, as time went on, that she disrelished
+me more and more. She would even keep her nose averted from my clothes.
+
+As for Fanny, to judge from her animation when Susan and Captain
+Valentine broke in upon us, I doubt if anybody less complacent than
+Percy would not have realized that she was often bored. She would look
+at him with head on one side, as if she had been painted like that for
+ever and ever in a picture. She could idly hide behind her beauty, and
+Percy might as well have gone hunting Echo or a rainbow. She could make
+corrosive remarks in so seducing a voice that the poor creature hardly
+knew where the smart came from. He would exclaim, "Oh, I say, Miss
+Bowater!" and gape like a goldfish. Solely, perhaps, to have some one to
+discuss herself with, Fanny so far forgave and forgot my shortcomings as
+to pay me an occasional visit, and had yawned how hideously expensive
+she found it to live with the rich. But the only promise of help I could
+make was beyond any possibility of performance. I promised, none the
+less, for my one dread was that she should guess what straits I was in
+for money.
+
+It is all very well to accuse Percy Maudlen of goldfishiness. What kind
+of fish was I? During the few months of my life at Mrs
+Monnerie's--until, that is, Fanny's arrival--she had transported her
+"Queen Bee," as she sometimes called me, to every conceivable social
+function and ceremony, except a deathbed and a funeral. Why had I not
+played my cards a little more skilfully? Had not Messrs de la Rue
+designed a pack as if expressly for me, and for my own particular little
+game of Patience? If perhaps I had shown more sense and less
+sensibility; and had not been, as I suppose, in spite of all my airs and
+flauntings, such an inward young woman, what altitudes I might have
+scaled. Mrs Monnerie, indeed, had once made me a promise to present me
+at Court in the coming May. It is true that this was a distinction that
+had been enjoyed by many of my predecessors in my own particular
+"line"--but I don't think my patroness would have dished me up in a Pie.
+
+That being so, my proud bosom might at this very moment be heaving
+beneath a locket adorned with the royal monogram in seed pearls, and
+inscribed, "To the Least of her Subjects from the Greatest of Queens."
+Why, I might have been the most talked-of and photographed debutante of
+the season. But I must beware of sour grapes. "There was once a Diogenes
+whom the gods shut up in a tub."--Poor Mr Wagginhorne, he had been,
+after all, comparatively frugal with his azaleas.
+
+In all seriousness I profited far too little by Mrs Monnerie's
+generosities, by my "chances," while I was with her. I just grew
+hostile, and so half-blind. Many of her friends, of course, were merely
+wealthy or fashionable, but others were just natural human beings. As
+Fanny had discovered, she not only delighted in people that were
+pleasant to look at. She enjoyed also what, I suppose, is almost as
+rare, intelligence.
+
+The society "Beauties," now? To be quite candid, and I hope without the
+least tinge of jealousy, I think they liked the look of me--well, no
+better than I liked the look of excessively handsome men. These exotics
+of either sex reminded me of petunias--the headachy kind, that are
+neither red nor blue, but a mixture. I always felt when I looked at them
+that they knew they were making me dizzy. Yet, as a matter of fact, I
+could hardly see their beauty for their clothes. It must, of course, be
+extremely difficult to endure _pure_ admiration. True, I never remember
+even the most tactful person examining me for the first time without
+showing some little symptom of discomposure. But that's a very different
+thing.
+
+There was, however, another kind of beauty which I loved with all my
+heart. It is difficult to express what I mean, but to see a woman whose
+face seemed to be the picture of a dream of herself, or a man whose face
+was absolutely the showing of his own mind--I never wearied of that. Or,
+at any rate, I do not now; in looking back.
+
+So much for outsides. Humanity, our old cook, Mrs Ballard, used to say,
+is very like a veal and ham pie: its least digestible part is usually
+the crust. I am only an amateur veal and ham Pieist; and the fact
+remains that I experienced just as much difficulty with what are called
+"clever" people. They were like Adam Waggett in his Sunday clothes--a
+little too much of something to be quite all there. I firmly believe
+that what one means is the best thing to say, and the very last thing,
+however unaffected, most of these clever people said was seemingly what
+they meant. Their conversation rarely had more than an intellectual
+interest. You asked for a penny, and they gave you what only looked like
+a threepenny bit.
+
+Perhaps this is nothing but prejudice, but I have certainly always got
+on very much better with stupid people. Chiefly, perhaps, because I
+could share experiences with them; and the latest thoughts did not
+matter so much. Clever men's--and women's--experiences all seem to be
+in their heads; and when I have seen a rich man clamber through the eye
+of a needle, as poor Mr Crimble used to say, I shall keep my eyes open
+for a clever one attempting the same feat. It had been one of my absurd
+little amusements at Mrs Bowater's to imagine myself in strange
+places--keeping company with a dishevelled Comet in the cold wilds of
+space, or walking about in the furnaces of the Sun, like Shadrach and
+Abednego. Not so now. Yet if I had had the patience, and the far better
+sense, to fix my attention on any one I disliked at Mrs Monnerie's so as
+to enter _in;_ no doubt I should so much have enlarged my inward self as
+to make it a match at last even for poor Mr Daniel Lambert.
+
+On the other hand, I sometimes met people at No. 2, or when I was taken
+out by Mrs Monnerie, whose faces looked as if they had been on an almost
+unbelievably long journey--and one not merely through this world, though
+that helps. I did try to explore _those_ eyes, and mouths, and wrinkles;
+and solitudes, stranger than any comet's, I would find myself in at
+times. Alas, they paid me extremely little attention; though I wonder
+they did not see in my eyes how hungry I was for it. They were as
+mysterious as what is called genius. And what would I not give to have
+set eyes on Sir Isaac Newton, or Nelson, or John Keats--all three of
+them comparatively little men.
+
+However absurdly pranked up with conceit I might be, I knew in my heart
+that outwardly, at any rate, I was nothing much better than a curio. To
+care for me was therefore a really difficult feat. And apart from there
+being very little time for anything at Mrs Monnerie's, I never caught
+any one making the attempt. When the novelty of me had worn off, I used
+to amuse myself by listening to Mrs Monnerie's friends talking to one
+another--discussing plays and pictures and music and so on--anything
+that was new, and, of course, each other. Often on these occasions I
+hardly knew whether I was on my head or my heels.
+
+Books had always been to me just a part of my life; and music very
+nearly my death. However much I forgot of it, I wove what I could
+remember of my small reading round myself, so to speak; and I am sure it
+made the cocoon more comfortable. As often as not these talkers argued
+about books as if their authors had made them--certainly not "out of
+their power and love"--but merely for their readers to pick to pieces;
+and about "beauty," too, as if it were something you could eat with a
+spoon. As for poetry, one might have guessed from what they said that it
+meant no more than--well, its "meaning." As if a butterfly were a
+chrysalis. I have sometimes all but laughed out. It was so contrary to
+my own little old-fashioned notions. Certainly it was not my mother's
+way.
+
+But there, what presumption this all is. I had never been to school,
+never been out of Kent, had never "done" anything, nor "been" anything,
+except--and that half-heartedly--myself. No wonder I was censorious.
+
+If I could have foreseen how interminably difficult a task it would
+prove to tack these memoirs together, I am sure I should have profited a
+little more by the roarings of my fellow lions. As a matter of fact I
+used merely to watch them sipping their tea, and devouring their cake
+amid a languishing circle of admirers, and to wonder if they found the
+cage as tedious as I did. If they noticed me at all, they were usually
+polite enough; but--like the Beauties--inclined to be absent and
+restless in my company. So the odds were against me. I had one advantage
+over them, however, for when I was no longer a novelty, I could
+occasionally slip in, unperceived, behind an immense marquetry bureau.
+There in the dust I could sit at peace, comparing its back with its
+front, and could enjoy at leisure the conversation beyond.
+
+Nevertheless, there was one old gentleman, with whom I really made
+friends. He was a bachelor, and was not only the author of numbers of
+books, but when he was a little boy had been presented by Charles
+Dickens himself with a copy of _David Copperfield_, and had actually sat
+on the young novelist's knee. No matter who it was he might be talking
+to, he used to snap his fingers at me in the most exciting fashion
+whenever we saw each other in the distance, and we often shared a quiet
+little talk together (I standing on a highish chair, perhaps, and he
+squatting beside me, his hands on his knees) in some corner of Mrs
+Monnerie's enormous drawing-room, well out of the mob.
+
+I once ventured to ask him how to write.
+
+His face grew very solemn. "Lord have mercy upon me," he said, "_to
+write_, my dear young lady. Well, there is only one recipe I have ever
+heard of: Take a quart or more of life-blood; mix it with a bottle of
+ink, and a teaspoonful of tears; and ask God to forgive the blots." Then
+he laughed at me, and polished his eyeglasses with his silk pocket
+handkerchief.
+
+I surveyed this grisly mixture without flinching, and laughed too, and
+said, tapping his arm with my fan: "But, dear Mr ----, would you have me
+die of anaemia?"
+
+And he said I was a dear, valuable creature, and, when next "Black
+Pudding Day" tempted us, we would collaborate.
+
+Having heard _his_ views, I was tempted to push on, and inquired as
+flatteringly as possible of a young portrait painter how he mixed his
+paints: "So as to get exactly the colours you want, you know?"
+
+He gently rubbed one long-fingered hand over the other until there fell
+a lull in the conversation around us. "What I mix my paints with, Miss
+M.? Why--merely with brains," he replied. My old novelist had forgotten
+the brains. But I discovered in some book or other long afterwards that
+a still more celebrated artist had said that too; so I suppose the _mot_
+is traditional.
+
+And last, how to "act": for some mysterious reason I never asked any
+theatrical celebrity, male or female, how to do that?
+
+More or less intelligent questions, I am afraid, are not the only
+short-cut to good, or even to polite, conversation. And I was such a
+dunce that I never really learned what topics are respectable, and what
+not. In consequence, I often amused Mrs Monnerie's friends without
+knowing why. They would exchange a kind of little ogling glance, or with
+a silvery peal of laughter like bells, cry, "How naive!"
+
+How I detested the word. Naive--it was simply my ill-bred earnestness.
+Still, I made one valuable discovery: that you could safely laugh or
+even titter at things which it was extremely bad manners to be serious
+about. What you _could_ be serious about, without letting skeletons out
+of the cupboard--that was the riddle. I had been brought up too
+privately ever to be able to answer it.
+
+How engrossing it all would have been if only the Harrises could have
+trebled my income, and if Fanny had not known me so well. There was even
+a joy in the ladies who shook their lorgnettes at me as if I were deaf,
+or looked at me with their noses, as one might say, as if I were a bad
+or unsavoury joke. On my part, I could never succeed in forgetting that,
+in spite of appearances, they must be of flesh and blood, and therefore
+the prey of them, and of the World, and the Devil. So I used to amuse
+myself by imagining how they would look in their bones, or in rags, or
+in heaven, or as when they were children. Or again, by an effort of
+fancy I would reduce them, clothes and all, to _my_ proportions; or even
+a little less. And though these little inward exercises made me
+absent-minded, it made them ever so much more interesting and
+entertaining.
+
+How I managed not to expire in what, for a country mouse, was extremely
+like living in a bottle of champagne, I don't know. And if my silly
+little preferences suggest cynicism--well, I may be smug enough, but I
+don't, and won't, believe I am a cynic. Remember I was young. Besides I
+love human beings, especially when they are very human, and I have even
+tried to forgive Miss M. her Miss M-ishness. How can I be a cynic if I
+have tried to do that? It is a far more difficult task than to make
+allowances for the poor, wretched, immortal waxwork creatures in Madame
+Tussaud's Chamber of Horrors, or even for the gentleman naturalist who
+shot and stuffed Kent's last golden oriole.
+
+Nor have I ever, for more than a moment, shared with Lemuel Gulliver his
+none too nice disgust at the people of Brobdingnag, even at kind-hearted
+Glumdalclitch. Am I not myself--not one of the quarrelsome "Fair Folks
+of the Woods"--but a Yahoo? Gulliver, of course, was purposely made
+unaccustomed to the gigantic; while I was born and bred, though not to
+such an extreme, in its midst. And habit is second nature, or, as an old
+Lyndsey proverb goes, "There's nowt like eels for eeliness."
+
+I am, none the less, ever so thankful that neither my ears, nose, nor
+eyes, positively magnify, so to speak. I may be a little more sensitive
+to noises and smells than some people are, but that again is probably
+only because I was brought up so fresh and quiet and privately. I am far
+more backward than can be excused, and in some things abominably
+slow-witted. Whether or not my feelings are pretty much of the usual
+size, I cannot say. What is more to the point is that in some of my
+happiest moments my inward self seems to be as remote from my body as
+the Moon is from Greenland; and, at others,--even though that body
+weighs me down to the earth like a stone--it is as if memory and
+consciousness stretched away into the ages, far, far beyond my green and
+dwindling Barrow on Chizzel Hill, and had shaken to the solitary
+night-cry of Creation, "Let there be Light."
+
+But enough and to spare of all this egotism. I must get back to my
+story.
+
+
+
+
+Chapter Forty-Three
+
+
+The fact is, Miss M.'s connection with good society was rapidly drawing
+to a close. My smoky little candle had long since begun to gutter and
+sputter and enwreathe itself in a winding sheet. It went out at last in
+a blaze of light. For once in his life Percy had conceived a notion of
+which his aunt cordially approved--my Birthday Banquet. Heart and soul,
+all my follies and misdemeanours forgotten, she entered into this new
+device to give her _Snippety_, her _Moppet_, her _Pusskinetta_, her
+little _Binbin_, her _Fairy_, her _Petite Sereine_, an exquisite
+setting.
+
+Invitations were sent out to the elect on inch-square cards embossed
+with my family crest and motto--a giant, head and shoulders, brandishing
+a club, and _Non Omnis Moriar_.[1] She not only postponed her annual
+departure from town, but, as did the great man in the parable,
+_compelled_ her friends to come in. She exhausted her ingenuity on the
+menu. The great, on this occasion, were to feast on the tiny. A copy of
+it lies beside me now, though, unfortunately, I did not examine it when
+I sat down to dinner. Last, but not least, Percy's pastry-cooks, Messrs
+Buszard, designed a seven-tiered birthday-cake, surrounded on its
+lowermost plateau by one-and-twenty sugar-figures, about a quarter
+life-size, and each of them bearing on high a silver torch.
+
+Their names were inscribed on their sugar pediments: Lady Morgan (the
+Windsor Fairy); Queen Elizabeth's Mrs Tomysen; the Empress Julia's
+Andromeda; the great little, little great Miss Billing of Tilbury; Anne
+Rouse and poor Ann Colling; the Sicilian Mlle Caroline Crachami (who
+went to the anatomists); Nannette Stocker (33 inches, 33 lbs.
+avoirdupois at 33); the blessed and tender Anastasia Boruwlaski;
+Gaganini; the gentle Miss Selby of Bath; Alethea (the Guernsey Nymph);
+Madame Teresa (the Corsican Fairy); Mrs Jeykll Skinner; the appalling
+Nono; Mrs Anne Gibson (_nee_ Shepherd); and the rest.
+
+It was a joke, none the worse, maybe, for being old; and Peter the Great
+must have turned in his grave in envy of Mrs Monnerie's ingenuity.
+
+It may scarcely be believed, but I had become so hardened to such little
+waggeries that under the genial eye of Mrs Monnerie I made the circuit
+of this cake with a smile; and even scolded her for omitting the
+redoubtable Mrs Bellamy with her life-size family of nine. I criticized
+the images too, as not to be compared, even as sugar, with the alabaster
+William of Windsor and Blanche, in the Tower.
+
+The truth is, when real revulsions of body and soul come, they come in a
+gush, all at once. Fleming, on the Night, was actually putting the last
+touches to my coiffure when suddenly, with a wicked curse, I turned from
+the great glass and announced my decision. Tiny tortoiseshell comb
+uplifted, she stood in the clear lustrousness looking in at my
+reflection, queer thoughts darting about in her eyes. At first she
+supposed it was but another fit of petulance. Then her hatred and
+disgust of me all but overcame her.
+
+She quietly argued. I insisted. But she was mortally afraid of Mrs
+Monnerie, and rather than deliver my message to her, sought out Susan.
+Poor Susan. She, too, was afraid: and it was her face rather than her
+love that won me over at last. Then she had to rush away to make what
+excuse she could for my unpunctuality. It thus came about that Mrs
+Monnerie's guests had already sat down to table, and were one and all
+being extremely amused by some story she was entertaining them with,
+when Marvell threw open the great mahogany doors for me, and I made my
+solitary entry.
+
+In primrose silk, _a la Pompadour_, a wreath of tight-shut pimpernels in
+my hair--it is just possible that Mrs Monnerie suspected I had chosen to
+come in late like this merely for effect. But that would have been an
+even feebler exhibition of vanity than _I_ was capable of. All her
+guests were known to me, even though only one of them was of my
+choosing; for Mrs Bowater was in the Argentine, Sir Walter in France,
+Miss Fenne on her deathbed, Mr Pellew in retreat, and Mr Crimble in his
+grave. Fanny was my all.
+
+She was sitting four or five chairs away from me on my left, between
+Percy (who had on his right hand a beautiful long-faced girl in
+turquoise green) and Captain Valentine. Further down, and on the other
+side of the table, sat Lady Maudlen--a seal-like lady, who, according to
+Fanny, disapproved of me on religious grounds--while I was on Mrs
+Monnerie's left, and next to Lord Chiltern. Alas, even my old friend the
+"Black Pudding" was too far distant to do more than twinkle "Courage!"
+at me, when our eyes met.
+
+Recollections of that disastrous evening are clouded. So evil with
+dreams my nights had been that I hardly knew whether I was awake or
+asleep. But I recall the long perspective of the table, the beards, the
+busts, the pearls, the camellias and gardenias, the cornucopias, and
+that glistening Folly Castle, my Birthday Cake. Marvell is behind me,
+and Adam Waggett is ducketing in the luminous distance. The clatter of
+many tongues beats on my ear. Mrs Monnerie murmurs and gently rocks. The
+great silver dishes dip and withdraw. Corks pop, and the fumes of meat
+and wine cloud into the air. In memory it is as if I myself were far
+away, as if I had read of the scene in a book.
+
+But two moments stand vividly out of its unreality--and each of them to
+my shame. A small, wreathed, silver-gilt dish was placed before me.
+Automatically I thrust my spoon into its jelly, and pecked at the
+flavourless morsels. Sheer nervousness had deprived me of my sense of
+taste. But there was something in Mrs Monnerie's sly silence, and Lord
+Chiltern's solemn monocle, and Percy's snigger, that set me speculating.
+
+"Angelic Tomtitiska!" sighed Mrs Monnerie, "I wager when she returns to
+Paradise, she will sit in a corner and forget to tune her harp."
+
+There was no shade of vexation in her voice, only amiable amusement; but
+those sitting near had overheard her little pleasantry, and smilingly
+watched me as, casting my eye down the menu--_Consomme aux Nids
+d'Hirondelles_, _Filets de Blanchailles a la Diable_, _Ailes de Caille
+aux petits pois Minnie Stratton_, _Sauterelles aux Caroubes Saint Jean_,
+it was caught at last by a pretty gilt flourishing around the words,
+_Supreme de Langues de Rossignols_. This, then, was the dainty jest,
+the _clou du repas_. The faint gold words shimmered back at me. In an
+instant I was a child again at Lyndsey, lulling to sleep on my pillow
+amid the echoing songs of the nightingales that used to nest in its
+pleasant lanes. I sat flaming, my tongue clotted with disgust. I simply
+couldn't swallow; and didn't. But never mind.
+
+
+This was my first mishap. Though her own appetite was capricious,
+ranging from an almost incredible voracity to a scrap of dry toast,
+nothing vexed Mrs Monnerie so much as to see my poor, squeamish stomach
+revolting at the sight of meat. She drew up a naked shoulder against me,
+and the feast proceeded with its chief guest in the shade. Once I could
+soon have regained my composure. Now I languished, careless even of the
+expression on my face. Not even the little mincing smile Fanny always
+reserved for me in company could restore me, and it was at her whisper
+that Percy stole down and filled my acorn glass with a translucent green
+liquid which he had himself secured from the sideboard. I watched the
+slow, green flow of it from the lip of the decanter without a thought in
+my head. Lord Chiltern endeavoured to restore my drooping spirits. I had
+outrageously misjudged him. He was _not_ one of Mrs Monnerie's stupid
+friends, and he really did his utmost to be kind to me. If he should
+ever read these words, may he be sure that Miss M. is grateful. But his
+kindness fell on stony ground. And when, at length, he rose to propose
+my health, I crouched beneath him shameful, haggard, and woebegone.
+
+It was as minute a speech as was she whom it flattered, and far more
+graceful. Nothing, of course, would satisfy its audience when the toast
+had been honoured, but that Miss M. should reply. One single, desperate
+glance I cast at Mrs Monnerie. She sat immovable as the Sphinx. There
+was no help for it. Knees knocking together, utterly tongue-tied, I
+stood up in my chair, and surveyed the two converging rows of smiling,
+curious faces. Despair gave me counsel. I stooped, raised my glass, and
+half in dread, half in bravado, tossed down its burning contents at a
+gulp.
+
+The green syrup coursed along vein and artery like molten lead. A
+horrifying transparency began to spread over my mind. It seemed it had
+become in that instant empty and radiant as a dome of glass. All sounds
+hushed away. Things near faded into an infinite distance. Every face,
+glossed with light as if varnished, became lifeless, brutal, and
+inhuman, the grotesque caricature of a shadowy countenance that hung
+somewhere remote in memory, yet was invisible and irrevocable. In this
+dead moment--the whole blazing scene like a nowhere of the
+imagination--my wandering eyes met Fanny's. She was softly languishing
+up at Captain Valentine, her fingers toying with a rose. And it seemed
+as though her once loved spirit cried homelessly out at me from space,
+as if for refuge and recognition; and a long-hidden flood broke bounds
+in my heart. All else forgotten, and obeying mechanically the force of
+long habit, I stepped up from my chair on to the table, and staggered
+towards her, upsetting, as I went, a shallow glass of bubbling wine. It
+reeked up in the air around me.
+
+"Fanny, Fanny," I called to her out of my swoon, "Ah, Fanny. Holy Dying,
+Holy Dying! _Sauve qui peut!_" With empty, shocking face, she started
+back, appalled, like a wounded snake.
+
+"Oh!" she cried in horror into the sleep that was now mounting my body
+like a cloud, "oh!" Her hand swept out blindly in my direction as if to
+fend me off. At best my balance was insecure; and though the velvet
+petals of her rose scarcely grazed my cheek, the insane glaze of my mind
+was already darkening, I toppled and fell in a heap beside her plate.
+
+FOOTNOTE:
+
+[1] To be truthful, this is not my family motto (_nor_ crest); but the
+real motto seemed a little too satirical to share with Mrs Monnerie; and
+however overweening its substitute may appear, I have now hopes, and now
+misgivings, that it is true.
+
+
+
+
+Monk's House
+
+
+
+
+Chapter Forty-Four
+
+
+Thus then I came of age, though not on St Rosa's day. However dramatic
+and memorable, I grant it was not a courteous method of acknowledging
+Lord Chiltern's courtesy. In the good old days the drunken dwarf would
+have been jovially tossed from hand to hand. From mind to mind was my
+much milder penalty. And yet this poor little _contretemps_ was of a
+sort that required "hushing up"; so it kept tongues wagging for many a
+day. It was little comfort that Percy shared my disgrace, and even
+Susan, for "giving way."
+
+She it was who had lifted my body from the table and carried it up into
+darkness and quiet. In the half light of my bedroom I remember I opened
+my eyes for a moment--eyes which refused to stay still in their sockets,
+but were yet capable of noticing that the left hand which clasped mine
+had lost its ring. I tried to point it out to her. She was crying.
+
+Philippina sober was awakened the next morning by the fingers of Mrs
+Monnerie herself. She must have withdrawn the kindly sheet from my face,
+and, with nightmare still babbling on my lips, I looked up into the
+familiar features, a little grey and anxious, but creased up into every
+appearance of goodwill.
+
+"Not so excessively unwisely, then," she rallied me, "and only the least
+little thought too well. We have been quite anxious about Bebe, haven't
+we, Fleming?"
+
+"Quite, madam. A little indigestion, that's all."
+
+"Yes, yes; a little indigestion, that's all," Mrs Monnerie agreed: "and
+I am sure Poppet doesn't want those tiresome doctors with their horrid
+physic."
+
+I sat up, blinking from one to the other. "I think it was the green
+stuff," I muttered, tongue and throat as dry as paper. I could scarcely
+see out of my eyes for the racking stabs of pain beneath my skull.
+
+"Yes, yes," was the soothing response. "But you mustn't agitate
+yourself, silly child. Don't open your eyes like that. The heat of the
+room, the excitement, some little obstinate dainty. Now, one of those
+darling little pills, and a cooling draught, perhaps. Thank you,
+Fleming."
+
+The door closed, we were left alone. Mrs Monnerie's scrutiny drifted
+away. Their shutters all but closed down on the black-brown pupils. My
+head pined for its pillows, my shoulders for some vestige of defence,
+but pined in vain. For the first time I felt afraid of Mrs Monnerie. She
+was thinking so densely and heavily.
+
+Yet, as if out of a cloud of pure absentmindedness, dropped softly her
+next remark. "Does pretty Pusskin remember what she _said_ to Miss
+Bowater?... No?... Well, then, if she can't, it's quite certain nobody
+else can--or wishes to. I inquired merely because the poor thing, who
+has been really nobly devoting herself to her duties, seems so hurt.
+Well, it shall be a little lesson--to us all. Though one swallow does
+not make a summer, my child, one hornet can make things extremely
+unpleasant. Not that I----" A vast shrug of the shoulders completed the
+sentence. "A little talk and tact will soon set _that_ right; and I am
+perfectly satisfied, perfectly satisfied with things as they are. So
+that's settled. Some day you must tell me a little more about your
+family history. Meanwhile, rest and quiet. No more excitement, no more
+company, and no more"--she bent low over me with wagging head--"no more
+_green stuff_. And then"--her eyes rested on me with a peculiar zest
+rather than with any actual animosity--"then we must see what can be
+done for you."
+
+There came a tap--and Percy showed in the doorway.
+
+"I thought, Aunt Alice, I thought----" he began, but at sight of the
+morose, heavy countenance lifted up to him, he shut his mouth.
+
+"Thank you," said Mrs Monnerie, "thank you, Sir Galahad; you did nothing
+of the kind."
+
+Whereupon her nephew wheeled himself out of the room so swiftly that I
+could not detect what kind of exotics he was carrying in a little posy
+in his hand.
+
+So the invalid, now a burden on the mind of her caretaker many times her
+own weight, was exiled for ever from No. 2. Poor Fleming, sniffier and
+more disgusted than ever, was deputed to carry me off to the smaller of
+Mrs Monnerie's country retreats, a long, low-roofed, shallow-staired
+house lying in the green under the downs at Croomham. There I was to
+vegetate for a time and repent of my sins.
+
+Percy's fiery syrup took longer to withdraw its sweet influences than
+might have been foreseen. Indeed, whenever I think of him, its effects
+are faintly renewed, though not, I trust, to the detriment of my style!
+None too strong physically, the Miss M. that sat up at her latticed
+window at Monk's House during those few last interminable August days,
+was very busy with her thoughts. As she looked down for hours together
+on the gnarled, thick-leafed old mulberry-tree in the corner of the lawn
+that swept up to the very stones of the house, and on the walled,
+sun-drugged garden beyond, she was for ever debating that old, old
+problem; what could be done _by_ herself _with_ herself?
+
+The doves crooned; the cawing rooks flapped black into the blue above
+the neighbouring woods; the earth drowsed on. It was a scene of peace
+and decay. But I seemed to have lost the charm that could have made it
+mine. I was an Ishmael. And worse--I was still a prisoner. No criminal
+at death's door can have brooded more laboriously on his chances of
+escape. No wonder the voices of childhood had whispered, Away!
+
+There came a long night of rain. I lay listening to the whisper and
+clucking of its waters. Far away the lapwings called: Ee-ooeet!
+Ee-ooeet! What follies I had been guilty of. How wilily circumstance had
+connived at them. Yet I was no true penitent. My heart was empty, so
+parched up that neither love nor remorse had any place in it. Revenge
+seemed far sweeter. Driven into this corner, I sent a desperate word to
+Sir W. It remained unanswered, and this friend followed the rest into
+the wilderness of my ingratitude.
+
+But that brought me no relief. For of all the sins I have ever
+committed, envy and hatred seem to me the most unpleasant to practise. I
+was to learn also that "he who sows hatred shall gather rue," and "bed
+with thistles." With eyes at last as anxious as Jezebel's, I resumed my
+watch at the window. But even if Percy had ridden from London solely to
+order Fleming to throw me down, she would not have "demeaned" herself to
+set hands on me. She might be bold, but she, too, was fastidious.
+
+Then Fleming herself one afternoon softly and suddenly vanished
+away--on her summer's holiday. Poor thing; so acute was the chronic
+indigestion caused by _her_ obstinate little dainty that she did not
+even bid me good-bye.
+
+She left me in charge of the housekeeper, Mrs French, a stout, flushed,
+horse-faced woman, who now and then came in and bawled good-humouredly
+at me as if I were deaf, but otherwise ignored me altogether. I now
+spent most of my time in the garden, listlessly wandering out of sight
+of the windows (and gardeners), along its lank-flowered, rose-petalled
+walks, hating its beauty. Or I would sit where I could hear the
+waterdrops in a well. The very thought of company was detestable. I sat
+there half-dead, without book or needle, with scarcely a thought in my
+head. In my library days at No. 2 I had become a perfect slave to
+pleasures of the intellect. But now dyspepsia had set in there too.
+
+My nights were pestered with dreams and my days with their vanishing
+spectres; and I had no Pollie to tell me what they forecast. I suppose
+one must be more miserable and hunted in mind even than I was, _never_
+to be a little sentimental when alone. I would lean over the cold mouth
+of the well, just able to discern in the cold mirror of water, far
+beneath, the face I was almost astonished to find reflected there.
+"Shall I come too?" I would morbidly whisper, and dart away.
+
+Still, just as with a weed in winter, life was beginning to renew the
+sap within me; and Monk's House was not only drowsy with age but gentle
+with whispers. Once at least in every twenty-four hours I would make a
+pilgrimage to its wrought-iron gates beside the square white lodge, to
+gloat out between the metal floriations at the dusty country lane
+beyond--with its swallows and wagtails and dragon-flies beneath the
+heat-parched tranquil elms. A slim, stilted greyhound on one such visit
+stalked out from the lodge. Quite unaware of his company, I turned about
+suddenly and stared clean down his arched throat--white teeth and
+lolling tongue. It was as if I had glanced into the jaws of destiny. He
+turned his head, whiningly yawned, and stalked back into the shade.
+
+A day or two afterwards I made the acquaintance of the lodge-keeper's
+daughter, a child named Rose, about five years of age, with a mop of
+copper-coloured curls bound up with a pale blue bow. At first glimpse
+of me she had hopped back as if on springs into the house. A moment
+after, her white-aproned mother appeared in the porch, and with a
+pleasant nod at me bade the child smile at the pretty little lady.
+Finger in mouth, Rose wriggled and stared. In a few days she grew
+accustomed to my small figure. And though I would sometimes discover her
+saucer-blue eyes fixed on me with a peculiar intensity, we almost came
+to be friends. She was not a very bright little girl; yet I found myself
+wooing her with all the arts I knew--in a scarcely conscious attempt, I
+suppose, to creep back by this small lane into the world's and my own
+esteem.
+
+I made her wristlets of little flowers, hacked her out cockle boats from
+the acorns, told her half-forgotten stories, and once had to trespass
+into the kitchen at the back of the lodge to tell her mother that she
+was fallen asleep. Was it mere fancy that read in the scared face she
+twisted round on the pretty little lady from over her saucepan, "Avaunt,
+Evil Eye!"? I had become abominably self-conscious.
+
+
+
+
+Chapter Forty-Five
+
+
+One such afternoon Rose and I were sitting quietly together in the
+sunshine on the green grass bank when a smart, short step sounded in the
+lane, and who should come springily pacing out of the country through
+the gates but Adam Waggett--red hands, black boots, and Londonish
+billycock hat all complete. Adam must have been born in a fit of
+astonishment; and when he dies, so he will enter Paradise. He halted
+abruptly, a ring of shifting sunshine through the leaves playing on his
+purple face, and, after one long glance of theatrical astonishment, he
+burst into his familiar guffaw.
+
+This time the roar of him in the open air was nothing but a pleasure,
+and the mere sound and sight of him set Rose off laughing, too. Her pink
+mouth was as clustered about with milk-teeth as a fragment of honeycomb
+is with cells.
+
+"Well, there I never, miss," he said at last, with a slow, friendly wink
+at the child, "Where shall us three meet again, I wonder." He flicked
+the dust off his black button boots with his pocket-handkerchief, mopped
+his high, bald forehead, and then positively exploded into fragments of
+information--like my father's fireworks on Guy Fawkes' Day.
+
+He talked of young Mr Percy's "goings-on," of the august Mr Marvell, of
+life at No. 2. "That Miss Bowater, now, she's a bit of all right, she's
+toffee, she is." But, his hat! there _had_ been a row. And the captain,
+too. Not that there was anything in that; "just a bit of silly jealousy;
+_like_ the women!" He could make a better guess than that. He didn't
+know what "the old lady" would do without that Miss Bowater--the old
+lady whose carriage would in a few days be rolling in between these very
+gates. And then--he began whistling a Highland Reel.
+
+The country air had evidently got into his head. Hand over hand he was
+swarming up the ladder of success. His "_joie de vivre_" gleamed at
+every pore. And I?--I just sat there, passively drinking in this
+kitchen-talk, without attempting to stop him. After all, he was out of
+my past; we were children of Israel in a strange land; and that hot
+face, with its violent pantomime, and hair-plastered temples, was as
+good as a play.
+
+He was once more settling his hat on his head and opening his mouth in
+preparation for a last bray of farewell, when suddenly in the sunny
+afternoon hush a peculiar, melancholy, whining cry rose over the
+treetops, and slowly stilled away. As if shot from a bow, Rose's
+greyhound leapt out of the lodge and was gone. With head twisted over
+his shoulder, Adam stood listening. Somewhere--where? when?--that sound
+had stirred the shadows of my imagination. The day seemed to gather
+itself about me, as if in a plot.
+
+In the silence that followed I heard the dust-muffled grinding of heavy
+wheels approaching, and the low, refreshing talk of homely, Kentish,
+country voices. Adam stepped to the gate. I clutched Rose's soft, cool
+fingers. And spongily, ponderously, there, beyond the bars, debouched
+into view a huge-shouldered, mole-coloured elephant, its trunk sagging
+towards the dust, its small, lash-fringed eye gleaming in the sun, its
+bald, stumpy, tufted tail stiff and still behind it.
+
+On and on, one after another, in the elm-shaded beams of the first of
+evening, the outlandish animals, the wheeled dens, the gaudy, piled-up
+vans of pasteboard scenery, the horses and ponies and riff-raff of a
+travelling circus wound into, and out of, view before my eyes. It was as
+if the lane itself were moving, and all the rest of the world, with Rose
+and myself clutched hand in hand on our green bank, had remained stark
+still. Probably the staring child supposed that this was one of my
+fairy-tales come true. My own mind was humming with a thought far more
+fantastic. Ever and again a swarthy face had glanced in on our quiet
+garden. The lion had glared into Africa beyond my head. But I was partly
+screened from view by Rose, and it was a woman, and she all but the last
+of the dusty, bedraggled company, that alone caught a full, clear sight
+of me.
+
+One flash of eye to eye--we knew each other. She was the bird-eyed,
+ear-ringed gipsy of my railway journey with Pollie from Lyndsey to
+Beechwood. Even more hawklike, bonier, striding along now like a man in
+the dust and heat in her dingy coloured petticoats and great boots,
+with one steel-grey dart of remembrance, she swallowed me up, like flame
+a moth. Her mouth relaxed into a foxy smile while her gaze tightened on
+me. She turned herself about and shrilled out a strange word or two to
+some one who had gone before. A sudden alarm leapt up in me. In an
+instant I had whisked into hiding, and found myself, half-suffocated
+with excitement, peeping out of a bush in watch for what was to happen
+next.
+
+So swift had been my disappearance she seemed doubtful of her own
+senses. A cage of leopards, with a fair-skinned, gold-haired girl in
+white stockings lolling asleep on the chained-up tail-board, trundled
+by; and then my gipsy was joined by a thick-set, scowling man. His face
+was bold and square, and far more lowering than that of the famous
+pugilist, Mr Sayers--to whose coloured portrait I had become almost
+romantically attached in the library at No. 2. This dangerous-looking
+individual filled me with a tremulous excitement and admiration. If, as
+in a dream, my past seemed to have been waiting for that solitary
+elephant; then my future was all of a simmer with _him_.
+
+He drew his thick hand out of his stomach-pocket and scratched his
+cheek. The afternoon hung so quiet that I heard the rasp of his finger
+nail against his sprouting beard. He turned to mutter a sullen word or
+two at the woman beside him. Then, more civilly, and with a jerk of his
+squat thumb in my direction, he addressed himself to Adam. Adam
+listened, his red ears erect on either side of his hat. But his only
+answer was so violent a wag of his head that it seemed in danger of
+toppling off his body. Softly I laughed to myself. The woman yelped at
+him. The man bade her ferociously "shut her gob." Adam clanged-to the
+gates. They moved on. Beast, cage, and men were vanished like a
+daydream. A fitful breeze rustled the dry elm-leaves. The swifts coursed
+on in the shade.
+
+
+When the last faint murmur had died away, I came out from behind my
+bush. "A country circus," I remarked unconcernedly. "What did the man
+want, Adam?"
+
+"That hairy cat frowned at Rosie," whispered the child, turning from me
+to catch at Adam's coat-tails. "Not _eat_ Rosie?"
+
+Adam bent himself double, and with an almost motherly tenderness
+stroked her bright red hair. He straightened himself up, spat modestly
+in the dust, and, with face still mottled by our recent experience,
+expressed the opinion that the man was "one of them low
+blackguards--excusing plain English, miss--who'd steal your chickens out
+of the very saucepan." As for the woman--words failed him.
+
+I waited until his small, round eye had rolled back in my direction.
+"Yes, Adam," I said, "but what did he _say_? You mean she told him about
+_me_?"
+
+"Well, miss, to speak equal-like, that was about the size of it. The old
+liar said she had seen you before, that you were--well, there you
+are!--a gold mine, a--a blessed gold mine. Her very words nearabout." At
+that, in an insuppressible gush of happiness I laughed out with him,
+like a flageolet in a concourse of bassoons.
+
+"But he didn't see me, Adam. I took good care of that."
+
+"That's just," said Adam, with a tug at his black cravat, "what's going
+to give the pair of them a mighty unpleasant afternoon."
+
+I dismissed him, smiled at the whimpering greyhound, smiled at Rose,
+whose shyness at me had unaccountably whelmed over her again, and
+followed in Adam's wake towards the house. But not to enter it. "A
+blessed"--oh, most blessed "_Gold Mine_!" The word so sang in me that
+the whole garden--espaliered wall, and bird, and flower--leapt into life
+and beauty before my eyes. Then my prayer (_what_ prayer?) had been
+answered. I squared my shoulders, shuddered--a Lazarus come to life.
+Away I went, and seating myself in a sunny corner, a few paces from a
+hive of bees, plucked a nectarine, and surrendered myself to the
+intoxication of an idea. Not "Your Master is dead," but "Your mistress
+is come to life again!" I whispered to the bees. And if I had been
+wearing a scarlet garter I would have tied it round their skep.
+
+Money! Money!--a few even of my handfuls of that, and I was free. I
+would teach "them" a lesson. I would redeem myself. Ah, if only I had
+had a fraction of Fanny's courage, should I so long have remained
+wilting and festering at No. 2? The sweet, sharp juices of the clumsy
+fruit quenched my thirst. To and fro swept the bees along their airy
+highway. A spiked tree of late-blooming bugloss streamed its blue and
+purple into my eyes. A year ago, the very thought of exhibiting myself
+for filthy (or any kind of) lucre would have filled me with unspeakable
+shame. But what else had I been doing those long, dragging months? What
+had Miss M. hired herself out to be but a pot of caviare to the
+gourmets? Puffed up with conceit and complacency, I had been merely
+feeding on the world's contempt sauced up as flattery. Nonsensical
+child.
+
+"Ah, I can make honey, too," I nodded at the bees; whereupon a wasp
+pounced out of nowhere upon my oozy fruit, and I thrust it away into the
+weeds. But how refreshing a draught is the thought of action, how
+comforting the first returning trickle of self-esteem. My body sank into
+motionlessness. The shadows lengthened. The August sun slid down the
+sky.
+
+Dusk was abroad in the colder garden, and the last bee home, when, with
+plans resolved on, I stretched my stiffened limbs and made my way into
+the house. Excellent augury--so easy had been my daily habits that no
+one had noticed my absence. Supper was awaiting me. I was ravenous. Up
+and down I stumped, gnawing my biscuit and sipping my sweet country
+milk. I had suddenly realized what the world meant to Fanny--an oyster
+for her sword. Somewhere I have read that every man of genius hides a
+woman in his breast. Well, perhaps in mine a _man_ was now stirring--the
+man that had occupied my Aunt Kitilda's skirts. It was high time.
+
+A moon just past its quarter was sinking in the heavens and silvering
+the jessamine at my window. My bosom swelled with longing at the breath
+of the slow night airs. Monk's House--I, too, had my ghosts and would
+face them down, would vanquish fate with the very weapons it had forged
+for my discomfiture. In that sheltered half-light I stood myself before
+a down-tilted looking-glass. If I had been malshapen, limbless,
+contorted, I would have drowned myself in mud rather than feed man's
+hunger for the monstrous and obscene. No, I was a beautiful thing, even
+if God had been idly at play when He had shaped me, and had then flung
+away the mould; even if to Mrs Monnerie I was nothing much better than a
+disreputable marionette. So I boasted myself. Percy's Chartreuse had
+been mere whey compared with the fleeting glimpse of a tame circus
+elephant.
+
+
+I tossed out on to the floor the old Lyndsey finery which some homesick
+impulse had persuaded me to bring away in my trunk. Seated there with
+busy needle under the window, sewing in every gewgaw and scrap of tinsel
+and finery I could lay hands on, I prepared for the morrow. How happy I
+was. Bats in the dewy dusk-light cast faint, flitting shadows on the
+casements. A large dark moth hawked to and fro above my head. It seemed
+I could spend eternity in this gentle ardent busyness. To think that God
+had given me what might have been so dreadful a thing as solitude, but
+which in reality, while my thoughts and fingers were thus placidly
+occupied, could be so sweet. When at length I leaned out on the cold
+sill, my work done, wrists and shoulders aching with fatigue, Croomham
+clock struck two. The moon was set. But there, as if in my own happy
+mind, away to the East shone Orion. Why, Sirius, then, must be in hiding
+under that quiet shoulder of the downs. A dwindling meteor silvered
+across space; I breathed a wish, shivered, and drew in.
+
+And there came that night a curious dream. I dreamt that I was a great
+soldier, and had won an enormous unparalleled battle. Glaring light
+streamed obliquely across a flat plain, humped and hummocked with the
+bodies of the dead lying in disorder. I was standing in arrogant reverie
+alone, a few paces distant--though leagues away in being--from a group
+of other officers, who were looking at me. And I suffered the streaming
+light to fall upon me, as I gazed into my joy and triumph with a kind of
+severe nonchalance. But though my face under my three-cornered hat can
+have expressed only calmness and resolution, I knew in my heart that my
+thoughts were merely a thin wisp of smoke above the crater of a
+suppressed volcano. Lest I should be detected in this weakness, I turned
+out of the glare, and without premeditation, began to step lightly and
+abstractedly from huddling mound to mound. And, as these heaps of the
+dead increased in size in the gloom after the white western light was
+gone, so I diminished, until I was but a kind of infinitesimal
+will-o'-the-wisp gliding from peak to peak of an infernal mausoleum of
+which every eye, though dead, was watching me. But there was _one_
+Eye....
+
+And that is all of the dream that I could remember. For then I awoke,
+looking into the dark. A pencil ray of moonlight was creeping across my
+bed. Peace unutterable. Over my drowsy eyes once more the clouds
+descended, and once more I fell asleep.
+
+
+
+
+Chapter Forty-Six
+
+
+Next day, after a long lying-in-wait, I intercepted Adam Waggett and
+beckoned him into the shrubbery. First I questioned him. A bill of the
+circus, he told me, had already been left at the lodge. Its tents and
+booths and Aunt Sallies were even now being pitched in a meadow three or
+four miles distant and this side the neighbouring town. So far, so good.
+I told him my plan. He could do nothing but look at me like a fish, with
+his little black eyes, as I sat on a tree stump and marshalled my
+instructions.
+
+But my first crucial battle had been fought with Adam Waggett in the
+garden at Lyndsey. He had neither the courage nor even the cowardice to
+gainsay me. After a tedious siege of his sluggish wits, greed for the
+reward I promised him, the assurance that if we were discovered the
+guilt should rest on me, and maybe some soupcon of old sake's sake won
+him over. The branches of the trees swayed and creaked above us in the
+sunshine; and at last, looking down on me with a wry face, Adam promised
+to do my bidding.
+
+Six had but just struck that evening when there came the rap of his
+knuckles on my bedroom door. He found me impatiently striding up and
+down in a scintillating bodice and skirts of scarlet, lemon, and
+silver--as gay and gaudy an object as the waxen Russian Princess I had
+seen in one of Mrs Monnerie's cabinets. My flaxen hair was plaited
+German-wise, and tied in two thumping pigtails with a green ribbon; I
+stood and looked at him. He fumblingly folded his hands in front of him
+as he stood and looked back at me. I was quivering like a flame in a
+lamp. And never have I been so much flattered as by the silly, stupefied
+stare on his face.
+
+How I was to be carried to the circus had been one of our most difficult
+problems. This cunning creature had routed out from some lumber-room in
+the old house a capacious old cage--now rusty, but stout and solidly
+made--that must once have housed the aged Chakka.
+
+"There, miss," he whispered triumphantly; "that's the ticket, and right
+to a hinch."
+
+I confess I winced at his "ticket." But Adam had cushioned and padded it
+for me, and had hooded it over with a stout piece of sacking, leaving
+the ring free. Apart from our furtive preparations, evening quiet
+pervaded the house. The maids were out sweethearting, he explained. Mrs
+French had retired as usual to her own sitting-room; Fortune seemed to
+be smiling upon me.
+
+"Then, Adam," I whispered, "the time has come. Jerk me as little as
+possible; and if questions are asked, you are taking the cage to be
+mended, you understand? And when we get there, see no one but the man or
+the woman who spoke to you at the gates."
+
+"Well, miss, it's a rum go," said Adam, eyeing me with a grotesque
+grimace of anxiety.
+
+I looked up at him from the floor of the cage. "The rummer the go is,
+Adam, the quicker we ought to be about it."
+
+He lowered the wiry dome over my head; I bunched in my skirts; and with
+the twist of a few hooks I was secure. The faint squeak of his boots
+told me that he had stolen to the door to listen.
+
+"All serene," he whispered hoarsely through the sacking. I felt myself
+lifted up and up. We were on our way. Then, like flies, a cloud of
+misgivings settled upon my mind. As best I could I drove them away, and
+to give myself confidence began to count. A shrill false whistling broke
+the silence. Adam was approaching the lodge; a mocking screech of its
+gates, and we were through. After that, apart from the occasional beat
+of hoofs or shoes, a country "good-night," or a husky cough of
+encouragement from Adam, I heard nothing more. The gloom deepened. The
+heat was oppressive; I became a little seasick, and pressing my mouth to
+a small slit between the bars, sucked in what fresh air I could.
+
+Midway on our journey Adam climbed over a stile to rest a while, and,
+pushing back a corner of the sacking, he asked me how I did.
+
+"Fine, Adam," said I, panting. "We are getting along famously."
+
+The fields were sweet and dusky. It was a clear evening, and
+refreshingly cool.
+
+"You may smoke a pipe, Adam, if you wish," I called softly. And while he
+puffed, and I listened to the chirping of a cricket, he told me of a
+young housemaid that was always chaffing and ridiculing him at No. 2.
+"It may be that she has taken a passing fancy to you," said I, looking
+up into the silent oak tree under which we were sitting. "On the other
+hand, you may deserve it. What is she like, Adam?"
+
+"Black eyebrows," said Adam. "Shows her teeth when she laughs. But
+that's no reason why she should make a fool of a fellow."
+
+"The real question is, is she a nice modest girl?" said I, and my
+bangles jangled as I raised my hand to my hair. "Come, Adam, there's no
+time to waste; are you ready?"
+
+He grunted, his mind still far away. "She's a fair sneak," he said,
+rapping his pipe-bowl on a stone. And so, up and on.
+
+Time seemed to have ceased to be, in this jolting monotony, unbroken
+except by an occasional giddying swing of my universe as Adam
+transferred the cage from hand to hand. Swelteringly hot without, but a
+little cold within, I was startled by a far-away blare of music. I
+clutched tight the slender bars; the music ceased, and out of the quiet
+that followed rose the moaning roar of a wild beast.
+
+My tongue pressed itself against my teeth; the sacking trembled, and a
+faint luminousness began to creep through its hempen strands. Shouting
+and screaming, catcalls and laughter swelled near. And now by the medley
+of smells and voices, and the glint of naked lights floating in on me, I
+realized that we had reached our goal.
+
+Adam came to a standstill. "Where's the boss?" The tones were thick and
+muffled. A feeble smile swept over my face: I discovered I was holding
+my breath.
+
+A few paces now, the din distanced a little and the glare diminished.
+Then sounded another voice hoarse and violent, high above my head.
+
+
+The cage bumped to the ground. And I heard Adam cringingly explain:
+"I've got a bird here for you, mister."
+
+"A bird," rang the jeer, "who wants your bloody bird? Be off."
+
+"Ay, but it won't be a bloody bird," gasped Adam cajolingly, "when
+you've seen her pretty feathers."
+
+At this, apparently, recollection of Adam's face or voice returned to
+the showman. He remained silent while with palsied fingers Adam
+unlatched my bolts and bars. Bent almost double and half-stifled, I sat
+there in sight, my clothes spread brightly out about me. The cool air
+swirled in, and for a while my eyes dazzled at the bubbling blaze of a
+naphtha lamp suspended from the pole of the tent above the criss-cross
+green-bladed grass at my feet. I lifted my head.
+
+There stood Adam, in his black tail-coat rubbing his arm; and there the
+showman. Still to the tips of my fingers, I sat motionless, gazing up
+into the hard, high-boned, narrow-browed face with its small restless
+eyes voraciously taking me in. Fortunately the choked beating of my
+heart was too small a sound for his ear; and he was the first to
+withdraw from the encounter.
+
+"My God," he muttered, and spat into a corner of the canvas booth--with
+its one dripping lamp, its rough table and chair, and a few oddments of
+his trade.
+
+"And what, my handsome young lady," he went on in a low, carneying tone,
+and fidgeting with his hands, "what might be your little imbroglio?"
+
+In a gush, presence of mind returned to me, and fear passed away. I
+quietly listened to myself explaining without any concealment precisely
+what was my little imbroglio. He burst out laughing.
+
+"Stage-struck, eh? There's a young lady now! Well, who's to blame 'ee?"
+
+He asked me my age, my name, where I came from, if I could dance, sing,
+ride; and stared so roundly at me that I seemed to see my garish colours
+reflected in the metallic grey of his eyes.
+
+All this was on his side of the bargain. Now came mine. I folded tight
+my hands in my lap, glanced up at the flaming lamp. How much would he
+pay me?
+
+It was as if a shutter had descended over his face. "Drat me," said he,
+"when a young lady comes selling anything, she _asks_ her price."
+
+So I asked mine--fifteen guineas for four nights' hire.... To look at
+that human animal you might have supposed the actual guineas had lodged
+in his throat. It may be that Shylock's was a more modest bargain. I
+cannot say.
+
+At first thought it had seemed to me a monstrous sum, but at that time I
+was ignorant of what a really fine midget fetched. It was but half my
+old quarterly allowance, with L2 over for Adam. I should need every
+penny of it. And I had not come selling my soul without having first
+decided on its value. The showman fumed and blustered. But I sat close
+on Chakka's abandoned stage, perfectly still, making no answer; finding,
+moreover, in Adam an unexpected stronghold, for the wider gawked his
+frightened eyes at the showman's noise and gesticulations, the more
+resolved I became. With a last dreadful oath, the showman all but kicked
+a hole in my cage.
+
+"Take me away, Adam," I cried quaveringly; "we are wasting this
+gentleman's time."
+
+I smiled to myself, in spite of the cold tremors that were shaking me
+all over; with every nerve and sinew of his corpulent body he was
+coveting me: and with a curse he at last accepted my terms. I shrugged
+my shoulders, but still refused to stir a finger until our contract had
+been written down in black and white. Maybe some tiny love-bird of
+courage roosts beneath every human skull, maybe my mother's fine French
+blood had rilled to the surface. However that may be, there could be no
+turning back.
+
+He drew out a stump of pencil and a dirty envelope. "That, my fine
+cock," he said to Adam, as he wrote, "that's a woman; and you make no
+mistake about it. To hell with your fine ladies."
+
+It remains, if not the most delicate, certainly one of the most
+substantial compliments I ever earned in my life.
+
+"That's that," he pretended to groan, presenting me with his scrawl.
+"Ask a shark for a stamp, and if ruined I must be--ruined I am."
+
+I leapt to my feet, shook out my tumbled finery, smiled into his
+stooping face, and tucked the contract into my bodice. "Thank you,
+sir," I said, "and I promise you shan't be ruined if _I_ can help it."
+Whereupon Adam became exceedingly merry, the danger now over.
+
+
+Such are the facts concerning this little transaction, so far as I can
+recall them; yet I confess to being a little incredulous. Have I,
+perhaps, gilded my side of the bargaining? If so, I am sure my showman
+would be the last person to quarrel with me. I am inclined to think he
+had taken a fancy to me. Anyhow I had won--what is, perhaps, even
+better--his respect. And though the pay came late, when it was no longer
+needed, and though it was the blackest money that ever touched my
+fingers, it came. And if anybody was the defaulter, it was I.
+
+There was no time to lose. My gipsy woman was sent for from the shooting
+gallery. I shook hands with her; she shook hands with Adam, who was then
+told to go about his business and to return to the tent when the circus
+was over. The three of us, showman, woman, and I, conferred together,
+and with extreme cordiality agreed what should be my little part in the
+performance. The booth in which we had made our bargain was hastily
+prepared for my "reception." Its table was to be my dais. A loose flap
+of canvas was hung to one side of it to screen me off from prying eyes
+when I was not on show. My only dangerous rival, it appeared, was the
+Spotted Boy.
+
+There followed a deafening pealing of panpipes, drumming of drum, and
+yelling of voices. In that monstrous din I was past thinking, just
+_being_; and I bridled to myself like a schoolgirl caught in a delicious
+naughtiness, to hear the fine things--the charms and marvels--which my
+showman was bawling about me. Then one by one, at first a little
+owlishly, the Great Public, at the charge of 6d. per adult and half
+price for children (or "full-growns under 3 foot") were admitted to the
+presence of the "_Signorina Donna Angelique, the Fairy Princess of
+Andalusia in Spain_." So at any rate declares the printed handbill.
+
+In the attitude of Madame Recamier in the picture, I reclined on a
+lustrous spread of crimson satin and rabbit-skin draped over a small
+lump of wood for bolster to give support to my elbow. And out of my
+paint and powder, from amid this oasis--and with repeated warnings "not
+to touch" screamed by my gipsy--I met as pleasantly and steadily as I
+could the eyes of the grinning, smirking, awestruck faces--townsfolk and
+village folk, all agape and all sound Kentish stock.
+
+"That isn't real, she's a doll," lisped a crepe-bonneted little girl who
+with skimpy legs dangling out of her petticoat had been hoisted up under
+her armpits for a clearer view. I let a little pause come, then turned
+my head on my hand and smiled, leaned over and eased my tinselled
+slipper. An audible sigh, sweet as incense, went up under the hollow of
+the booth. I looked on softly from face to face--another dream. Some
+captive beast mewed and brushed against the sides of a cage drawn up a
+yard or two from where I lay. The lamp poured flame and smoke. The
+canvas quietly flapped, and was still. Wild ramped the merry-go-round
+with its bells and hootings; and the panpipes sobbed their liquid decoy.
+The Signorina's first reception was over.
+
+News of her spread like wildfire. I could hear the showman bellowing at
+the press of people. His guineas were fructifying. And a peculiar
+rapturous gravity spread over me. When one's very self is wrapt in the
+ordeal of the passing moment, is lost like that, out of time and space,
+it seems, well--another presence had stolen into my mind, had taken
+possession. I cannot explain. But in this, it may be, all men _are_
+equal, whatever their lot. So, I suppose, a flower breaks out of the
+bud, and butterflies put off the mask of the chrysalis, and rainbows
+mount the skies. But I must try not to rhapsodize. All I know is that
+even in that low self-surrender, some tiny spark of life in me could not
+be content to let my body remain a mere mute stock for the ignorant
+wonder of those curious eyes.
+
+The actual impulse, however, came from a young woman who, when next the
+people had streamed in, chanced to be standing close beside me. She was
+a weak-looking thing, yet reminded me in a sorrowful fashion of Fanny.
+Caught back by her melancholy, empty eyes, I seemed to lose myself in
+their darkness; to realize that she, too, was in trouble. I craned up
+from my wooden bolster and whispered in her hair: "Patience, patience.
+There shall be a happy issue, my dear, out of all your afflictions."
+
+Only she herself and a weedy, sallow young man in her company could
+have heard these words. A glint of fright and desperation sprang into
+her large-pupilled eyes. But I smiled, and we exchanged kindness. She
+moistened her lips, turned from me, and clutching at the young man's
+arm, edged her way out of the throng and vanished.
+
+"And what sort be this un?" roared an ox-faced, red-haired man from the
+back. "This un" hung on his shoulder, tiptoe, fair, young, and blowsy.
+
+"She'll _coin_ you money," I cried pleasantly, "and spend it. The hand
+that rocks the cradle rules the world."
+
+"And him, and him? the toad!" cried the girl half-angrily at the shout
+of merriment that had shaken the tent.
+
+"Why, pretty maid," piped I, "the nearer the wine the sweeter the cork;
+the plumper the pig the fatter the pork." The yell that followed was a
+better advertisement than drum or panpipes. The showman had discovered
+an oracle! For the next half-hour my booth was a mass of
+"Sixpennies"--the squirming Threepennies were told to wait. It filled
+and emptied again and again like a black bottle in the Dog Days. And
+when the spirit moved me, I singled out a tell-tale face and told its
+fortune--not less shrewdly on the whole, I think, than Mrs Ballard's
+_Book of Fate_.
+
+But it was a strangely exhausting experience. I was inexpressibly
+relieved when it was over; when the tent-flap descended for the last
+time, and I could rest from my labours, puffed up, no doubt, with far
+too rich a conceit of myself, but immeasurably grateful and happy.
+Comparative quiet descended on the meadows. From a neighbouring tent
+broke shattering bursts of music, clapping and thumping, the fretful
+growling of the beasts, the elephant's trumpeting, the firing of guns,
+whoops, caterwauling, and the jangling of harness. The Grand Circus was
+in progress, and fantasy made a picture for me of every sound.
+
+Presently my showman reappeared, leading in a pacing, smooth-skinned,
+cinnamon-and-milk-dappled pony, bridled and saddled with silver and
+scarlet, his silky mane daintily plaited, his tail a sweeping plume. He
+stood, I should guess, about half a hand higher than my childhood's
+Mopsa--the prettiest pygmy creature, though obviously morose and
+unsettled in temper. I took a good long look at his pink Albino eye. But
+a knack once acquired is quickly recovered. I mounted him. The stirrup
+was adjusted, one of my German plaits was dandled over my shoulder, and
+after a leisurely turn or two in the open, I nodded that the highborn
+Angelique was ready.
+
+The showman, leering avariciously at me out of his shifty eyes, led us
+on towards the huge ballooning tent, its pennon fluttering darkly
+against the stars. I believe if in that spirituous moment he had
+muttered, "Fly with me, fairest!" all cares forgotten, I'd have been
+gone. He held his peace.
+
+The brass band within wrenched and blared into the tune of "The Girl I
+Left behind Me." Chafing, pawing, snorting, my steed, with its rider,
+paused in the entry. Then with a last smirk of encouragement from the
+gipsy woman, the rein was loosed, I bowed my head, and the next moment,
+as if in a floating vat of light, I found myself cantering wellnigh
+soundlessly round the ring, its circumference thronged tier above tier
+in the smoke-laden air with ghost-white rings of faces.
+
+I smiled fixedly, tossing my fingers. A piebald clown came wambling in
+to meet me, struck his hand on his foolish heart, and fell flat in the
+tan. Love at first sight. Over his prostrate body we ambled, the
+ill-tempered little beast naggling at its bit, and doing his utmost to
+unseat me. The music ceased. The cloud of witnesses loured. Come Night,
+come Nero, I didn't care! Edging the furious little creature into the
+centre of the ring, I mastered him, wheeled him, in a series of
+obeisances--North, South, East, West. A hurricane--such as even Mr
+Bowater can never have outridden--a hurricane of applause burst bounds
+and all but swept me out of the saddle. "Good-bye, Sweetheart,
+Good-bye!" sang cornet and trombone. With a toss, I swept my plaits
+starwards, brandished my whip at the faces, and galloped out into the
+night.
+
+My _debut_ was over. I confess it--the very memory of it carries me away
+even now. And even now I would maintain that it was at least a little
+more successful than that other less professional _debut_ which poor Mr
+Crimble and Lady Pollacke had left unacclaimed in Beechwood High Street.
+
+
+
+
+Chapter Forty-Seven
+
+
+My showman, his hard face sleek with sweat, insisted on counting out
+three huge platelike crown pieces into my lap--for a douceur. I brushed
+them off on to the ground. "Only to clinch the bargain," he said. His
+teeth grinned at me as if he would gladly have swallowed me whole.
+
+"Pick up the money," said I coldly, determined once and for all to keep
+him in his place. "It's early days yet." But when my back was turned,
+covetous Adam took charge of it.
+
+While we trudged along homeward--for in the deserted night the cage was
+unnecessary, until I was too tired to go further--I listened to the
+coins clanking softly together in Adam's pocket It was an intoxicating
+lullaby. But such are the revulsions of success, for hours and hours
+that night I lay sleepless. Once I got up and put my hand in where the
+crowns were, to assure myself I was awake. But the dream which visited
+me--between the watches of remorse--I shall keep to myself.
+
+With next day's sun, the Signorina had become the talk of the
+country-side, and Adam's vacant face must have stood him in good stead.
+She had been such "a draw," he told me, that the showman had decided to
+stay two more nights on the same pitch: which was fortunate for us both.
+Especially as on the third afternoon heavy rain fell, converting the
+green field into a morass. With evening the clouds lifted, and a fulling
+moon glazed the puddles, and dimmed the glow-worm lamps. Impulse is a
+capricious master. I did my best, for even when intuition fails my sex,
+there's obstinacy to fall back upon; but all that I had formerly
+achieved with ease had to be forced out of me that night with endless
+effort. The Oracle was unwilling. When a genteel yet foxy looking man,
+with whiskers and a high stiff collar under his chin, sneakishly invited
+me to tell his fortune, and I replied that "Prudent chickens roost
+high," the thrust was a little too deft. My audience was amused, but
+nobody laughed.
+
+He seemed to be well known, and the green look he cast me proved that
+the truth is not always palatable or discreet. Unseduced by the lumps of
+sugar which I had pilfered for him, my peevish mount jibbed and bucked
+and all but flung the Princess of Andalusia into the sodden ring. He
+succeeded in giving a painful wrench to her wrist, which doubled the
+applause.
+
+A strange thing happened to me, too, that night. When for the second or
+third time the crowd was flocking in to view me, my eyes chanced to fall
+on a figure standing in the clouded light a little apart. He was dressed
+in a high-peaked hat and a long and seemingly brown cassock-like
+garment, with buttoned tunic and silver-buckled leather belt. Spurs were
+on his boots, a light whip in his hand. Aloof, his head a little bowed
+down, his face in profile, he stood there, framed in the opening, dusky,
+level-featured, deep-eyed--a Stranger.
+
+What in me rushed as if on wings into his silent company? A passionate
+longing beyond words burned in me. I seemed to be carried away into a
+boundless wilderness--stunted trees, salt in the air, a low, enormous
+stretch of night sky, space; and this man, master of soul and solitude.
+
+He never heeded me; raised not an eyelid to glance into my tent. If he
+had, what then? I was a nothing. When next, after the press of people, I
+looked, he was gone; I saw him no more. Yet the girlish remembrance
+remains, consoling this superannuated heart like a goblet of flowers in
+that secret chamber of the mind we call the imagination.
+
+The fall from that giddy moment into this practical world was abrupt.
+Sulky, tired with the rain and the cumbersome cage and the showman's
+insults, on our arrival at Monk's House Adam was completely unnerved
+when he found our usual entry locked and bolted.
+
+He gibbered at me like a mountebank in the windy moonlight, his conical
+head blotting out half the cloud-wracked sky. These gallivantings were
+as much as his place was worth. He would wring the showman's neck. He
+had a nail in his shoe. He had been respectable all his life; and what
+was I going to do about it? A nice kettle of fish. Oh, yes, he had had
+"a lick or two of the old lady's tongue" already, and he didn't want
+another. What's more, there was the mealy-mouthed Marvell to reckon
+with.
+
+Once free of the cage, I faced him and desired to know whether he would
+be happier if I wrote at once to Mrs Monnerie and absolved him there and
+then. "Look at yourself in your own mind," I bade him. "What a sight is
+a coward!" And I fixed him with none too friendly an eye under the moon.
+
+His clumsiness in opening a window disturbed Mrs French. She came to the
+head of the staircase and leaned over, while we crouched in a recess
+beneath. But while the beams of the candle she carried were too feeble
+to pierce the well of darkness between us, by twisting round my head I
+could see every movement and changing expression of the shape above
+me--the frilled, red-flannel dressing-gown, the shawl over her head, and
+her inflamed peering face surmounted with a "front" of hair in pins. She
+was talking to herself in peculiar guttural mutterings. But soon, either
+because she was too sleepy or too indolent to search further, she
+withdrew again; and Adam and I were free to creep up the glooming
+shallow staircase into safety.
+
+Last but not least, when I came to undress, I found that my
+grandfather's little watch was gone. In a fever I tumbled my clothes
+over again and again. Then I sat down and in memory went over the events
+of the evening, and came at last to the thief. There was no doubt of
+him--a small-headed, puny man, who almost with tears in his eyes had
+besought me to give him one of my buttons to take home to his crippled
+little daughter. He had pressed close: my thoughts had been far away. I
+confess this loss unnerved me--a haggard face looked out of my glass. I
+scrambled into bed, and sought refuge as quickly as possible from these
+heart-burnings.
+
+After such depressing experiences Adam's resolution was at an even lower
+ebb next morning. We met together under the sunny whispering pine-trees.
+I wheedled, argued, adjured him in vain. Almost at my wits' end at last,
+I solemnly warned him that if we failed the showman the following
+evening, he would assuredly have the law against us. "A pretty pair we
+shall look, Adam, standing up there in the dock--with the black cap and
+the wigs and the policemen and everything. And not a penny for our
+pains."
+
+He squinted at me in unfeigned alarm at this; the lump in his throat
+went up and down; and though possibly I had painted the picture in
+rather sombre colours, this settled the matter. I hope it taught Adam
+to fight shy ever afterwards of adventuresses. It certainly taught
+_this_ adventuress that the mind may be "subdued to what it works in,
+like the dyer's hand." I cast a look of hatred after the weak, silly man
+as he disappeared between the trees.
+
+The circus, so the showman had warned me, was moving on that day to
+another market town, Whippington--six miles or so from its present
+pitch, though not more than four miles further away from Croomham. This
+would mean a long and wearisome trudge for us the next evening, as I
+found on consulting an immense map of Kent. Yet my heart sighed with
+delight at the discovery that, as the dove flies, we should be a full
+five miles nearer to Beechwood. If this little church on the map was St
+Peter's, and this faint shading the woody contour of the Hill, why,
+then, that square dot was Wanderslore. I sprawled over the outspread
+county with sublime content. My very "last appearance" was at hand;
+liberty but a few hollow hours away.
+
+It is true I had promised my showman to think over his invitation to me
+to "sign on" as a permanent member of his troupe of clowns, acrobats,
+wild beasts, and monstrosities. He had engaged in return to pay me in
+full, "with a bit over," at the close of the last performance. But I had
+merely laughed and nodded. Not that I was in any true sense ashamed of
+what I had done. Not _ashamed_.
+
+But you cannot swallow your pride and your niceness without any
+discomfort. I was conscious of a hardening of the skin, of a grimness
+stealing over my mouth, and of a tendency to stare at the world rather
+more boldly than modesty should. At least, so it seemed. In reality it
+may have been that Life was merely scraping off the "cream." Quite a
+wholesome experience.
+
+On the practical side, all was well. Two pounds to Adam, which I had
+promised to make three if he earned it, would leave me with thirteen or
+twelve pounds odd, apart from my clumsy "douceur." I thirsted for my
+wages. With that sum--two five-pound notes and say, four
+half-sovereigns--sewn up, if possible, in my petticoat, I should once
+more be my own mistress; and I asked no more for the moment. The future
+must take care of itself. On one thing I was utterly resolved--never,
+never to return to Monk's House, or to No. 2--to that old squalid
+luxury, dissembling and humiliation.
+
+No: my Monnerie days were over; even though it had taken a full pound
+of their servile honey to secrete this ounce of rebellious wax.
+
+How oddly chance events knit themselves together. That very morning I
+had received a belated and re-addressed letter which smote like sunbeams
+on my hopes and plans. It was from Mrs Bowater:--
+
+
+     "DEAR MISS M.,--I send this line to say that I am still in the land
+     of the living. I have buried my poor husband but have hopes some
+     day of bringing him home. England is England when all's said and
+     done, and I can't say I much approve of foreign parts. It's a fine
+     town and not what you might call foreign to look at the buildings,
+     but moist and flat and the streets like a draughtboard. And the
+     thought of the cattle upsets me. Everything topsy-turvy too with
+     Spring coming along and breaking out and we here on the brink of
+     September. It has been an afflicting time though considering all
+     things he made a peaceful end, with a smile on his face as you
+     would hardly consider possible.
+
+     "The next fortnight will see me on board the steamer again, which I
+     can scarcely support the thought of, though, please God, I shall
+     see it through. I have spent many days alone here and the
+     strangeness of it all and the foreign faces bring up memories which
+     are happier forgotten. But I'm often thinking what fine things you
+     must be doing in that fine place. Not as I think riches will buy
+     everything in this world--and a mercy too--or that I'm not anxious
+     at times you don't come to harm with that delicate frame and all.
+     Wrap up warm, miss, be watchful of your victuals and keep early
+     hours. Such being so, I'm still hoping when I come home, if I'm
+     spared, you may be of a mind to come to Beechwood Hill again and
+     maybe settle down.
+
+     "I may say that I had my suspicions for some time that that young
+     Mr Anon was consumptive in the lungs. But from what I gathered he
+     isn't, only suffering from a stomach cough--bad cooking and
+     exposing himself in all weathers. I will say nothing nearer. I
+     shall be easier off as money goes, but you and me needn't think of
+     that. Fanny doesn't write much and which I didn't much expect. She
+     is of an age now which must reap as it has sown, though even
+     allowing for the accident of birth, as they say, a mother's a
+     mother till the end of the chapter. I must now close. May the Lord
+     bless you, miss, wherever you may be.
+
+     Yours truly,
+
+     "E. BOWATER (MRS)."
+
+
+Surely this letter was a good omen. It cheered me, and yet it was
+disquieting, too. That afternoon I spent in the garden, wandering
+irresolutely up and down under the blue sky, and fretting at the
+impenetrable wall of time that separated me from the longed-for hour of
+freedom. On a sunny stone near a foresty bed of asparagus I sat down at
+last, tired, and a little dispirited. I was angry with myself for the
+last night's failure, and for a kind of weakness that had come over me.
+Yet how different a creature was here to-day from that of only a week
+ago. From the darkened soil the stalks sprang up, stiffened and green
+with rain. A snail reared up her horns beneath my stone. An azure
+butterfly alighted on my knee, slowly fanning its turquoise wings,
+patterned with a delicate narrow black band on the one side, and spots
+of black and orange like a Paisley shawl beneath. Between silver-knobbed
+antennae its furry perplexed face and shining eyes looked out at me,
+sharing my warmth. I watched it idly. How long we had been strangers.
+And surely the closer one looked at anything that was not of man's
+making.... My thoughts drifted away. I began day-dreaming again.
+
+And it seemed that life was a thing that had neither any plan nor any
+purpose; that I was sunk, as if in a bog, in ignorance of why or where
+or who I truly was. The days melted on, to be lost or remembered, the
+Spring into Summer, and then Winter and death. What was the meaning of
+it all--this enormous ocean of time and space in which I was lost? Never
+else than a stranger. That couldn't be true of the men and women who
+really keep the world's "pot boiling." All _I_ could pray for was to sit
+like this for a while, undisturbed and at peace with my own heart.
+Peace--did I so much as know the meaning of the word? How dingy a
+patchwork I had made of everything. And how customary were becoming
+these little passing fits of repining and remorse. The one sole thing
+that comforted me--apart from my blue butterfly--was an echo in my head
+of those clapping hands, whoops and catcalls--and the white staring
+faces in the glare. And a few months ago this would have seemed an
+incredible degradation.
+
+There stole into memory that last evening at Wanderslore. What would he
+think of me now? I had done worse than forget him, had learned in one
+single instant that for ever and ever, however dearly I liked and valued
+him and delighted in his company, I could not be "in love" with him. I
+hid my face in my hands. Yet a curious quiet wish for his company sprang
+up in me. How stiff-necked and affected I had been. Love was nothing but
+cheating. Let me but confess, explain, ask forgiveness, unburden myself.
+Those hollow temples, that jutting jaw, the way he stooped on his hands
+and coughed. My great-aunt, Kitilda, had died in her youth of
+consumption. A sudden dread, like a skeleton out of the sky, stood up in
+my mind. There was no time to delay. To-morrow night, Adam or no Adam, I
+would set off to find him: all would be well.
+
+As if in response to my thought, a shadow stole over the stones beside
+me. I looked up and--aghast--saw Fanny.
+
+
+
+
+Chapter Forty-Eight
+
+
+Her head was turned away from me, a striped parasol leaned over her
+shoulder. With a faintly defiant tilt of her beautiful head, as if
+exclaiming, "See, Strangeness, I come!" she stepped firmly on over the
+turf. A breath of some delicate indoor perfume was wafted across to my
+nostrils. I clung to my stone, watching her.
+
+Simply because it seemed a meanness to play the spy on her in her
+solitude, I called her name. But her start of surprise was mere
+feigning. The silk of her parasol encircled her shoulders like an
+immense nimbus. Her eyes dwelt on me, as if gathering up the strands of
+an unpleasing memory.
+
+"Ah, Midgetina," she called softly, "it is you, is it, on your little
+stone? Are you better?" The very voice seemed conscious of its own
+cadences. "What a delicious old garden. The contrast!"
+
+The contrast. With a cold gathering apprehension at my heart I glanced
+around me. Why was it that of all people only Fanny could so shrink me
+up like this into my body? And there floated back to remembrance the
+vast, dazzling room, the flower-clotted table, and, in that hideous
+vertigo, a face frenzied with disgust and rage, a hand flung out to cast
+me off. But I entered her trap none the less.
+
+"Contrast, Fanny?"
+
+"No, _no_, now, my dear! Not quite so disingenuous as all that,
+_please_. You can't have quite forgotten the last time we met."
+
+"There was nothing in that, Fanny. Only that the midge was drunk. You
+should see the wasps over there in the nectarines."
+
+"Only?" she echoed lightly, raising her eyebrows. "I am not sure that
+every one would put it quite like that. You couldn't see yourself, you
+see. They call you little Miss Cassandra now. Woe! Woe! you know. Mrs
+Monnerie asked me if I thought you were--you know--'all there,' as they
+say."
+
+"I don't care what they say."
+
+"If I weren't an old friend," she returned with crooked lip, "you might
+be made to care. I have brought the money you were kind enough to lend
+me; I'll give it you when I have unpacked--to-morrow night."
+
+My body sank into a stillness that might well have betrayed its mind's
+confusion to a close observer. _Had_ she lingered satirically,
+meaningly, on those two last words? "I don't want the money, Fanny:
+aren't you generous enough to accept a gift?"
+
+"Well," said she, "it needs a good deal of generosity sometimes. Surely,
+a gift depends upon the spirit in which it is given. That last little
+message, now--was that, shall we say, an acceptable gift?" Her tones
+lost their silkiness. "See here, Midgetina," she went on harshly, "you
+and I are going to talk all this out. But I'm thirsty. I hate this
+spawning sun. Where are the nectarines?"
+
+Much against my will I turned my back on her, and led her off to the
+beehives.
+
+"One for you," she said, stooping forward, balancing the sheeny toe of
+her shoe on the brown mould, "and the rest for me. Catch!" She dropped a
+wasp-bitten, pulpy fruit into my hands. "Now then. It's shadier here. No
+eavesdroppers. Just you and me and God. _Please_ sit down?"
+
+There was no choice. Down I sat; and she on a low wooden seat opposite
+me in the shade, her folded parasol beside her, the leaf-hung wall
+behind. She bit daintily into the juicy nectarine poised between finger
+and thumb, and watched me with a peculiar fixed smile, as if of
+admiration, on her pale face.
+
+"Tell me, pretty Binbin," she began again, "what is the name of that
+spiked red and blue and violet thing behind your back? It colours the
+edges of your delicate china cheeks. Most becoming!"
+
+It was viper's bugloss--a stray, I told her, shifting my head uneasily
+beneath her scrutiny.
+
+"Ah, yes, _viper's_ bugloss. Personally I prefer the common variety.
+Though no doubt that may stray, too. But fie, fie! You naughty thing,"
+she sprang up and plucked another nectarine, "you have been blacking
+your eyebrows. I shouldn't have dreamt it of you. What would mother
+say?"
+
+"Listen, Fanny," I said, pronouncing the words as best I could with a
+tongue that seemed to be sticking to the roof of my mouth; "I am tired
+of the garden. What do you really want to say to me? I don't much care
+for your--your fun."
+
+"And I just beginning to enjoy it! There's contrariness!--To _say_?
+Well, now, a good deal, my dear. I thought of writing. But it's
+better--safer to talk. The first thing is this. While you have been
+malingering down here I have had to face the whole Monnerie orchestra.
+It hasn't been playing quite in tune; and you know why. That lovesick
+Susan, now, and her nice young man. But since you seem to be quite
+yourself again--more of yourself than ever, in fact: listen." I gazed,
+almost hypnotized, through the sunshine into her shady face.
+
+"What I am going to suggest," she went on smoothly, "concerns only you
+and me. If you and I are to go on living in the same house--which heaven
+forbid--I give you fair warning that we shall have nothing more to do
+with one another than is absolutely inevitable. I am not so forgiving as
+I ought to be, Midgetina, and insults rankle. Treachery, still more."
+The low voice trembled.
+
+"Oh, yes, you may roll your innocent little eyes and look as harmless as
+a Chinese god, but answer me this: Am _I_ a hypocrite? Am I? And while
+you are thinking it over, hadn't you better tumble that absurd little
+pumpkin off your knee? It's staining your charming frock."
+
+"I never said you were a hypocrite," I choked.
+
+"No?" The light gleamed on the whites of her eyes as they roved to and
+fro. "Then I say, _you_ are. Fair to face, false to back. Who first
+trapped me out star-gazing in the small hours, then played informer? Who
+wheedled her way on with her mincing humbug--poof! _naivete!_--and set
+my own mother against me? Who told some one--_you_ know who--that I was
+not to be trusted, and far better cast-off? Who stuffed that
+lackadaisical idiot of a Sukie Monnerie with all _those_ old horrors?
+Who warned that miserable little piece of deformity that I might
+come--borrowing? Who hoped to betray me by sending an envelope through
+the post packed with mousey bits of paper? Who made me a guy, a
+laughing-stock and poisoned---- Oh, it's a long score, Miss M. When I
+think of it all, what I've endured--well, honestly when a wasp crawls
+out of my jam, I remind myself that it's stinged."
+
+The light smouldering eyes held me fast. "You mean, I suppose, Fanny,
+that you'd just kill it," I mumbled, looking up into her distorted face.
+"I don't think I should much mind even that. But it's no use. It would
+take hours to answer your questions. You have only put them your own
+way. They may sound true. But in your heart you know they are false. Why
+should you bother to hurt me? You know--you know how idiotically I loved
+you."
+
+"_Loved me, false, kill_," echoed Fanny scornfully, with a leer which
+transformed her beauty into a mere vulgar grimace. "Is there any end to
+the deceits of the little gaby? Do you really suppose that to be loved
+is a new experience for me; that I'm not smeared with it wherever I go;
+that I care a snap of my fingers whether I'm loved or not; that I
+couldn't win through without that? Is that what you suppose? Well, then,
+here's one more secret. Open your ears. I am going to marry Percy
+Maudlen. Yes, _that_ weed of a creature. You may remember my little
+prophecy when he brought his Aunt Alice's manikin some lollipops. Well,
+the grace of God is too leisurely, and since you and I are both, I
+suppose, of the same sex, I tell you I care no more for him than
+that----" She flung the nectarine stone at the beehive. "And I _defy_
+you, defy you to utter a word. I am glad I was born what I am. All your
+pretty little triumphs, first to last, what are they?--accidents and
+insults. Isn't half the world kicking down the faces of those beneath
+them on the ladder? _I_ have had to fight for a place. And I tell you
+this: I am going to teach these supercilious money-smelling ladies a
+lesson. I am going to climb till I can sneer down on _them_. And Mrs
+Monnerie is going to help me. She doesn't care a jot for God or man. But
+she enjoys intelligence, and loves a fighter. Is that candour? Is it
+now?"
+
+"I detest Percy Maudlen," I replied faintly. "And as for sneering, that
+only makes another wall. Oh, Fanny, do listen to yourself, to what you
+are. I swear I'm not the sneak you think me. I'd help you, if I could,
+to my last breath. Indeed, I would. Yes, and soon I _can_."
+
+"Thank you: and I'd rather suffocate than accept your help--now. Listen
+to myself, indeed! That's just the pious hypocrite all over. Well,
+declarations of love you know quite enough about for your--for your age.
+Now you shall hear one of a different kind. I tell you, Midgetina, I
+hate you: I can't endure the sight or sound or creep or thought of you
+any longer. Why? Because of your unspeakable masquerade. You play the
+pygmy; pygmy you are: carried about, cosseted, smirked at, fattened on
+nightingales' tongues--the last, though, you'll ever eat. But where have
+you come from? What are you in your past--in your mind? I ask you that:
+a thing more everywhere, more thief-like, more detestable than a
+conscience. Look at me, as we sit here now. _I_ am the monstrosity. You
+see it, you think it, you hate even to touch me. From first moment to
+last you have secretly despised me--me! I'm not accusing you. You
+weren't your own maker. As often as not you don't know what you are
+saying. You are just an automaton. But these last nights I have lain
+awake and thought of it all. It came on me as if my life had been
+nothing but a filthy, aimless nightmare; and chiefly because of you.
+I've worked, I've thought, I've contrived and forced my way. Oh, that
+house, the wranglings, the sermons. Did I make myself what I am, ask to
+be born? No, it's all a devilish plot. And I say this, that while things
+are as they are, and this life is life, and this world _my_ world, I
+refuse to be watched and taunted and goaded and defamed."
+
+Her face stooped closer, fascinating, chilling me like a cold cloud with
+its bright, hunted, malevolent stare. She stretched out a hand and wrung
+my shoulder. "Listen, I say. Come out of that trance! I loathe you, you
+holy imp. You haunt me!"
+
+My eyes shut. I sat shivering, empty of self, listening, as if lost in a
+fog in a place desperately strange to me; and only a distant sea
+breaking and chafing on its stones far below. Then once more I became
+conscious of the steady and resolute droning of the bees; felt the
+breathing of actuality on my hair, on my cheek. My eyes opened on a
+garden sucked dry of colour and reality, and sought her out. She had
+left me, was standing a few paces distant now, looking back, as if
+dazed, her lips pale, her eyes dark-ringed.
+
+"Perhaps you didn't quite hear all that, Midgetina. You led me on. You
+force things out of me till I am sick. But some day, when you are as
+desperate as I have been, it will come back to you. Then you'll know
+what it is to be human. But there can't be any misunderstanding left
+now, can there?"
+
+I shook my head. "No, Fanny. I shall know you hate me."
+
+"And I am free?"
+
+What could she mean? I nodded.
+
+She turned, pushed up her parasol. "What a talk! But better done with."
+
+"Yes, Fanny," said I obediently. "Much better done with."
+
+She gave me an odd glance out of the corner of her eye. "The queer thing
+is," she went on, "what I wanted to say was something quite, quite
+different. To give you a friendly word of warning, entirely on your own
+account.... You have a rival, Midgetina."
+
+The words glided away into silence. The doves crooned on the housetop.
+The sky was empty above the distant hills. I did not stir, and am
+thankful I had the cowardice to ask no questions.
+
+"Her name is Angelique. She lives in a Castle in Spain"; sighed the
+calm, silky voice, with the odd break or rasp in it I knew so well. "Oh,
+I agree a circus-rider is nothing better than a mongrel, a pariah, worse
+probably. Yet this one has her little advantages. As Midgets go, she
+beats you by at least four inches, and rides, sings, dances, tells
+fortunes. Quite a little Woman of the World. The only really troublesome
+thing about it is that she makes you jiltable, my dear. They are so very
+seductive, these flounced up, painted things. _No_ principle! And, oh,
+my dear; all this just as dear Mrs Monnerie has set her heart on finding
+her Queen Bee a nice little adequate drone for a husband!"
+
+It was her last taunt. It was over. I had heard the worst. The arrow I
+had been waiting for had sprung true to its mark. Its barb was sticking
+there in my side. And yet, as I mutely looked up at her, I knew there
+was a word between us which neither could utter. The empty air had
+swallowed up the sound of our voices. Its enormous looking-glass
+remained placid and indifferent. It was as if all that we had said, or,
+for that matter, suffered, was of no account, simply because we were not
+alone. For the first instant in the intimacy of my love and hatred,
+Fanny seemed to be just any young woman standing there, spiteful,
+meaningless. The virtue had gone out of her. She made up her mouth,
+glanced uneasily over her shoulder and turned away.
+
+We were never again to be alone together, except in remembrance.
+
+
+I sat on in the garden till the last thin ray of sunlight was gone.
+Then, in dread that my enemy might be looking down from the windows of
+the house, I slipped and shuffled from bush to bush in the dusk, and so
+at last made my way into the house, and climbed the dark polished
+staircase. As, stealthily, I passed a bedroom door ajar, my look pierced
+through the crevice. It was a long, stretching, shallow room, and at the
+end of it, in the crystal quiet, stood Fanny, her arms laid on the
+chimney-piece, her shoulder blades sticking out of her muslin gown, her
+face hidden in her hands.
+
+Why did I not venture in to speak to her? I had never seen a figure so
+desolate and forsaken. Could things ever be so far gone as to say No to
+that? I hesitated; turned away: she would think I had come only to beg
+for mercy.
+
+For hours I sat dully brooding. What a trap I was in. In my rummagings
+in the Monnerie library I had once chanced on a few yellow
+cardboard-covered novels tucked away in a cupboard, and had paddled in
+one or two of them. Now I realized that my life also was nothing but "a
+Shocker." So people actually suffered and endured the horrible things
+written about in cheap, common books.
+
+One by one I faced Fanny's charges in my mind. None was true, yet none
+was wholly false. And none was of any consequence beside the fact that
+she execrated the very self in me of which I could not be conscious. And
+what would she do? What did all those covert threats and insinuations
+mean? A "husband"--why had that such a dreadful power to wound me? I
+heard my teeth begin to chatter again. There was no defence, no refuge
+anywhere. If I could get no quiet, I should go mad. I looked up from my
+stool. It was dark. It was a scene made for me. I could watch the
+miserable little occupant of its stage roving to and fro like one of my
+showman's cowed, mangy beasts.
+
+The thought of the day still ahead of me, through which I must somehow
+press on, keep alive, half stupefied me with dread. We can shut our eyes
+and our mouths and our hearts; why cannot we stop thinking? The awful
+passive order of life: its mechanicalness. All that I could see was the
+blank white face of its clock--but no more of the wheels than of the
+Winder. No haste, no intervention, no stretching-out beyond one's finger
+tips. So the world wore away; life decayed; the dunghill smoked. Mrs
+Monnerie there; stepping into her brougham, ebony cane in hand, Marvell
+at her elbow; Mrs Bowater languishing on board ship, limp head in stiff
+frilling; Sir Walter dumb; the showman cursing his wretched men; the
+bills being posted, the implacable future mutely yawning, the past
+unutterable. Everything in its orbit. Was there no help, no refuge?
+
+The door opened and the skimpy little country girl who waited on me in
+Fleming's absence, brought in my supper. She bobbed me a scared curtsey,
+and withdrew. Then she, too, had been poisoned against me. I flung
+myself down on the floor, crushing my hands against my ears. Yet,
+through all this dazed helplessness, in one resolve I never faltered. I
+would keep my word to the showman, and this night that was now in my
+room should be the last I would spend alive in Monk's House. Fanny must
+do her worst. Thoughts of her, of my unhappy love and of her cruelty,
+could bring no good. Yet I thought of her no less. Her very presence in
+the house lurked in the air, in the silence, like an apparition's.
+
+Still stretched on the floor, I woke to find the September
+constellations faintly silvering the pale blue crystal of the Northern
+Lights; and the earth sighing as if for refuge from the rising moon. My
+fears and troubles had fallen to rest beneath my dreams, and I prepared
+myself for the morrow's flight.
+
+
+
+
+Chapter Forty-Nine
+
+
+When next Fanny and I met, it was in the cool grey-green summery
+drawing-room at Monk's House, and Mrs Monnerie and Susan shared tea with
+us. One covert glance at Mrs Monnerie's face had reassured me. That
+strange mask was as vigilant and secretive, but as serene, as when it
+had first smiled on me in the mauves and gildings of Brunswick House.
+She had set her world right again and was at peace with mankind. As
+complacently as ever she stretched me out her finger. She had not even
+taken the trouble to forgive me for my little "scene"; had let it perish
+of its own insignificance. Oh, I thought, if I could be as life-size as
+that! I did not learn till many days afterwards, however, that she had
+had news of me from France. _Good_ news, which Sir W., trusting in my
+patience and commonsense, had kept back from me until he could deliver
+it in person and we could enjoy it together.
+
+Only one topic of conversation was ours that afternoon--that "amazing
+Prodigy of Nature," the Spanish Princess; Mrs Monnerie's one regret that
+she herself had not discovered a star of such ineffably minute
+magnitude. Yet her teasing and sarcasm were so nimble and good-humoured;
+she insinuated so pleasantly her little drolleries and innuendoes; that
+even if Miss M. had had true cause for envy and malice, she could have
+taken no offence. Far from it.
+
+I looked out of the long open windows at the dipping, flittering
+wagtails on the lawn; shrugged my shoulders; made little mouths at her
+with every appearance of wounded vanity. Did she really think, I
+inquired earnestly, that that shameless creature was as lovely as the
+showman's bills made her out to be? Mightn't it all be a cheat, a trick?
+Didn't they always exaggerate--just to make money? The more jovially she
+enjoyed my discomfiture, nodding her head, swaying in her chair, the
+more I enjoyed my duplicity. The real danger was that I should be a
+little too clever, over-act my part, and arouse her suspicions.
+
+"Ah, you little know, you little know," I muttered to myself, sharply
+conscious the while of the still, threatening presence of Fanny. But she
+meant to let me go--that was enough. It was to be good riddance to bad
+rubbish. There was nothing to fear from her--yet. Her eyes lightly
+dwelling on me over her Chelsea teacup, she sat drinking us in. Well,
+she should never taunt me with not having played up to her conception of
+me.
+
+
+"Well, well," Mrs Monnerie concluded, "all it means, my dear, is that
+you are not quite such a rarity as we supposed. Who is? There's nothing
+unique in this old world; though character, even bad character, never
+fails to make its mark. Ask Mr Pellew."
+
+"But, surely, Mrs Monnerie," said I, "it isn't character to sell
+yourself at twopence a look."
+
+"Mere scruples, Poppet," she retorted. "Think of it. If only you could
+have pocketed that pretty little fastidiousness of yours, the newspapers
+would now be ringing with your fame. And the fortune! You are too
+pernickety. Aren't we all of us on show? And aren't nine out of ten of
+us striving to be more on show than we are entitled to be? If man's
+first disobedience and the rest of it doesn't mean that, then what, I
+ask you, Mademoiselle _Bas Bleu_, was the sour old Puritan so concerned
+about? Assist me, Susan, if I stumble."
+
+"I wish I could, Aunt Alice," said Susan sweetly, cutting the cake. "You
+must ask Miss Bowater."
+
+"_Please_, Miss Monnerie," drawled Fanny.
+
+"Whether or not," said Mrs Monnerie crisply, "I beseech you, children,
+don't quarrel about it. There is our beloved Sovereign on her throne;
+and there the last innocent little victim in its cradle; and there's the
+old sun waggishly illuminating the whole creaking stage. Blind beggar
+and dog, Toby, artists, authors, parsons, statesmen--heart and
+everything else, or everything else but heart, on sleeve--and all on
+show--every one of them--at _something_ a look. No, my dear, there's
+only one private life, the next: and, according to some accounts, that
+will be more public than ever. And so twirls the Merry-go-Round."
+
+Her voice relapsed, as it were, into herself again, and she drew in her
+lips. She looked about her as if in faint surprise; and in returning to
+its usual expression, it seemed to me that her countenance had paused an
+instant in an exceedingly melancholy condition. Perhaps she had caught
+the glint of sympathy in my eye.
+
+"But isn't that all choice, Mrs Monnerie?" I leaned forward to ask. "And
+aren't some people what one might call conspicuous, simply because they
+are really and truly, as it were, superior to other people? I don't mean
+better--just superior."
+
+"I _think_, Mrs Monnerie," murmured Fanny deprecatingly, "she's
+referring to that '_ad infinitum_' jingle--about the fleas, you know. Or
+was it Dr Watts, Midgetina?"
+
+"Never mind about Dr Watts," said Mrs Monnerie flatly. "The point from
+which we have strayed, my dear, is that even if you were not born great,
+you were born exquisite; and now here's this Angelique rigmarole----"
+Her face creased up into its old good-humoured facetiousness: "Was it
+three inches, Miss Bowater?"
+
+"Four, Mrs Monnerie," lipped Fanny suavely.
+
+"Four! pooh! Still, that's what they say; half a head or more, my dear,
+more exquisite! Perfect nonsense, of course. It's physically impossible.
+These Radical newspapers! And the absinthe, too." Her small black-brown
+eyes roamed round a little emptily. Absinthe! was that a Fanny story?
+"But there, my child," she added easily, "you shall see for yourself. We
+dine with the Padgwick-Steggals; and then go on together. So that's
+settled. It will be my first travelling circus since I was a child. Most
+amusing: if the lion doesn't get out, and there's none of those horrible
+accidents on the trapeze one goes in hope to see. By the way, Miss
+Bowater, your letter was posted?"
+
+"Oh, yes, Mrs Monnerie--this afternoon; but, as you know, I was a little
+doubtful about the address." She hastened to pass me a plate of
+button-sized ratafias; and Mrs Monnerie slowly turned a smiling but not
+quite ingenuous face aside.
+
+"What a curious experience the circus will be for you, Midgetina," Fanny
+was murmuring softly, glancing back over her shoulder towards the
+tea-table. "Personally, I believe the Signorina Angelique and the rest
+of it is only one of those horrible twisted up prodigies with all the
+bones out of place. Mightn't it, Mrs Monnerie, be a sort of shock, you
+know, for Miss M.? She's still a little pale and peaky."
+
+"She shall come, I say, and see for herself," replied Mrs Monnerie
+petulantly.
+
+There was a pause. Mrs Monnerie gazed vacantly at the tiers of hot-house
+flowers that decorated the window-recess. Susan sate with a little
+forked frown between her brows. She never seemed to derive the least
+enjoyment from this amiable, harmless midget-baiting. Not at any rate
+one hundredth part as much as I did. Fanny set Plum begging for yet
+another ratafia. And then, after a long, deep breath, my skin all
+"gooseflesh," I looked straight across at my old friend.
+
+"I don't think, Mrs Monnerie," I said, "if you don't mind--I don't think
+I really _wish_ to go."
+
+As if Joshua had spoken, the world stood still.
+
+Mrs Monnerie slowly turned her head. "Another headache?"
+
+"No, I'm perfectly well, thank you. But, whatever I may have said, I
+don't approve of that poor creature showing herself for--for money. She
+is selling herself. It _must_ be because there's no other way out."
+
+Finger and thumb outstretched above the cringing little dog, Fanny was
+steadily watching me. With a jerk of my whole body I turned on her. "You
+agreed with me, Fanny, didn't you, in the garden yesterday afternoon?"
+
+Placidly drooped her lids: "Trust, Plum, trust!"
+
+"What!" croaked Mrs Monnerie, "you, Miss Bowater! Guilty of that silly
+punctilio! She was merely humouring you, child. It will be a most
+valuable experience. You shall be perfectly protected. Pride, eh? Or is
+it jealousy? Now what would you say if I promise to try and ransom the
+poor creature?--buy her out? pension her off? Would _that_ be a nice
+charitable little thing to do? She might make you quite a pleasant
+companion."
+
+"Ah, Mrs Monnerie, please let _me_ buy her out. Let me be the
+intermediary!" I found myself, hands clasped in lap, yearningly stooping
+towards her, just like a passionate young lady in a novel.
+
+She replied ominously, knitting her thick, dark eyebrows. "And how's
+that to be done, pray, if you sulk here at home?"
+
+"I think, Aunt Alice, it's an excellent plan," cried Susan, "much, much
+more considerate. She could write. Think of all those horrible people!
+The poor thing may have been kidnapped, forced to do her silly tricks
+like one of those wretched, little barbered-up French poodles. Anyhow, I
+don't suppose she's there--or anywhere else, for that matter--for
+_fun_!"
+
+Even Susan's sympathy had its sting.
+
+"Thank you, Susan," was Mrs Monnerie's acid retort. "_Your_ delicate
+soul can always be counted on. But advice, my child, is much the more
+valuable when asked for."
+
+"Of course I mustn't interfere, Mrs Monnerie," interposed Fanny sweetly;
+"but wouldn't it perhaps be as well for you to see the poor thing first?
+She mayn't be quite--quite a proper kind of person, may she? At least
+that's what the newspapers seem to suggest. Not, of course, that Miss M.
+wouldn't soon teach her better manners."
+
+Mrs Monnerie's head wagged gently in time to her shoe. "H'm. There's
+something in that, Miss Worldly-Wise. Reports don't seem to flatter her.
+But still, I like my own way best. Poppet must _come and see_. After
+all, she should be the better judge."
+
+Never before had Mrs Monnerie so closely resembled a puffed-out tawny
+owl.
+
+I looked at her fixedly: shook my head. "No: no judge," I spluttered.
+"I'm sorry, Mrs Monnerie, but I _won't_ go."
+
+There was no misdoubting her anger now. The brows forked. The
+loose-skinned hands twitched. She lifted herself in her chair,
+"_Won't_," she said. "You vex me, child. And pray don't wriggle at me in
+that hysterical fashion. You are beside yourself; trembling like a
+mouse. You have been mooning alone too much, I can see. Run away and
+nurse that silly head, and at the same time thank heaven that you have
+more time and less need of the luxury than some one else we know of. It
+may be a low life, but it needs courage. I'll say _that_ for her."
+
+She swept her hands to her knees over her silken lap, and turned upon
+Susan.
+
+
+
+
+Wanderslore
+
+
+
+
+Chapter Fifty
+
+
+I had been dismissed. But Mrs Monnerie's anger had a curious potency.
+For a moment I could scarcely see out of my eyes, and the floor swayed
+under me as I scrambled down from my chair. It took me at least a
+minute, even with the help of a stool, to open the door.
+
+Like a naughty child I had been put in the corner and then sent to bed.
+Good. There could be no going back now. I could count on Fanny--the one
+thing she asked was to be free of me. As for Mrs Monnerie, her flushed
+and sullen countenance convinced me that my respite would be
+undisturbed. There was only impulsive Susan to think of. And as if in
+answer, there came a faint tap, and the door softly opened to admit her
+gentle head and shoulders.
+
+"Ah, my dear," she whispered across at me. "I'm _so_ sorry; and so
+helpless. Don't take it too hardly. I have been having my turn, too."
+
+I twisted round, wet face and hands, as I stood stooping over my
+washbowl on its stool, scrutinized her speechlessly, and shook a dizzy
+head. The door shut. Dearest Susan: as I think of her I seem to see one
+of those tiny, tiny "building rotifers" collecting out of reality its
+exquisite house. Grace, courage, loving-kindness. If I had been the
+merest Miss Hop-o'-my-Thumb, I should still have been the coarsest
+little monster by comparison.
+
+Scarce three safe hours remained to me; I must be off at once. To go
+looking for Adam was out of the question. Even if I could find him, I
+dared not risk him. Would it be possible for me to cover my six miles or
+more across undiscovered country in a hundred and eighty minutes? In my
+Bowater days, perhaps; but there had been months of idle, fatted, indoor
+No. 2 in between. A last forlorn dishonest project, banished already
+more than once from my mind, again thrust itself up--to creep off to the
+nearest Post Office and with one of my crown pieces for a telegram,
+cast myself on the generosity of Mr Anon. No, no: I couldn't cheat
+myself like that.
+
+I was ready. I pinned to the carpet a message for Adam, in case he
+should dare to be faithful to me--just four scribbled uncompromising
+words: "The Bird is flown." With eyes fixed on a starry knot of wood at
+the threshold, I stood for a while, with head bent, listening at my
+door. I might have been pausing between two worlds. The house was quiet.
+No voice cried "Stay." I bowed solemnly to the gentle, silent room
+behind me, and, with a prayer between my teeth, bundle in hand, stepped
+out into the future.
+
+Unchallenged, unobserved, I slipped along the blue-carpeted corridor,
+down the wide stairs and out of the porch. After dodging from tree to
+tree, from shrub to shrub, along the meandering drive, I turned off,
+and, skirting the lodge through a seeding forest of weeds and grasses,
+squeezed through the railings and was in the lane. From my map of Kent I
+had traced out a rough little sketch of the route I must follow. With
+the sun on my left hand I set off almost due north. How still the world
+was. In that silk-blue sky with its placid, mountainous clouds there was
+no heed of human doings.
+
+The shoes I had chosen were good sound Bowaters, and as I trudged on my
+spirits rose high. I breathed in deep draughts of the sweet September
+air. Thomasina of Bedlam had been "summoned to tourney." "The wide
+world's end.... No journey!" In sober fact, it was a sorry little wretch
+of a young female, scarcely more than a girl, that went panting along in
+the dust and stones, scrambling into cover of ditch and hedge at every
+sound or sight of life. I look at her now, and smile. Poor thing; it
+needed at any rate a pinch of "courage."
+
+Cottages came into sight. At an open door I heard the clatter of
+crockery, and a woman scolding a child. Two gates beyond, motionless as
+a block of wood, an old, old man stood leaning out of his garden of
+dahlias and tarnishing golden-rod. In an instant in the dumb dust I was
+under his nose. His clay pipe shattered on the stone. Like a wagtail I
+flitted and scampered all in a breath. That little danger was safely
+over; but it was not ruminating old gentlemen who caused me
+apprehension. Youthful Adam Waggetts were my dread.
+
+At the foot of the slope there came a stile, and a footpath winding off
+NW. but still curving in my direction. I hesitated. Any risk seemed
+better than the hedged-in publicity of this dusty lane. Ducking under
+the stile, I climbed the hill and presently found myself clambering
+across an immense hummocky field, part stubble, part fresh plough. Then
+a meadow and cows. Then once more downhill, a drowsy farm-yard, with its
+stacks and calves and chickens, to the left, and at bottom of the slope
+a filthy quagmire where an immense sow wallowed, giving suck to her
+squalling piglets. Her glinting, amorous eyes took me in. Stone on to
+stone, I skipped across a brook, dowsing one leg to the thigh in its
+bubbling water. It was balm in Gilead, for I was in a perfect fume of
+heat, and my lungs were panting like bellows.
+
+I sat down for a breathing space on the sunset side of a haystack. In
+the shade of the hazels, on the verge of the green descending field,
+rabbits were feeding and playing. And I began to think. Supposing I did
+reach the new pitch in time: the wreck I should be. Then Mrs
+Monnerie--and Fanny: my thoughts skimmed hastily on. What then? As soon
+as my showman had paid me I must creep away by myself out of sight _at
+once_; that was certain. I must tell him that Adam was waiting for me.
+And then? Well, after a few hours' rest in some shed or under a
+haystack, somehow or other I should have to find out the way, and press
+on to Wanderslore. There'd be a full moon. That would be a comfort. I
+knew the night. Once safely there, with money in my pocket, I could with
+a perfectly free conscience ask Mr Anon to find me a lodging, perhaps
+not very far from his own. A laughable situation. But we would be the
+best of friends; now that all that--that nonsense was over. A deep sigh,
+drawn, as it were, from the depths of my bowels, rose up and subsided.
+What a strange thing that one must fall in love, couldn't jump into it.
+And then? Well, Mrs Bowater would soon be home, and perhaps Sir Walter
+had circumvented the Harrises. Suppose not. Well, even at the very
+worst, at say ten, say even fifteen shillings a week, my thirteen pounds
+would last me for months and months.... Say _four_.
+
+And as I said "four," a gate clacked-to not many yards distant and a
+slow footfall sounded. Fortunately for me, the path I had been
+following skirted the other side of my haystack. Gathering myself close
+under the hay, I peeped out. A tall, spare man, in a low, peaked cap and
+leather leggings, came cautiously swinging along. His face was long,
+lean, severe. His eyes were fixed in a steady gaze as if he were a human
+automaton stalking on. And the black barrel of a gun sloped down from
+under his arm. I drew in closer. His footsteps passed; died away; the
+evening breeze blew chill. A few moments afterwards a shattering report
+came echoing on from wood to wood, seeming to knock on my very
+breastbone. This was no place for me. With one scared glance at the
+huddling wood, I took to my heels, nor paused until the path through the
+spinney became so rutted that I was compelled to pick my way.
+
+A cold gloom had closed in on my mind. I cursed clod-hopping shoes and
+bundle; envied the dead rabbit that had danced its airy dance and was
+done. As likely as not, I had already lost my way. And I plodded on
+along the stony paths, pausing only to quench my thirst with the rough
+juice of the blackberries that straggled at the wayside. I wonder if the
+"Knight of Furious Fancies" was as volatile!
+
+But yet another shock was awaiting me. The footpath dipped, there came a
+hedge and another stile, and I scuffled down the bank into the very lane
+which I had left more than an hour ago. I knew that white house on the
+hill; had seen it with Adam under the moon. It stood not much more than
+a mile from the lodge gates. My short cut had been a detour; and now the
+sun was down.
+
+I drew back and examined my scribble of map. There was no help for it.
+Henceforward I must keep to the road. My thick shoes beat up the dust,
+one of my heels had blistered, my bundle grew heavier with every step.
+But fear had left me. Some other master cracked his whip at me as I
+shambled on, as doggedly and devil-may-care as a tramp.
+
+I was stooping in the wayside ditch in one more attempt to ease my foot,
+when once again I heard hoofs approaching. With head pushed between the
+dusty tussocks, I stared along the flat, white road. A small and
+seemingly empty cart was bowling along in the dust. As it drew near, my
+ears began to sing, my heart stood still. I knew that battered cart,
+that rough-haired, thick-legged pony. Suddenly I craned up in horror,
+for it seemed that the face peering low over the splashboard in my
+direction was that of a death's-head, grinning at me out of its gloom.
+Then with a cry of joy I was up and out into the road. "Hi, hi!" I
+screamed up at him.
+
+It was Mr Anon. The pony was reined back on to its haunches; the cart
+stood still. And my stranger and I were incredulously gazing at one
+another as if across eternity, as if all the world beside were a dream
+that asked no awakening.
+
+Half dragged and half lifted into the cart, by what signs I could, for
+speech was impossible, I bade him turn back. It unmanned me to see the
+quiet and love in his face. Without a word he wheeled the rearing pony
+round under the elm-boughs, and for many minutes we swung on together at
+an ungainly gallop, swaying from this side to that, the astonishment of
+every wayfarer we met or overtook on our way. At length he turned into a
+grass-track under a rusting hedge festooned with woodbine and feathery
+travellers' joy; and we smiled at one another as if in all history there
+had never been anything quite so strange as this.
+
+"You are ill," he said. "Oh, my dear, what have they done to you?"
+
+I denied it emphatically, wiping my cheeks and forehead with the hem of
+my skirt--for my handkerchief was stuffed into my shoe. "Look at me!" I
+smiled up at him, confident and happy. Was my face lying about me? Oh, I
+knew what a dreadful object I must be, but then, "I've been tramping for
+hours and hours in the dust; and why!--haven't you come to meet me; to
+give me a _lift_?"
+
+What foolish speeches makes a happy heart. Indeed Mr Anon _had_ come to
+meet me, but not exactly there and then. He fetched out of his pocket
+the minute note that had summoned him. Here it is, still faintly
+scented:--
+
+
+     "Mrs Monnerie sends her compliments, and would Miss M.'s friend
+     very kindly call at Monk's House, Croomham, at three o'clock on
+     Friday afternoon. Mrs Monnerie is anxious about Miss M.'s health."
+
+
+Oh, Fanny, Fanny! Precisely how far she had taken Mrs Monnerie's name in
+vain in this letter I have never inquired. And now, I suppose, Mrs Percy
+Maudlen would not trouble to tell me. But I can vow that in spite of
+the grime on my face the happiest smile shone through as I stuffed it
+into my bodice. So this was all that her harrowing "husband" had come
+to--a summoning of friend to friend. If every little malicious plot
+ended like this, what a paradise the world would be. All tiredness
+passed away, though perhaps it continued to effervesce in my head a
+little. It seemed that I had been climbing on and on; and now suddenly
+the mist had vanished, and mountain and snow lay spread out around me in
+eternal peace and solitude. If Susan Monnerie's was my first stranger's
+kiss, Mr Anon's were my quietest tears.
+
+His crazy cart seemed more magical than all the carpets of Arabia. I
+poured out my story--though not quite to its dregs. "This very
+afternoon," I told him, "I was writing to you--in my mind. And you see,
+you have come." The shaggy pony tugged at the coarse grass. I could hear
+the trickling sands in the great hour glass, and chattered on in vain
+hope to hold them back.
+
+"You are not listening, only watching," I blamed him.
+
+His lips moved; he glanced away. Yet I had already foreseen the conflict
+awaiting me. And all his arguments and entreaties that I should throw
+over the showman, and drive straight on with him into the gathering
+evening towards Wanderslore, were in vain.
+
+"Look," he said, as if for straw to break the camel's back, and drew out
+by its ribbon my Bowater latchkey.
+
+"No," said I, "not even that. I sleep out to-night." And surely, surely
+I kept repeating, he must understand. How could I possibly be at rest
+with a broken promise? What cared I now for what was past and gone?
+Think what a joy, what sheer fun it would be to face Mrs Monnerie for
+the last time, and she unaware of it! Nothing, nothing could amuse her
+more when she hears of it. He should come and see; hear the crowd yell.
+He mustn't be so solemn about things. "Do try and see the humour of it,"
+I besought him.
+
+But the money--that little incentive--I kept to myself.
+
+He stared heavily into the silvery copse that bordered the track.
+Motionless in their bright, withering leaves, its trees hung down their
+tasselled branches beneath the darkening sky. Then, much against his
+will, he turned his pony towards the high road. The wheel gridded on a
+stone, he raised his whip.
+
+"Hst!" I whispered, clutching at the arm that held the rein. Crouching
+low, we watched the great Monnerie carriage, with its stiff-necked,
+blinkered, stepping greys and gleaming lamps sweep by.
+
+"There," I laughed up at him, lifting myself, one hand upon his knee,
+"there but for the Grace of God goes Miss M."
+
+The queer creature frowned into my smiling face and flicked the pony
+with his whip. "And here," he muttered moodily, "who knows but by the
+Grace of God go I?"
+
+
+Anxiety gone now, and responsibility but a light thing, my tongue
+rattled on quite as noisily as the cart. Kent's rich cornfields were
+around us, their stubble a pale washed-out gold in the last light of
+evening. Here and there on the hills a row or two of ungarnered stooks
+stood solemnly carved out against the sky. Most of the hop-gardens, too,
+had been dismantled, though a few we passed, with their slow-twirling
+dusky vistas and labyrinths, were still wreathed with bines. Their scent
+drifted headily on the stillness. And as with eyes peeping over the edge
+of the cart I watched these beloved, homelike hills and fields and
+orchards glide by, I shrilled joyfully at my companion every thought and
+fancy that came into my head, many of them, no doubt, recent deposits
+from the library at No. 2.
+
+I told him, I remember, how tired I was of the pernicketiness of my
+life; and amused him with a description of my Tank. "You would hardly
+believe it, but I have never once heard the least faint whisper of water
+in it, and if I had been a nice, simple savage, I dare say I should have
+prayed to it. Instead of which, when one night I saw a star over the
+housetop I merely shrugged my shoulders. My mind was so rancid I hated
+it. I was so shut in; that's what it was."
+
+He stroked the little, thick-coated horse with the lash of his whip, and
+smiled round at me.
+
+On I went. Shouldn't life be a High Road, didn't he think; surely not a
+hot, silly zigzag of short cuts leading back to the place you started
+from, and you too old or stupid, perhaps, to begin again? Didn't he
+hunger, too, to see the _great_ things of the world, the ruins of
+Babylon, the Wall of China, the Himalayas, and the Pyramids--at
+night--black; and sand?
+
+"My ghost!" said I, had he ever thought of the enormous solitudes of
+the Sahara, or those remote places where gigantic images stare blindly
+through the centuries at the stars--their builders just a pinch of dust?
+Some day, I promised him out of the abandonment of my heart, we would
+sail away, he and I, to his Pygmy Land. Surf and snow and singing
+sand-dunes, and fruits on the trees and birds in the air: we would
+live--"Oh, happy as all this!" (and I swept my hands across hill and
+dale), "ever, ever afterwards. As they do, Mr Anon, in those absurd,
+incredible fairy-tales, you know."
+
+He smiled again, cast a look into the distance, touched my hand.
+
+Perhaps he was wishing the while that that piercing, pining voice of
+mine would keep silence, so that my presence might not disturb his own
+brooding thoughts. I could only guess at pleasing him. Yet I felt, still
+feel, that he was glad of my company and never for a moment sorry we had
+met.
+
+
+
+
+Chapter Fifty-One
+
+
+But our brief hour was drawing to an end. We were now passing little
+groups of country people and children in the quiet evening. We ourselves
+talked no more. The old pony plodded up yet another hill; we went
+clattering down its deep descent; and there, in the green bowl of a
+meadow sloping down from its woody fringes above, lay scattered the
+bellying booths, the gaudy wagons and cages of the circus. All but
+hidden in the trees above them, a crooked, tarnished weather-cock
+glinted in the sunset afterglow. Lights twinkled against the dying
+daylight. The bright-painted merry-go-round with its staring,
+motionless, galloping horses was bathed in the shine of its flares, a
+thin plume of steam softly ascending from its brass-rimmed funnel.
+
+A knot of country boys, gabbling at one another like starlings, shrilled
+a cheer as we came rattling over a stone bridge beneath which a stream
+shallowly washed its bank of osiers. I laughed at them, waved my hand.
+At this they yelled, danced in the road, threw dust into the air. Not,
+perhaps, a very friendly return; but how happy I was, all anxiety and
+responsibility gone now.
+
+The faint, rank smell of the wild beasts mingling with the evening air,
+was instilling its intoxication in my brain. I longed for darkness, the
+din and glare; longed for my tent and the gaping faces, for the smoky
+wind to fan my cheek as I bobbed cantering round the ring. It must have
+been a ridiculously childish face that ever and again scrutinized my
+companion's. Nothing for me in _that_ looking-glass! How slow a face his
+was; he was refusing to look at me. It dismayed and fretted me to find
+him so sombre and dour.
+
+His glance shifted to and fro under a frown that expressed a restless
+anxiety. His silence seemed to reproach me. Oh, well, when the day was
+over, and Mademoiselle's finery packed up in its bundle again, and the
+paint washed off, and the last echo of applause from the crowded
+benches had died away, and my pay was safe in my pocket, then he would
+know that the stake I had played for had been my freedom, my very self.
+Then surely his heart would lighten, and he would praise me, and we
+could go in peace. Would he not realize, too, that even my small body
+had its value, and was admired in a dismal world that cared not a jot
+for the spirit that inhabited it?
+
+The showman stood by the tent, a gaudy silk scarf knotted round his
+neck. My lean-breasted gipsy woman spangled there beside him, with her
+black hair looped round her narrow bony head, and her loose, dusty,
+puckered boots showing beneath her skirts. There was a clear lustre in
+the lamp-starred air; and the spectacle of man and woman, of resting
+wheel and cropping horse, meadow and hill, poured a livelong blessing
+into my heart. Even the cowed, enfeebled lion with the mange of age and
+captivity in his skin, seemed to drowse content, and the satin-skinned
+leopards--almost within pat of paw of the flaxen-haired girl in the
+white stockings who leaned idly against the wheel--paced their den as if
+in pride. It was the same old story: my heart could not contain it all.
+Yet to whom tell its secrets?
+
+A roomier tent had been prepared for me. We were ushered into it by the
+showman with a mock obeisance that swelled the veins on his forehead
+almost to bursting. The gipsy's birdlike eyes pierced and darted from
+one to the other of us, her skinny hand concealing her mouth. I felt as
+light as a feather, and thankful that my mud-caked shoes and petticoats
+were hardly discernible as none too elegantly I scrambled down from the
+cart.
+
+The showman watched me with that sly, covetous grin about his mouth that
+I knew so well, though the stare with which he had greeted Mr Anon had
+been more insolent than friendly. I had cut the time rather close, he
+told me, but better late than never! As for that long-nosed rat with the
+cage, he hadn't been much smitten with the looks of him; and he was not
+the man to ask questions of a lady, not he. Here I was, and he hoped I
+had come for good. A rough life but a merry. Up with the lark until down
+under the daisies; and every man jack of them ready to kiss the ground I
+walked on. And the Fat Woman--just pining good money away she was, with
+longing to mother the little stranger!
+
+I nodded my head at him with a smile as worldly-wise as I could make
+it. "It's the last taste that counts, Mr Showman," I said politely.
+"Every one has been exceedingly kind to me; and my love, please, to the
+Fat Woman. This is my friend, Mr Anon. He has come to take care of me.
+We shall go back--go on together."
+
+The showman broke into a laugh, but his face hardened again, as,
+grinding one jaw slowly on the other, he turned to Mr Anon. Maybe "the
+young gentleman" was anxious to enjoy a taste of the life on his own
+account, he asked me. Could he ride? A bit of steeplechasing? There was
+plenty of horseflesh--a double turn: Beauty and the Beast, now? Or
+perhaps another Spotted Boy? Love or money; just name the figure. Treat
+him fair and square, and he wouldn't refuse a genuine offer; though,
+naturally, every inch made a difference, and a foot twelve times as
+much. And looks were looks.
+
+There was little enough to enjoy in the sound of all this. Apparently
+the mere sight of Mr Anon had soured the showman. Many of his words were
+Greek to me, and to judge from the woman's yelps of laughter their
+meaning was none of the daintiest. I shrugged my shoulders, smiled,
+spread out my hands, and with a word or two fenced him off, pretending
+to be flattered. He looked at the woman as if to say, There's manners
+for you! She made a sudden, ferocious grimace. We were a singular four
+in the tent.
+
+But it would be false to profess that I hadn't a sneaking admiration for
+the man; and I kept glancing uneasily at the "young gentleman" who was
+so blackly ignoring his advances. To say the least of it, it was a
+little unintelligent of Mr Anon not to take things as they came, if only
+for my sake.
+
+"But you must please try and help me a little," I pleaded, when the
+showman and the gipsy had left us to ourselves for a moment. "It's only
+his fun. He's really not a bad sort of man underneath. You can't say
+there's a Spirit of Evil in that great hulking creature, now can you? I
+am not the least bit afraid of him."
+
+He glanced at me without turning his head. Involuntarily I sighed.
+Things never were so easy as one supposed or hoped they would be.
+
+Already my fingers were busy at the knots of my bundle, and for a while,
+simply because what Mr Anon was saying was so monstrous and incredible,
+I continued to fumble at them without attempting to answer him. He was
+forbidding me to keep my word; forbidding me to show myself; just
+ordering me to come away. No, no; he must be crazy; I had never
+understood him. There must be some old worm in his mind. He was telling
+me in so many words that to lie a prey to the mob's curiosity had been a
+disgrace--soiling me for ever.
+
+
+The cruel stupidity of it! With head bent low and burning cheek I heard
+his harsh voice knell on and on--not persuading or conciliating, or
+pleading with me--I could have forgiven him that easily enough; but
+flatly commanding me to listen and obey.
+
+"For mercy's sake," I broke in hurriedly at last, "that's enough of
+that. If just sitting here and talking to one's fellow-creatures has
+smeared me over, as you say it has, why, I must wait till Jordan to be
+clean. You should have seen that great wallowing sow this evening. _She_
+wasn't ashamed of herself. Can't you understand that I simply had to get
+free? You'd see it was for your sake, too, perhaps, if you had had the
+patience to listen. But there; never mind. I understand. You can't
+endure my company any longer. That's what it means. Well, then, if that
+is so, there's no help for it. You must just go. And I must be alone
+again."
+
+But no: there was a difference, he stubbornly maintained. What was done,
+was done. He was not speaking of the past. I knew nothing about the
+world. It was my very innocence that had kept me safe; "and--well, the
+courage." My innocence! and the "courage" thrown in! But couldn't I,
+wouldn't I _see_? he argued. The need was over now; he was with me;
+there was nothing to be afraid of; he would protect me. "Surely--oh, you
+know in your heart you couldn't have enjoyed all that!"
+
+"Oh," said I poisonously, "so you don't think that to cheat the
+blackguard, as you call him, at the last moment--and please don't
+suppose I have forgotten what you have called other friends of mine--you
+don't think that to break every promise I have made wouldn't be
+wallowing worse than---- Oh, thank you for the _wallowing_, I shall
+remember that."
+
+"But, my dear, my dear," he began, "I never--"
+
+"I say I am _not_ your dear," I broke in furiously. "One moment you
+dictate to me as if I were a child, and the next---- As if I hadn't
+been used to that pretence, that wheedling all my life long. As if I had
+ever been treated like an ordinary human being--coddled up, smuggled
+about, whispered at! Why, a scullery maid's is Paradise compared with
+the life _I've_ led. And as for the vile mob and the rest of it, I tell
+you I've enjoyed every minute of them. I _make_ them clap their great
+ugly hands: I _make_ them ashamed of themselves; they can't help
+themselves; they just---- And I've comforted some of them too. What's
+more, I tell you I love them. They are my own people; and I'd die for
+them if they would only forget what's between us and--and share it all.
+You be careful; maybe I shall stay here for good. _They_ don't wince at
+my company; _they_ don't come creeping and crawling. Why! aren't we all
+on show? Who set the world spinning? I tell you I hate that--that
+hypocrisy. What does it amount to, pray, but that you'd like the pretty,
+simpering doll all to yourself?"
+
+A hooting screech broke the quiet that followed. The merry-go-round had
+set to its evening's labours. Faster and faster jangled the pipes and
+chiming:--
+
+
+     "I dreampt that I dwe-elt in mar-ar-ble halls,
+     With vassals and serfs by my si-i-ide...."
+
+
+And at the sound, anger and pride died down in me. I lifted my face from
+the ground.
+
+"I'm sorry," I muttered. "But you don't know what I have gone through
+these last weeks. And even if I were a hundred times as ashamed of
+myself as you think I ought to be, I couldn't--I can't go back. I have
+promised. It's written down. Only once more--this one night, and I swear
+it shall be the last." My mouth crooked itself into a smile. "You shall
+pray for me on the hill," I said, "then lead me off to a Nunnery
+yourself."
+
+And still I could not whisper--Money. The word stuck in my throat.
+
+He seemed not to have heard the miserable things I had been saying.
+Without a syllable of retaliation, he came a little nearer, and stood
+over me. We were all but in darkness now, though lights were beating on
+the canvas of our tent. It was quite, quite simple, he said. The showman
+was no fool. He couldn't compel me to exhibit myself against my will. A
+contract was a contract, of course, but what if both parties to it
+agreed to break it? And supposing the showman refused to agree--what
+then? There was a far better plan, if only I would listen. As soon as
+he had been made to realize that nothing on earth could persuade me to
+show myself again, he would accept any alternative: "I'll take your
+place," smiled Mr Anon.
+
+Take my place!
+
+So this was the plan he had been brooding over on our journey. No wonder
+he had been absent-minded. Cold with dread I gazed at him in the
+obscurity of the tent. A glimpse of Adam's rabbit face as he had stood
+brazening out his fears of the showman on that first night of adventure
+had darted through my mind. And this man--dwarfed, shrunken, emaciated.
+
+A terrifying compassion gushed up into my heart, breaking down barriers
+that I never knew were there. It was the instant in my life, I think,
+when I came nearest to being a mother.
+
+"S-sh," I implored him. "You don't understand. You can have no notion of
+what you are saying. I am a woman. They daren't harm me. But you!
+They--and besides," the craftier argument floated into my mind,
+"besides, Mrs Monnerie...."
+
+But the sentence remained unfinished. The flap of the tent had lifted.
+The figure of the showman loomed up in the entry against the lights and
+the darkening sky. He was in excellent humour. He rattled the money in
+his pocket and breathed the smell of whisky into the tent, peering into
+it as if he were uncertain whether it was occupied or not.
+
+"That's right, then," he began huskily, "that's as it should be. Ten
+minutes, your ladyship! And maybe the young gentleman would give a hand
+with the drum outside, while you get through with the titivating."
+
+His shape was only vaguely discernible as he stood gently rocking there.
+It was Mr Anon who answered him. For a little while the showman seemed
+to be too much astounded to reply. Then he lost control of himself. A
+torrent of imprecations spouted out of his mouth. He threatened to call
+in the police, the mob. He shook his brass-ringed whip in our faces. I
+had never seen a man of his kind really angry before. He looked like a
+beast, like the Apollyon straddling the path in my _Pilgrim's Progress_.
+His roaring all but stunned me, swept over me, as if I were nothing--a
+leaf in the wind. I think I could have listened to him all but in mere
+curiosity--as to an equinoctial gale when one is safe in bed--if he had
+not been so near, and the tent so small and gloomy, and if Mr Anon had
+not been standing in silence within reach of his hands. But his fury
+spent itself at last. Slowly his head turned on his heavy shoulders. He
+seemed suddenly to have forgotten his rage and became coaxing and
+conciliatory. He had a sounding, calf-like voice, and it rose up and
+down. An eavesdropper outside the tent would have supposed he was on the
+verge of tears.
+
+He was sure the young lady had no intention of cheating him, of "doing
+the dirty." Why he'd as lief send off there and then to the great house
+for the flunkey and the cage. What had I to complain of? Wasn't it
+private enough? Should he make it a level bob-a-nob, and no thruppenies?
+There was nothing to be afraid of. "God bless you, sir, she wouldn't
+cheat an honest man, not she."
+
+People were swarming into the Fair from miles around, and real gentry in
+their carriages amongst them, like as had never been seen before. Did we
+want to ruin him? What should we think now, if we had paid down good
+money to come and see the neatest little piece of female shape as ever
+God Almighty smuggled out of heaven; and in we went, and stuck up there
+was a gent.--"a nice-spoken, respectable gent," he agreed, with a
+contemptuous heave of his massive shoulders, "but a gent no less, and
+him gowked up on the table, there, why, half as big again, and mouthing,
+mouthing like a...?" The hideous words poured on.
+
+His great body gently rocked above me; his thumbs hooked-in under his
+armpits, his whip dangling. Till that moment I had scarcely realized
+that the scene in which I sat was real, I had been so harassed and
+stupefied by his noise. But now he had begun to think of what he was
+saying. In those last words an unnameable insult lurked. He was looking
+at us, _seeing_ us, approaching us as if in a dream.
+
+A horror of the spirit came over me, and, as if rapt away from myself, I
+stared sheer up at him.
+
+"Beware, my friend," I cried up at him. "Have a care. I see a rope
+around your neck."
+
+It was the truth. In the gloom, actually with my own eyes, I saw a noose
+loosely dangling there over his round, heavy shoulders.
+
+So to this day I see my showman. His circus, I believe, continues to
+roam the English country-side, and by the mercy of heaven he will die
+in his bed, or, better still, in the bracken. But I suppose, like most
+of us, he was a slave to his own superstitions, or perhaps it was my
+very littleness, combined with the memory of some old story he had heard
+as a boy, that intimidated him. His mouth opened; his whip shook; the
+grin of a wild beast swept over his face. But he said no more.
+
+Yet his, none the less, was half the victory. Nothing on earth could now
+have dissuaded me from keeping my bargain. His words had bitterly
+frightened me. No one else should be "gowked" up there. I turned my back
+on him. He could go; I was ready.
+
+But if I could be obstinate, so too could Mr Anon. And when at last our
+argument was over, I in sheer weariness had agreed to a compromise. It
+was that I should show myself; and he take my place in the circus. The
+showman's money was safe; that was all _he_ cared about. If "Humpty"
+liked to petticoat himself up like a doxy and take my "turn" in the
+ring--why, it was a rank smelling robbery, but let him--let him. He
+bawled for the woman, flung a last curse at us, and withdrew.
+
+We were alone--only the vacancy of the tent between us. Beyond the
+narrow slit I could see the merry jostling crowds, hoydens and
+hobbledehoys, with their penny squirts and pasteboard noses and tin
+trumpets. A strange luminousness bathed their faces and clothes,
+beautifying them with light and shadow, carpeting with its soft radiance
+the rough grey-green grass. The harvest moon was brightening. I went
+near to him and touched his sleeve. His lips contracted, his shoulder
+drew in from my touch.
+
+"Listen," I pleaded. "One hour--that is all. That evening in
+Wanderslore--do you remember? All my troubles over. Yes, I know. I have
+brought you to this. But then we can talk. Then you shall forgive me."
+
+He stretched out his hand. A shuffling step, a light were approaching. I
+fled back, snatched up my bundle, and climbed up into the darkness
+behind my canvas curtain. The next moment gigantic shadows rushed
+furiously into hiding, the tent was swamped with the flaring of the
+naphtha-lamp which the gipsy-woman had come to hang to the tent-pole to
+light my last seance.
+
+A few hasty minutes, and, stealing out, I bade Mr Anon look. All
+Angelique's fair hair had been tied into a bob and draped
+mantilla-fashion with a thick black veil. A black, coarse fringe torn
+from the head of a doll which I had found in the bottom of my trunk,
+dangled over her forehead. Her eyebrows were angled up like a
+Chinaman's. Her cheeks were chalk-white, except for a dab of red on the
+bone, and she was dressed in a flounced gown, jet black and yellow,
+which I had cobbled up overnight and had padded out, bust, hips, and
+shoulders to nearly double my natural size. A spreading topaz brooch was
+on her breast, chains of beads and coral dangled to her waist, and a
+silk fan lay on her arm.
+
+I swept him a curtsey. "I dreamt that I dwe-elt in mar-arble halls," I
+piped out in a quavering falsetto. The folly of taking things so
+solemnly. What was humanity but a dressed-up ape? Had not my fair saint,
+Isobel de Flores, painted her cheeks, and garlanded her hair? And all
+his answer was to clench his teeth. He turned away with a shudder.
+
+The drum reverberated, the panpipes squealed. I signed to him to hide
+himself in the recess among my discarded clothes, out of sight of
+peeping eyes, and arranged my person on the satin and rabbit-skins.
+
+The tent flap lifted and the mob pressed in. Stretching out in a queue
+like a serpent, I caught a glimpse in the pale saffron moonlight of the
+crowd beyond. The sixpences danced in the tray. Once more the flap
+descended; my audience stilled. I looked from one to the other, smiling,
+defiant.
+
+"Why, Bob said she was a pale, pinched-up snippet of a thing with golden
+hair," whispered a slip of a girl to a smooth little woman at her side.
+
+"Ay, my Goff! And a waist like a wedding-ring," responded a wide mouth
+in a large red face, peering over.
+
+"Ah, lady," warbled the Signorina, "fair to-day and foul to-morrow.
+'Believe what you are told,' clanked the bell in the churchyard.
+Stuffing, my pretty; ask the goose!"
+
+So went the Signorina's last little orgy. It would be a lie to profess
+that she, or rather some black hidden ghost in her, did not enjoy it. My
+monstrous disguise, that ferment of humanity, those owlish faces, the
+lurking shame, the danger, the poisonous excitement swept me clean out
+of myself. Anything to be free for a while from "pernickety" Miss M. But
+that, I suppose, is the experience of every gambler and wastrel and
+jezebel in the world, every one of his kind. One must not open the door
+too wide.
+
+But this was not all. On other nights I had been alone. Now I was
+fervidly conscious of unseen, hungering eyes, watching every turn, and
+glance, and gesture. My dingy dais was no longer in actuality. I lived
+in that one watcher's mind--in his imagination. And deep beneath this
+insane excitement lay a gentle, longing happiness. Oh, when this vile
+tinsel show was over, and these swarming faces had melted into thin air,
+and the moonlit empty night was ours, what would I not pour out for his
+peace and comfort. What gratitude and tenderness for all that he had
+been to me, and done, and said. Why, we seemed never even to have spoken
+to each other--not self to self, and there was all the world to tell.
+
+Hotter, ranker grew the fetid atmosphere. I could scarcely breathe in my
+monstrous mummery. But clearly, the showman was making a rich bargain of
+me, and rumour of a Midget that was golden as Aphrodite one night, and
+black as pitch the next, only thickened the swarm. At length--long
+expected--there came a pause. Yet another country urchin flat on his
+stomach in the grass, with head goggling up at me from the hem of the
+canvas, was dragged out, screeching and laughing, by his breeches. But I
+had caught the accents of a well-known voice, and, crouching, with head
+wrenched aside to listen, I heard the gipsy's whining reply.
+
+My moment had come. A pulse began its tattoo in my head. To remain
+helplessly lying there was impossible. I thrust myself on to my feet
+and, drawing back a pace or two, stood hunched up on the crimson spread
+of satin beside my wooden bolster. The canvas lifted, and one by one,
+the little party of "gentry" stooped and filed in.
+
+
+
+
+Chapter Fifty-Two
+
+
+Mrs Monnerie had paid for elbow room. It was the last "Private View" in
+this world we were to share together. The sight of her capacious figure
+with its great bonnet and the broad, dark face beneath, now suddenly
+become strange and hostile, filled me with a vague sense of desolation.
+Yet I know she has forgiven me. Had I not pocketed my "pretty little
+fastidiousness"?
+
+What Fanny had planned to do if Miss M., plain and simple, had occupied
+the Signorina's table I cannot even guess. For the spectacle of the
+squat, black, gloating guy she actually found there, she was utterly
+unprepared. It seemed, as I looked at her, that myself had fainted--had
+withdrawn out of my body--like the spirit in sleep. Or, maybe, not to be
+too nice about it, I merely "became" my disguise. With mind emptied of
+every thought, I sank into an almost lifeless stagnancy, and with a
+heavy settled stare out of my black and yellow, from under the coarse
+fringe that brushed my brows, I met her eyes. Out of time and place, in
+a lightless, vacant solitude, we wrestled for mastery. At length the
+sneering, incredulous smile slowly faded from the pale, lovely face,
+leaving it twisted up as if after a nauseous draught of physic. Her gaze
+faltered, and fell. Her bosom rose; she coughed and turned away.
+
+"Hideous! monstrous!" murmured Mrs Monnerie to the tall, expressionless
+figure that stood beside her. "The abject evil of the creature!"
+
+Her dark, appraising glance travelled over me--feet, hands, body,
+lace-draped head. It swept across my eyes as if they were less
+significant than bits of china stuck in a cocoanut.
+
+"No, Miss Bowater," she turned massively round on her, "you were
+perfectly right, it seems. As usual--but a dangerous habit, my dear. My
+little ransoming scheme must wait a bit. Just as well, perhaps, that our
+patient's dainty nerves should have been spared this particular little
+initiation----. Could one have imagined it?"
+
+Mr Padgwick-Steggall merely raised his eyebrows. "I shouldn't have cared
+to try," he drawled. And the lady beside him made a little mouth and
+laid her gloved hand on his arm.
+
+"But, Madame is forgetting," whined the Signorina in a broken nosy
+English over her outspread fan, "Madame is forgetting. It's alive! Oh,
+truly!" and I clasped my arms even tighter across my padded chest, my
+body involuntarily rocking to and fro, though not with amusement.
+
+"Madame is forgetting nothing of the kind," retorted Mrs Monnerie
+heartily. "The princess is an angel--Angelique--adorable." She turned to
+the gipsy woman and slipped a coin into the claw-like fingers. "Well,
+good-night," she nodded at me. "We are perfectly satisfied."
+
+"La, la, Madame," my stuttering voice called after her, the words
+leaping out from some old hiding-place in my mind. "_Je vous remercie,
+madame. Rien ne va plus.... Noir gagne!_"
+
+Her ebony stick shook beneath her hand. "Unspeakable," she angrily
+ejaculated, stumping her way out. "A positive outrage against humanity."
+
+I shut my eyes, but the silent laughter that had once overtaken me in my
+bedroom at Mrs Bowater's scarcely sounded in my head. And Mrs Monnerie
+could more easily survive the little exchange than I. My body was dull
+and aching as if after a severe fall. The booth was filling for the last
+time.
+
+Little life was left in the inert figure that faced this new assortment
+of her fellow-creatures: how strangely dissimilar one from another; how
+horrifyingly alike. A faint premonition bade me be on my guard. Under
+the wavering flame of the lamp, my glance moved slowly on from face to
+face, eye on to eye; and behind every one a watcher whom now I dared not
+wait to challenge. Empty or cynical, disgusted, malevolent, or blankly
+curious, they met me: none pitiful; none saddened or afflicted. On
+former nights---- Why had they grown so hostile? This, then, was to
+smother in the bog.
+
+But one face there was known to me, and that known well. Hoping,
+perhaps, to take me unaware, or may it have been to snatch a secret word
+with me; Fanny had slipped back into the tent again, and was now
+steadily regarding me from behind the throng. A throng so densely packed
+together that the canvas walls bulged behind them, and the tent-pole
+bent beneath the strain. Yet so much alone were she and I in that last
+infinite moment that we might have been whispering together after death.
+And this time, suddenly overwhelmed with self-loathing, it was I who
+turned away.
+
+When, stretching my cramped limbs, I drew back, exhausted and shivering,
+from the empty tent, I thought for an instant that the figure which sat
+crouching in the corner of the recess was asleep. But no: with head
+averted, sweat gleaming on his forehead, he rose to his feet. His
+consciousness had been my theatre in a degree past even my realization.
+
+"Then, that is over," was all he said. "Now it is my turn."
+
+The voice was flat and indifferent, but he could not conceal his disgust
+of what had passed, nor his dread of what was to come. Why, I thought
+angrily once more as I looked at him, why did he exaggerate things like
+this? Even a drowning man can sink three times, and still cheat the
+water. What cared I?--the night was nearly over. We should have won
+release. Why consider it so deeply? But even while I pleaded with him to
+let me finish the wretched business--every savour of adventure and
+daring and romance gone from it now--I was conscious of the trussed-up
+monstrosity that confronted him. He could not endure even a glance at my
+painted face. I stepped back from him with a hidden grimace. Past even
+praying for, then. So be it.
+
+I heard the nimble stepping of the pony's hoofs on the worn turf. A
+sullen malice smouldered in its reddish, luminous eyes. When I clutched
+at its bridle it jerked back its sensitive head as if teased with a
+gadfly. The gipsy daubed vermilion on my friend's sallow cheeks. She
+shook out the tarnished finery she had brought with her and hung it
+round the stooping shoulders. She plastered down his black hair above
+his eyes, and thrust a riding-whip into his hand.
+
+"There, my fine pretty gentleman," she smirked at him. "King of the
+Carrots! I lay even your own mammie wouldn't know you now, not even if
+you tried it straddle-legs. Tug at the knot, lovey; it's fast, but it
+won't strangle you. As for you, you----!" she suddenly flamed at me,
+"all very fly and cunning, but if I'd had the fixing of it, you
+wouldn't have diddled me: not you. I know _your_ shop. Slick off double
+quick, I warn you, or you'll have the mob at your heels. Now then,
+master!"
+
+She grasped at the bridle, slapped the tooth-bared sensitive muzzle with
+her hand. I drew back, cowed and speechless. The sour thought died in my
+mind--Better, perhaps, if we had missed each other on the road. The pony
+jerked and snatched back its head.
+
+
+He was gone, and now I was quite alone. What was there to fear? Only his
+contempt, his loathing of this last humiliation? But that, too, would
+soon be nothing but a memory. As always, the present would glide into
+the past. Yet a dreadful foreboding daunted me. Coarse canvas, walls and
+roof, table, beaten grass, my very hands and clothes had become menacing
+and unreal. The lamp hissed and bubbled as if at any moment it would
+burst asunder. Alone, afraid, ashamed, in the foulness of the tent, I
+looked around me in the silence; and beyond, above--the Universe of
+night and space. All my life but the feeble rustlings of a mouse in
+straw.
+
+As I stripped off my miserable gewgaws I discovered myself talking into
+my solitude; weeping, beseeching, though eyes were dry and tongue
+silent. I scoured away the chalk and paint: and cleansed as far as
+possible my travel-stained clothes. From my bit of looking-glass a
+scared and shining face looked out. "Oh, my dear," I whispered, but not
+to its reflection, "it is as clean now and for ever as I can make it." I
+tied up my bundle.
+
+It was impossible to cheat away the moments any longer. I sat down and
+listened. A distant roar of welcome, like that of a wave breaking over a
+wreck, had been borne across as the band broke into its welcoming tune.
+I saw the ring, its tall, lank-cheeked "master" in his white shirt and
+coat-tails, the lights, the sidling, squalling clown, and the slim,
+exquisite creature with its ungainly rider ambling on and on. Where sat
+Fanny amidst that rabble? What were her thoughts? Was Mrs Monnerie
+already yawning over the low, beggarly scene? A few minutes now. I began
+to count. A scream, human or animal, rose faint and awful in the
+distance, and died away.
+
+I climbed down the ladder and looked out of the tent. Far-spread the
+fields and wooded hills lay, as if in a swoon beneath the blazing
+moonlight. The scattered lamps on the slope shone dim as glow-worms.
+Only a few figures loitered in the gleam of the side-shows, and so
+engrossed and still sat the watching multitude beneath the enormous
+mushroom of the tent, so thinly floated out its strains of music, that
+the hollow clucking of the stream over its pebbles beneath the
+wan-stoned bridge was audible. A few isolated stars glittered faintly in
+the heights of the sky. What was happening now? Why did he not hasten? I
+was ready: my life prepared. I could bear no more waiting. A whip
+cracked. The music ceased: silence. One moment now.
+
+Again the whip cracked. And then, as if at a signal, a vast, protracted,
+unanimous bawl poured up into space, a spout of sound, like a gigantic,
+invisible flower. "That wasn't applause. But, you know, that wasn't
+applause," I heard myself muttering. There can be no mistaking the sound
+of human mockery. There can be no mistaking that brutal wrench at the
+heart, under one's very ribs. I leapt round where I stood, in a kind of
+giddiness.
+
+The shout died away. An indiscriminate clamour broke out--clapping of
+hands, beating of feet, whistling, hootings, booings, catcalls, and
+these all but drowned by cymbal, drum, trombone: "Good-bye, Sweetheart,
+Good-bye." It was over. Unlike Mrs Monnerie, the mob was imperfectly
+satisfied. But all was well. The elephant, massive, imperturbable--the
+sagacious elephant with the hurdy-gurdy, must now be swinging into the
+ring.
+
+I ran out over the trampled grass to meet the approaching
+group--showman, gipsy, trembling, sweating pony. Its rider stooped
+forward on the saddle, clutching its pommel, as if afraid of falling. He
+pushed himself off, lurched unsteadily, lifted and let fall his arm in
+an attempt to stroke the milk-white snapping muzzle. The strings of his
+cloak were already broken. He edged from beneath it, and with his left
+hand clumsily brushed the dust and damp from his face.
+
+"He hadn't quite the knack of it," the showman was explaining. "Stirrup
+a morsel too short, maybe. All the strength, lady, and the ginger, by
+God, but not the knack, you understand. And we offered him a quieter
+little animal too. But what I say is, a bargain's a bargain, that's what
+I say. A bit dazed-like, sir, eh? My, you did come a cropper."
+
+"Sst! are you hurt?" I whispered.
+
+The head shook; his moon-washed face smiled at me.
+
+"Come now, come _now_," I implored him, tugging at his arm, "before the
+crowd...."
+
+He recoiled as if my touch had scalded him.
+
+"We go----" I turned to the showman.
+
+Hands thrust under his leathern belt, he looked fixedly at me, and then
+at the woman. Her eyes glittered glassily back at him.
+
+"That's it. The young lady knows best. He's twisted his shoulder, lady;
+wrenched it; more weight than size, as you might say. She'll know where
+to make her friend comfortable. Trust the ladies. Never you be afraid of
+that. Now, then, Mary, fetch up the gentleman's cart."
+
+The woman, with one wolfish glance into his face, obeyed.
+
+"There, sir! Is that easier? Push the rags in there behind his back.
+It'll save the jolts. Lord love you, I wouldn't split on the pair of
+you, not me. I know the old, old story. There, that's it! Now, then,
+your ladyship. No more weight in the hand than a mushroom! All serene,
+Mary. Home sweet home; that's the tune, sir, ain't it? Drive easy now:
+and off we go."
+
+
+
+
+Chapter Fifty-Three
+
+
+Noiselessly turned the wheels in the grass. We were descending the hill.
+A jolt, and we were in the road. A hedgerow shut us out from the two
+shrouded watchers by the tent. The braying music fainted away; and apart
+from the trotting hoofs and the grinding of the wheels in the dust, the
+only sound I heard was an occasional lofty crackle in space, as a
+rocket--our last greeting from the circus--stooping on its fiery course,
+strewed its coloured stars into the moonlight. Then the rearing
+hill-side shut us out.
+
+Speechlessly, from the floor of the cart, I watched the stooping figure
+above me. Ever and again, at any sudden lurch against a stone, he shrank
+down, then slowly lifted himself, turned his head and smiled.
+
+"That's the tune, sir; that's the tune, sir." The words aimlessly
+repeated themselves in my brain, as if bringing me a message I could not
+grasp or understand. "What was I thinking about?" a voice kept asking
+me. A strange, sluggish look dwelt in the dilated pupils under the
+drooping lids when the moonbeams struck in on us from between the
+branches. His right hand hung loosely down. I clasped it--stone-cold.
+
+"Listen, tell me," I entreated, "you fell? I heard them calling,
+and--and the clapping, what then?" I could speak no louder, but he
+seemed scarcely able to hear me.
+
+"My shoulder," he answered thickly, as if the words came sluggishly and
+were half-strange to him. "I fell.... Nothing: nothing. Only that I love
+you."
+
+The breath sighed itself away. I leaned my cheek against the unanswering
+hand, and chafed it with mine. Where now? Where now?
+
+"We must keep awake," I called beguilingly into the slumbrous face,
+after a long silence, as if to a child. "Awake!"
+
+A sigh, as he smiled in answer, shook him from head to foot.
+
+"You are thirsty? What's this on your coat? Look, there is a gate. I'll
+creep through and get help." I scrambled up, endeavouring in vain to
+clutch at the reins.
+
+But no; his head stirred its No; the left hand still held them fast.
+"Only ... wait."
+
+_Was_ it "wait"--that last faint word? It fell into my mind like a leaf
+into a torrent, and before I could be sure of it, the sound was gone.
+
+Instinct, neither his nor mine, guided us on through the winding lanes,
+up hill and down, along the margin of sleeping wood and light-dappled
+stream, over a level crossing whose dew-rusted rails gleamed in the
+moon, then up once more, the retreating hill-side hollowly echoing to
+every clap of hoof against stone. There was no strength or will left in
+me, only thoughts which in the dark within, between waking and sleeping,
+seemed like hovering flies to veer and dart--fantasies, fragments of
+dream, rather than thoughts.
+
+I realized how sorely he was hurt, yet not then in my stupidity and
+horror--or is it that I refused to confess it to myself?--that his hurt
+was mortal. Morning would come soon. I grasped tight the hand in mine.
+Then help. In this monotony and weariness of mind and body, the passing
+trees seemed to dance and gesticulate before my eyes. A torturing
+drowsiness crept over me which in vain, thrusting up my eyelids with my
+fingers, beating my senseless feet on the floor of the cart, I tried to
+dispel. Once, I remember, I rose and threw my cape over his shoulder. At
+last I must have slept.
+
+For the next thing I became conscious of was that the cart was at a
+standstill, and that the pony stood cropping the thyme-sweet turf by the
+wayside. I touched the cold dark hand. "Hush, my dear, we are here!"
+
+But I expected no answer. The head was sunken between the heavy
+shoulders; the pallid features were set in an empty stare. There wasn't
+a sound in the whole world, far or near. "Oh, but you haven't said a
+single word to me!" It was the only speech in my mind--a reproach. It
+died on my lips; I drew away. What was this?--a dreadful fear plucked at
+my sleeve, fear of the company I was in, of a solitude never so much as
+tasted before. I leapt out of the cart, stood up in the dust, and in the
+creeping light stared about me.
+
+Every window of the creeper-hung cottage was shrouded, its gate
+latched. I struggled to climb the fence, to fling a stone through the
+casement. The moon shone glassily in the cold skies, but daybreak was in
+the east; I must wait till morning. With eyes fixed on the motionless
+head I sat down in the grass by the wayside. Ever and again, after
+solemnly turning to survey me, the pony dragged the cart on a foot or
+two under the willows, nibbling the dewy grass.
+
+Roused suddenly from stupor by the howling of a dog, I leapt up. Who
+called? Where was I? What had I forgotten? In renewed and dreadful
+recognition I looked vacantly around me. A strangeness had come. His
+company was mine no longer.
+
+Dawn brightened. The voice of a thrush pealed out of the orchard beyond
+the stone wall--wild and sweet as in Spring. I crouched on the ground,
+elbows on knees, and now kept steady watch upon those night-hung upper
+windows. At last a curtain was drawn aside. An invisible face within
+must have looked down upon us in the lane. The casement was unlatched
+and thrust open, and a grey, tousled head pushed out as if in alarm into
+the keen morning. At sight of it a violent hiccoughing seized me, so
+that when an old woman appeared at her door and hobbled out to the cart,
+I could not make myself understood. Her sleep-bleared, faded eyes
+surveyed me with horror and suspicion--as if in my smallness there I
+looked scarcely human. She shook her crooked fingers at me, to scare me
+off; then stooping, put her head into the cart. I cried out, and ran----
+
+
+
+
+Chapter Fifty-Four
+
+
+The sun had burned for some hours in the heavens, when bleeding with
+thorns and on fire with nettles and stinking mayweed, I dragged myself
+out of the undergrowth into a low-lying corner of the desolate garden.
+Near by lay a pool of water under an old ruinous wall, swept by the
+foliage of an ash. On a flat, shelving stone at its brink I knelt down,
+bathed my face, and drank.
+
+All that day I spent in the neighbourhood of the water, overhung with
+the colourless trumpets of convolvulus. Occasionally I edged on, but
+only to keep pace with the sunbeams, for I was deathly cold, and as soon
+as shadow drew over me, fits of shivering returned. For some hours I
+slept, but so shallowly that I heard my own voice gabbling in dreams.
+
+When I awoke, the western sky was an ocean of saffron and gold. Amidst
+its haze, stood up the distant clustered chimneys of Wanderslore: and I
+realized I must be in an outlying hollow of the park--farthest from
+Beechwood Hill. I sat up, bound back my hair, and, bathing my swollen
+feet in the dark, ice-cold water, I watched the splendour fade.
+
+While there was still light in the sky I set out for the cottage again,
+but soon found myself in such distress amongst the tangled weeds and
+grasses, which at every movement flung their stifling dust and seeds and
+pollen over me, that I was compelled to give up the attempt. With
+senseless tears dropping down my cheeks, I returned to the pool, and
+made my bed in the withered bracken.
+
+So passed the next days. When once more the cloudless heat of the sun
+had diminished, I made another attempt to press back by the way I had
+come, if only to look up at those windows again. But I was dazed and
+exhausted; lost my way; and, keeping watch until daybreak, I returned
+again to the pool. Sitting there, I tried to control my misery and be
+calm. "Wait, wait; I am coming," was my one inarticulate thought.
+Surely that other solitude must be the easier to bear. But it was in
+vain. He was dead; and I had killed him--pride, vanity, greed,
+obstinacy, lovelessness. Every flower and fading leaf bore witness
+against me.
+
+Now and again I quenched my thirst and rambled off a little way in
+search of a few fallen hazel nuts and blackberries, and attempted to
+ease the pain and distress I was in. But I knew in my heart that a few
+such days must see the last of me, and I had no other desire. Evening
+came with its faint stars. My mind at last seemed to empty itself of
+thought; and until dark fell, a self sat at the windows of my eyes
+gazing heedlessly out over that peace and beauty without consciousness
+even of grief and despair. Nocturnal creatures began to stir in weed and
+thicket; a thin mist to rise. For a while I kept watch until sense left
+me, and I slept.
+
+A waning misshapen moon hung over the garden when I awoke, my mind
+still, clear, empty. So empty that I might but just have re-entered the
+world after the lapse of ages. In this silvery hush of night, winged
+shapes were wheeling around and above me, piercing the air with mad,
+strident cries. With sight strangely sharpened and powerful, I gazed
+tranquilly up, and supposed for a while these birds were swallows. Idly
+I watched them, scarcely conscious whether they were real or creatures
+of the imagination.
+
+Darting, swooping in the mild blaze of the moonlight, with gaping beaks
+and whirring wings, they swept, wavered, tumbled above their motionless
+pastures; ghostly-fluttering, feathery-plumed moths their prey. At last,
+a continuous churring, like the noise of a rattle, near at hand,
+betrayed them. I lay in my solitude in the midst of a whirling flock of
+nightjars, few in number, but beside themselves with joy, on the eve of
+their autumnal flight.
+
+I can only grope my way now through vague and baffling memories. Maybe
+it was the frenzied excitement of these madly happy birds that shed
+itself into my defenceless mind, after rousing me into the night I knew
+too well. With full, vigilant eyes I am standing again a few paces from
+the brink of the pool, looking up into a moonlit bush of deadly
+nightshade, its noxious flowering over, and hung with its black,
+gleaming, cherry-like fruit. I cannot recall having ever given a thought
+to this poisonous plant in Wanderslore during my waking hours, though
+in my old happy reconnoitrings of the garden I had sometimes chanced on
+the coral-red clusters of the woody nightshade--the bittersweet, and had
+afterwards seen it in blossom.
+
+It may be that only a part of my mind was fully awake, while the rest
+dreamed on. Yet, as I strive to return in imagination to that solitary
+hour, I am certain that a complete realization was mine of the power
+distilled into those alluring light-glossed berries; and, slave of my
+drowsy senses, I fixed gaze and appetite on them as though, from
+childhood up, they had been my one greed and desire. Even then, as if
+for proof that they were real, my eyes wandered; recognized, low in the
+west, glaring Altair amid the faint outspread wings of Aquila; pondered
+on the spark-like radiance struck out by the moonbeams from the
+fragments of tile that protruded here and there from the crumbling wall
+beyond the pool; and softly returned once more to the evil bush.
+
+Then, for an instant, I fancied that out of the nearer shadows a
+half-seen form had stolen up close behind me, and was watching me. Fancy
+or not, it caused me no fear. I turned about where I stood, and from
+this gentle eminence scanned the immense autumnal garden with its
+coursing night-birds and distant motionless woods. No; I was alone; by
+my Self; conscious only of an unfathomable quiet; and I stooped and took
+up one of the ripe fruits that had fallen to the ground. "Ah, ah!"
+called a far-away voice within me. "Ah, ah! What are you at now?"--a
+voice like none I had ever heard in the world until that moment. Yet I
+raised the fruit to my lips.
+
+Its bitter juices jetted out upon cheek, mouth, and tongue, for ever
+staining me with their dye. Their very rancour shocked my body wide
+awake. Struck suddenly through with frightful cold and terror, I flung
+the vile thing down, and scoured my mouth with the draggled hem of my
+skirt. "Oh God! oh God!" I cried; then turned, ran a few steps, tripped,
+turned back and cast myself down, crushing my eyes with my hands; and in
+helpless confusion began to pray.
+
+Minutes, hours, passed--I know not. But at last, with throat parched and
+swollen, and hands and cheeks and scalp throbbing with an unnatural
+heat, I raised my eyes. Two moons were in the sky, hideously revolving
+amid interwoven arcs of coloured light, and running backward and
+forward. I called out in the silence. A gigantic nightjar swirled on me,
+plucking at my hair. A maddening vertigo seized me. I went stumbling and
+staggering down to my stone and drenched head and breast in the flashing
+black and silver water.
+
+It was a momentary refreshment, and in its influence memory began
+droning of the past. Confused abhorrent images mocked my helpless
+dreamings. There was a place--beyond--out of these shadows,
+unattainable. A piercing, vindictive voice was calling me. No hope now.
+I was damned. In senseless hallucination I began systematically,
+laboriously, a frenzied search. Leaf, pebble, crawling
+night-creature--with slow, animal-like care, I turned them over one by
+one, seeking and seeking.
+
+
+
+
+Lyndsey
+
+
+
+
+Chapter Fifty-Five and Last
+
+
+And yet again I pause--long after these last words were written--to look
+back across the intervening years at that young woman. What, indeed, was
+her insane mind seeking: what assurance, reconciliation? I know not, but
+there she herself was found, nails worn to the quick, feet shoeless, a
+hunted anatomy. Her fret and fever were to pass away; but what has all
+this experience done for me?--that wildest, happiest, cruellest,
+dearest, blackest twelve-month of my life? One more unanswerable
+question. But, thank God, I live on; have even finished the task I set
+myself; and in spite of fits and moods of depression, distaste, and
+weariness, have been happy in it. Even when most contemptuous and
+ashamed of myself, I have still found comfort in the belief that truth
+is a wholesome medicine, though in essence it be humanly unattainable.
+And my work has taught me this too--not to fret so foolishly as once I
+did, at being small and insignificant in body; to fear a great deal more
+remaining pygmy-minded, and pygmy-spirited. I used to try to set myself
+against the World--but no need to enter further into that. We _cannot_
+see ourselves as others see us, but that is no excuse for not wearing
+spectacles; and even up here, in my peaceful lonely old Stonecote, I
+must beware of a mind swept and garnished. Moreover my hour must come
+again: and his.
+
+That being so, of this I am certain; that it will be impossible to free
+myself, to escape from this world, unless in peace and amity I can take
+every shred of it, every friend and every enemy, all that these eyes
+have seen, these senses discovered with me. I _know_ that. And perhaps
+for that very reason, in spite of the loving gratitude that overcomes me
+at the thought of what my existence might have been, I sometimes dread
+the ease and quiet and seclusion in which I live. And this tale itself?
+As Mrs Monnerie had said, what is it but once more to have drifted into
+being on show again--in a book? That is so; and so I must leave it,
+hoping against hope that one friend at any rate will consent in his love
+and wisdom to take me seriously, and to remember me, not with scorn or
+even with pity, but as if, life for life, we had shared the world on
+equal terms.
+
+M.
+
+
+
+
+
+End of Project Gutenberg's Memoirs of a Midget, by Walter de la Mare
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