Chapter XI: Part 11

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----"