Chapter XII: Part 12

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."