Chapter XIV: Part 14

I put away the envelope and its contents into my box again. And late that night, when I was secure from interruption, I wrote to Wanderslore. Nibbling a pen is no novelty to me, but never in all my life have I spent so blank and hideous an hour merely in the effort to say No to one simple question so that it should sound almost as pleasant as Yes, and far more unselfish. "Throw the stone," indeed; when my only desire was to heal the wound it might make.

Thank goodness my letter was kinder than I felt. My candelabra burned stilly on. Cold, in the blues, I stood in my dressing-gown and spectacling my eyes with my hands, looked out of the chill glass into the London night. Only one high garret window shone out in the dark face of the houses.... Who, where, was Willie Arbuthnot with the peculiar eyes? Had Lord Chiltern a tank on his roof--his back-yard? What a fool I had been to abandon myself and come here. If they only knew how I despised them. And the whole house asleep. So much I despised them that not until I was dressing the following morning did I stoop into my Indian mirror to see if I could discover what Lord Chiltern had meant.

During the next few weeks Mrs Monnerie--with ample provocation--almost yawned at sight of me. In a bitter instant of rebellion our eyes met. She detected the "ill-wish" in mine, and was so much taken aback by it that I should hardly have recognized the set face that glared at me as hers at all. Well, the fancier had wearied of her fancy--that was all. If I had been just an ordinary visitor, she would soon have washed her hands of me. But I was notorious, and not so easily exchanged as bronchitic Cherry had been for her new Pekinese, Plum.

Possibly, too, the kind of aversion she now felt against me was a closer bond than even virtuosity or affection. She would sit with a sullen stare under her heavy eyelids watching me grow more and more heated and clumsy over my scrap of embroidery or my game of Patience. Meanwhile Chakka would crack his nut, and with stagnant eye sidle thievishly up and down the bars of his cage; while Plum gobbled up dainties or snored on his crimson cushion. We three.

Usually I was left pretty much alone; and what plans Mrs Monnerie was turning over to dispose of me were known only to herself. What to do; where to hide; how to "make myself small" during those torpid August days, I hardly knew. My one desire was to keep out of sight. One afternoon, I remember, after brooding for some hours under a dusty lilac bush in the Square garden, I strayed off--my eyes idly glancing from straw to hairpin to dead match in the dust--down a narrow deserted side street that led to a Mews. A string of washing hung in the sunlight from the windows. Skirting a small public house, from which the smell of beer and spirits vapoured into the sunshine, I presently found myself in a black-green churchyard among tombstones.

A clear shadow slanted across the porch, the door of the church stood open, and after pausing for a moment on its flagstones, I went in. It was empty. Stone faces gazed sightlessly from its walls. Two red sanctuary lamps hung like faint rubies in the distant chancel. I dragged out a cushion and sat down under the font. The thin, cloudy fragrance that hung in the gloom of the coloured windows stole in through my nostrils, drugged my senses. Propping my chin on my hands, I looked up through the air into the dark roof. A pendulum ticked slowly from on high. Quiet began to steal over me--long centuries of solitude had filled this vacancy as with a dream.

It was as if some self within me were listening to the unknown--but to whom? I could not answer; I might as well have been born a pagan. Was this church merely the house of a God? There were gods and temples all over the world. Was it a house of _the_ God? Or only of "their" God? In a sense I knew it was also _my_ God's, but how much more happily confident of His secret presence I had been in wild-grown Wanderslore. Did this mean that I was actually so much alone in my world as to be different from all other human beings?

A fluttering panic swept through my mind at the muffled thumping of the invisible pendulum. I had forgotten that time never ceased to be wasting. And the past stretched its panorama before my eyes: No. 2; the public house with the solitary thinking man I had seen, pot in hand, staring into the sawdust; and this empty, cavernous silence. Then back and back--Lyme Regis, Mrs Bowater's--and Fanny, Lyndsey, my mother and father, the garden. No sylphs of the air, no trancing music out of the waters now! It was as if the past were surrounded with a great wall; and the future clear and hard as glass. You might explore the past in memory: you couldn't scale its invisible walls.

And there was Mr Crimble--an immeasurable distance away; yet he had still the strange power to arrest me, to look out on me in my path. Must the future be all of its piece? I stopped thinking again, and my eyes wandered over my silk skirt and shoes.

My ghost! there was no doubt I was an exceedingly small human being. It may sound absurd, but I had never _vividly_ realized it before. And how solemnly sitting there--like a spider in wait for flies. "For goodness' sake, Miss M.," I said to myself, "cheer up. You are being deadly dull company--always half afraid. They daren't really do anything to you, you know. Face it out." And even while I was muttering, I was reading the words cut into a worn tombstone at my feet: "Jenetta Parker"--only two-and-twenty, a year older than I. Yet she had lain here for two whole centuries and more. And beneath her name I spelled out her epitaph:--

"Ah, Stranger, breathe a sigh:
For, where I lie,
Is but a handful of bright Beauty cast:
It was; and now is past."

I repeated the words mechanically again and again; and, as if in obedience to her whisper, a much more niggardly handful of none too bright a beauty did breathe a sigh and a prayer--part pity, part melancholy, and all happiness and relief. I kissed my hand to Jenetta; crossed myself and bowed to the altar--dulled gems of light the glass--and emerged into the graveyard. A lamp had been lit. An old man was shuffling along behind me; he had come to lock up the church. For an instant I debated whether or not to scuttle off down the green-bladed cobbles of the Mews and--trust my luck. No: the sight of a Punch and Judy man gobbling some food out of a newspaper at the further corner scared me out of _that_ little enterprise. Dusk was settling; and I edged back as fast as I could to No. 2.

But it did me good--that visit. It was as if I had been looking back and up at my own small skull on a high shelf in some tranquil and dingy old laboratory--a few bottles, a spider's web, and an occasional glint of moonlight. How very brief the animation for so protracted a peace.

Chapter Forty-Two

Susan's visits to her aunt were now less frequent. Percy's multiplied. Duty seemed to have become a pleasure to him. Mrs Monnerie's gaze would rest on him with a drowsy vigilance which it was almost impossible to distinguish from mere vacancy of mind. He was fortunate in being her only nephew; unfortunate in being himself, and the son of a sister to whom Mrs Monnerie seemed very little attached. Still, he appeared to be doing his best to cultivate his aunt's graces, would meander "in attendance" round and round the Square's square garden, while Fanny's arm had now almost supplanted Mrs Monnerie's ebony cane. When Mrs Monnerie was too much fatigued for this mild exercise, or otherwise engaged, there was still my health to consider. At least Fanny seemed to think so. But since Percy's conversation had small attractions for me, it was far rather he who enjoyed the experience; while I sat and stared at nothing under a tree.

At less than nothing--for I was staring, as usual, chiefly at myself. I seemed to have lost the secret of day-dreaming. And if the quantity of aversion that looked out of my eyes had matched its quality, those piebald plane-trees and poisonous laburnums would have been scorched as if with fire. I shall never forget those interminable August days, besieged by the roar and glare and soot and splendour and stare of London. All but friendless, absolutely penniless, I had nothing but bits of clothes for bribes to keep Fleming from mutiny. I shrank from making her an open enemy; though I knew, as time went on, that she disrelished me more and more. She would even keep her nose averted from my clothes.

As for Fanny, to judge from her animation when Susan and Captain Valentine broke in upon us, I doubt if anybody less complacent than Percy would not have realized that she was often bored. She would look at him with head on one side, as if she had been painted like that for ever and ever in a picture. She could idly hide behind her beauty, and Percy might as well have gone hunting Echo or a rainbow. She could make corrosive remarks in so seducing a voice that the poor creature hardly knew where the smart came from. He would exclaim, "Oh, I say, Miss Bowater!" and gape like a goldfish. Solely, perhaps, to have some one to discuss herself with, Fanny so far forgave and forgot my shortcomings as to pay me an occasional visit, and had yawned how hideously expensive she found it to live with the rich. But the only promise of help I could make was beyond any possibility of performance. I promised, none the less, for my one dread was that she should guess what straits I was in for money.

It is all very well to accuse Percy Maudlen of goldfishiness. What kind of fish was I? During the few months of my life at Mrs Monnerie's--until, that is, Fanny's arrival--she had transported her "Queen Bee," as she sometimes called me, to every conceivable social function and ceremony, except a deathbed and a funeral. Why had I not played my cards a little more skilfully? Had not Messrs de la Rue designed a pack as if expressly for me, and for my own particular little game of Patience? If perhaps I had shown more sense and less sensibility; and had not been, as I suppose, in spite of all my airs and flauntings, such an inward young woman, what altitudes I might have scaled. Mrs Monnerie, indeed, had once made me a promise to present me at Court in the coming May. It is true that this was a distinction that had been enjoyed by many of my predecessors in my own particular "line"--but I don't think my patroness would have dished me up in a Pie.

That being so, my proud bosom might at this very moment be heaving beneath a locket adorned with the royal monogram in seed pearls, and inscribed, "To the Least of her Subjects from the Greatest of Queens." Why, I might have been the most talked-of and photographed debutante of the season. But I must beware of sour grapes. "There was once a Diogenes whom the gods shut up in a tub."--Poor Mr Wagginhorne, he had been, after all, comparatively frugal with his azaleas.

In all seriousness I profited far too little by Mrs Monnerie's generosities, by my "chances," while I was with her. I just grew hostile, and so half-blind. Many of her friends, of course, were merely wealthy or fashionable, but others were just natural human beings. As Fanny had discovered, she not only delighted in people that were pleasant to look at. She enjoyed also what, I suppose, is almost as rare, intelligence.

The society "Beauties," now? To be quite candid, and I hope without the least tinge of jealousy, I think they liked the look of me--well, no better than I liked the look of excessively handsome men. These exotics of either sex reminded me of petunias--the headachy kind, that are neither red nor blue, but a mixture. I always felt when I looked at them that they knew they were making me dizzy. Yet, as a matter of fact, I could hardly see their beauty for their clothes. It must, of course, be extremely difficult to endure _pure_ admiration. True, I never remember even the most tactful person examining me for the first time without showing some little symptom of discomposure. But that's a very different thing.

There was, however, another kind of beauty which I loved with all my heart. It is difficult to express what I mean, but to see a woman whose face seemed to be the picture of a dream of herself, or a man whose face was absolutely the showing of his own mind--I never wearied of that. Or, at any rate, I do not now; in looking back.

So much for outsides. Humanity, our old cook, Mrs Ballard, used to say, is very like a veal and ham pie: its least digestible part is usually the crust. I am only an amateur veal and ham Pieist; and the fact remains that I experienced just as much difficulty with what are called "clever" people. They were like Adam Waggett in his Sunday clothes--a little too much of something to be quite all there. I firmly believe that what one means is the best thing to say, and the very last thing, however unaffected, most of these clever people said was seemingly what they meant. Their conversation rarely had more than an intellectual interest. You asked for a penny, and they gave you what only looked like a threepenny bit.

Perhaps this is nothing but prejudice, but I have certainly always got on very much better with stupid people. Chiefly, perhaps, because I could share experiences with them; and the latest thoughts did not matter so much. Clever men's--and women's--experiences all seem to be in their heads; and when I have seen a rich man clamber through the eye of a needle, as poor Mr Crimble used to say, I shall keep my eyes open for a clever one attempting the same feat. It had been one of my absurd little amusements at Mrs Bowater's to imagine myself in strange places--keeping company with a dishevelled Comet in the cold wilds of space, or walking about in the furnaces of the Sun, like Shadrach and Abednego. Not so now. Yet if I had had the patience, and the far better sense, to fix my attention on any one I disliked at Mrs Monnerie's so as to enter _in;_ no doubt I should so much have enlarged my inward self as to make it a match at last even for poor Mr Daniel Lambert.

On the other hand, I sometimes met people at No. 2, or when I was taken out by Mrs Monnerie, whose faces looked as if they had been on an almost unbelievably long journey--and one not merely through this world, though that helps. I did try to explore _those_ eyes, and mouths, and wrinkles; and solitudes, stranger than any comet's, I would find myself in at times. Alas, they paid me extremely little attention; though I wonder they did not see in my eyes how hungry I was for it. They were as mysterious as what is called genius. And what would I not give to have set eyes on Sir Isaac Newton, or Nelson, or John Keats--all three of them comparatively little men.

However absurdly pranked up with conceit I might be, I knew in my heart that outwardly, at any rate, I was nothing much better than a curio. To care for me was therefore a really difficult feat. And apart from there being very little time for anything at Mrs Monnerie's, I never caught any one making the attempt. When the novelty of me had worn off, I used to amuse myself by listening to Mrs Monnerie's friends talking to one another--discussing plays and pictures and music and so on--anything that was new, and, of course, each other. Often on these occasions I hardly knew whether I was on my head or my heels.

Books had always been to me just a part of my life; and music very nearly my death. However much I forgot of it, I wove what I could remember of my small reading round myself, so to speak; and I am sure it made the cocoon more comfortable. As often as not these talkers argued about books as if their authors had made them--certainly not "out of their power and love"--but merely for their readers to pick to pieces; and about "beauty," too, as if it were something you could eat with a spoon. As for poetry, one might have guessed from what they said that it meant no more than--well, its "meaning." As if a butterfly were a chrysalis. I have sometimes all but laughed out. It was so contrary to my own little old-fashioned notions. Certainly it was not my mother's way.

But there, what presumption this all is. I had never been to school, never been out of Kent, had never "done" anything, nor "been" anything, except--and that half-heartedly--myself. No wonder I was censorious.

If I could have foreseen how interminably difficult a task it would prove to tack these memoirs together, I am sure I should have profited a little more by the roarings of my fellow lions. As a matter of fact I used merely to watch them sipping their tea, and devouring their cake amid a languishing circle of admirers, and to wonder if they found the cage as tedious as I did. If they noticed me at all, they were usually polite enough; but--like the Beauties--inclined to be absent and restless in my company. So the odds were against me. I had one advantage over them, however, for when I was no longer a novelty, I could occasionally slip in, unperceived, behind an immense marquetry bureau. There in the dust I could sit at peace, comparing its back with its front, and could enjoy at leisure the conversation beyond.

Nevertheless, there was one old gentleman, with whom I really made friends. He was a bachelor, and was not only the author of numbers of books, but when he was a little boy had been presented by Charles Dickens himself with a copy of _David Copperfield_, and had actually sat on the young novelist's knee. No matter who it was he might be talking to, he used to snap his fingers at me in the most exciting fashion whenever we saw each other in the distance, and we often shared a quiet little talk together (I standing on a highish chair, perhaps, and he squatting beside me, his hands on his knees) in some corner of Mrs Monnerie's enormous drawing-room, well out of the mob.

I once ventured to ask him how to write.

His face grew very solemn. "Lord have mercy upon me," he said, "_to write_, my dear young lady. Well, there is only one recipe I have ever heard of: Take a quart or more of life-blood; mix it with a bottle of ink, and a teaspoonful of tears; and ask God to forgive the blots." Then he laughed at me, and polished his eyeglasses with his silk pocket handkerchief.

I surveyed this grisly mixture without flinching, and laughed too, and said, tapping his arm with my fan: "But, dear Mr ----, would you have me die of anaemia?"

And he said I was a dear, valuable creature, and, when next "Black Pudding Day" tempted us, we would collaborate.

Having heard _his_ views, I was tempted to push on, and inquired as flatteringly as possible of a young portrait painter how he mixed his paints: "So as to get exactly the colours you want, you know?"

He gently rubbed one long-fingered hand over the other until there fell a lull in the conversation around us. "What I mix my paints with, Miss M.? Why--merely with brains," he replied. My old novelist had forgotten the brains. But I discovered in some book or other long afterwards that a still more celebrated artist had said that too; so I suppose the _mot_ is traditional.

And last, how to "act": for some mysterious reason I never asked any theatrical celebrity, male or female, how to do that?

More or less intelligent questions, I am afraid, are not the only short-cut to good, or even to polite, conversation. And I was such a dunce that I never really learned what topics are respectable, and what not. In consequence, I often amused Mrs Monnerie's friends without knowing why. They would exchange a kind of little ogling glance, or with a silvery peal of laughter like bells, cry, "How naive!"

How I detested the word. Naive--it was simply my ill-bred earnestness. Still, I made one valuable discovery: that you could safely laugh or even titter at things which it was extremely bad manners to be serious about. What you _could_ be serious about, without letting skeletons out of the cupboard--that was the riddle. I had been brought up too privately ever to be able to answer it.

How engrossing it all would have been if only the Harrises could have trebled my income, and if Fanny had not known me so well. There was even a joy in the ladies who shook their lorgnettes at me as if I were deaf, or looked at me with their noses, as one might say, as if I were a bad or unsavoury joke. On my part, I could never succeed in forgetting that, in spite of appearances, they must be of flesh and blood, and therefore the prey of them, and of the World, and the Devil. So I used to amuse myself by imagining how they would look in their bones, or in rags, or in heaven, or as when they were children. Or again, by an effort of fancy I would reduce them, clothes and all, to _my_ proportions; or even a little less. And though these little inward exercises made me absent-minded, it made them ever so much more interesting and entertaining.

How I managed not to expire in what, for a country mouse, was extremely like living in a bottle of champagne, I don't know. And if my silly little preferences suggest cynicism--well, I may be smug enough, but I don't, and won't, believe I am a cynic. Remember I was young. Besides I love human beings, especially when they are very human, and I have even tried to forgive Miss M. her Miss M-ishness. How can I be a cynic if I have tried to do that? It is a far more difficult task than to make allowances for the poor, wretched, immortal waxwork creatures in Madame Tussaud's Chamber of Horrors, or even for the gentleman naturalist who shot and stuffed Kent's last golden oriole.

Nor have I ever, for more than a moment, shared with Lemuel Gulliver his none too nice disgust at the people of Brobdingnag, even at kind-hearted Glumdalclitch. Am I not myself--not one of the quarrelsome "Fair Folks of the Woods"--but a Yahoo? Gulliver, of course, was purposely made unaccustomed to the gigantic; while I was born and bred, though not to such an extreme, in its midst. And habit is second nature, or, as an old Lyndsey proverb goes, "There's nowt like eels for eeliness."

I am, none the less, ever so thankful that neither my ears, nose, nor eyes, positively magnify, so to speak. I may be a little more sensitive to noises and smells than some people are, but that again is probably only because I was brought up so fresh and quiet and privately. I am far more backward than can be excused, and in some things abominably slow-witted. Whether or not my feelings are pretty much of the usual size, I cannot say. What is more to the point is that in some of my happiest moments my inward self seems to be as remote from my body as the Moon is from Greenland; and, at others,--even though that body weighs me down to the earth like a stone--it is as if memory and consciousness stretched away into the ages, far, far beyond my green and dwindling Barrow on Chizzel Hill, and had shaken to the solitary night-cry of Creation, "Let there be Light."

But enough and to spare of all this egotism. I must get back to my story.

Chapter Forty-Three

The fact is, Miss M.'s connection with good society was rapidly drawing to a close. My smoky little candle had long since begun to gutter and sputter and enwreathe itself in a winding sheet. It went out at last in a blaze of light. For once in his life Percy had conceived a notion of which his aunt cordially approved--my Birthday Banquet. Heart and soul, all my follies and misdemeanours forgotten, she entered into this new device to give her _Snippety_, her _Moppet_, her _Pusskinetta_, her little _Binbin_, her _Fairy_, her _Petite Sereine_, an exquisite setting.

Invitations were sent out to the elect on inch-square cards embossed with my family crest and motto--a giant, head and shoulders, brandishing a club, and _Non Omnis Moriar_.[1] She not only postponed her annual departure from town, but, as did the great man in the parable, _compelled_ her friends to come in. She exhausted her ingenuity on the menu. The great, on this occasion, were to feast on the tiny. A copy of it lies beside me now, though, unfortunately, I did not examine it when I sat down to dinner. Last, but not least, Percy's pastry-cooks, Messrs Buszard, designed a seven-tiered birthday-cake, surrounded on its lowermost plateau by one-and-twenty sugar-figures, about a quarter life-size, and each of them bearing on high a silver torch.

Their names were inscribed on their sugar pediments: Lady Morgan (the Windsor Fairy); Queen Elizabeth's Mrs Tomysen; the Empress Julia's Andromeda; the great little, little great Miss Billing of Tilbury; Anne Rouse and poor Ann Colling; the Sicilian Mlle Caroline Crachami (who went to the anatomists); Nannette Stocker (33 inches, 33 lbs. avoirdupois at 33); the blessed and tender Anastasia Boruwlaski; Gaganini; the gentle Miss Selby of Bath; Alethea (the Guernsey Nymph); Madame Teresa (the Corsican Fairy); Mrs Jeykll Skinner; the appalling Nono; Mrs Anne Gibson (_nee_ Shepherd); and the rest.

It was a joke, none the worse, maybe, for being old; and Peter the Great must have turned in his grave in envy of Mrs Monnerie's ingenuity.

It may scarcely be believed, but I had become so hardened to such little waggeries that under the genial eye of Mrs Monnerie I made the circuit of this cake with a smile; and even scolded her for omitting the redoubtable Mrs Bellamy with her life-size family of nine. I criticized the images too, as not to be compared, even as sugar, with the alabaster William of Windsor and Blanche, in the Tower.

The truth is, when real revulsions of body and soul come, they come in a gush, all at once. Fleming, on the Night, was actually putting the last touches to my coiffure when suddenly, with a wicked curse, I turned from the great glass and announced my decision. Tiny tortoiseshell comb uplifted, she stood in the clear lustrousness looking in at my reflection, queer thoughts darting about in her eyes. At first she supposed it was but another fit of petulance. Then her hatred and disgust of me all but overcame her.

She quietly argued. I insisted. But she was mortally afraid of Mrs Monnerie, and rather than deliver my message to her, sought out Susan. Poor Susan. She, too, was afraid: and it was her face rather than her love that won me over at last. Then she had to rush away to make what excuse she could for my unpunctuality. It thus came about that Mrs Monnerie's guests had already sat down to table, and were one and all being extremely amused by some story she was entertaining them with, when Marvell threw open the great mahogany doors for me, and I made my solitary entry.

In primrose silk, _a la Pompadour_, a wreath of tight-shut pimpernels in my hair--it is just possible that Mrs Monnerie suspected I had chosen to come in late like this merely for effect. But that would have been an even feebler exhibition of vanity than _I_ was capable of. All her guests were known to me, even though only one of them was of my choosing; for Mrs Bowater was in the Argentine, Sir Walter in France, Miss Fenne on her deathbed, Mr Pellew in retreat, and Mr Crimble in his grave. Fanny was my all.

She was sitting four or five chairs away from me on my left, between Percy (who had on his right hand a beautiful long-faced girl in turquoise green) and Captain Valentine. Further down, and on the other side of the table, sat Lady Maudlen--a seal-like lady, who, according to Fanny, disapproved of me on religious grounds--while I was on Mrs Monnerie's left, and next to Lord Chiltern. Alas, even my old friend the "Black Pudding" was too far distant to do more than twinkle "Courage!" at me, when our eyes met.

Recollections of that disastrous evening are clouded. So evil with dreams my nights had been that I hardly knew whether I was awake or asleep. But I recall the long perspective of the table, the beards, the busts, the pearls, the camellias and gardenias, the cornucopias, and that glistening Folly Castle, my Birthday Cake. Marvell is behind me, and Adam Waggett is ducketing in the luminous distance. The clatter of many tongues beats on my ear. Mrs Monnerie murmurs and gently rocks. The great silver dishes dip and withdraw. Corks pop, and the fumes of meat and wine cloud into the air. In memory it is as if I myself were far away, as if I had read of the scene in a book.

But two moments stand vividly out of its unreality--and each of them to my shame. A small, wreathed, silver-gilt dish was placed before me. Automatically I thrust my spoon into its jelly, and pecked at the flavourless morsels. Sheer nervousness had deprived me of my sense of taste. But there was something in Mrs Monnerie's sly silence, and Lord Chiltern's solemn monocle, and Percy's snigger, that set me speculating.

"Angelic Tomtitiska!" sighed Mrs Monnerie, "I wager when she returns to Paradise, she will sit in a corner and forget to tune her harp."

There was no shade of vexation in her voice, only amiable amusement; but those sitting near had overheard her little pleasantry, and smilingly watched me as, casting my eye down the menu--_Consomme aux Nids d'Hirondelles_, _Filets de Blanchailles a la Diable_, _Ailes de Caille aux petits pois Minnie Stratton_, _Sauterelles aux Caroubes Saint Jean_, it was caught at last by a pretty gilt flourishing around the words, _Supreme de Langues de Rossignols_. This, then, was the dainty jest, the _clou du repas_. The faint gold words shimmered back at me. In an instant I was a child again at Lyndsey, lulling to sleep on my pillow amid the echoing songs of the nightingales that used to nest in its pleasant lanes. I sat flaming, my tongue clotted with disgust. I simply couldn't swallow; and didn't. But never mind.

This was my first mishap. Though her own appetite was capricious, ranging from an almost incredible voracity to a scrap of dry toast, nothing vexed Mrs Monnerie so much as to see my poor, squeamish stomach revolting at the sight of meat. She drew up a naked shoulder against me, and the feast proceeded with its chief guest in the shade. Once I could soon have regained my composure. Now I languished, careless even of the expression on my face. Not even the little mincing smile Fanny always reserved for me in company could restore me, and it was at her whisper that Percy stole down and filled my acorn glass with a translucent green liquid which he had himself secured from the sideboard. I watched the slow, green flow of it from the lip of the decanter without a thought in my head. Lord Chiltern endeavoured to restore my drooping spirits. I had outrageously misjudged him. He was _not_ one of Mrs Monnerie's stupid friends, and he really did his utmost to be kind to me. If he should ever read these words, may he be sure that Miss M. is grateful. But his kindness fell on stony ground. And when, at length, he rose to propose my health, I crouched beneath him shameful, haggard, and woebegone.

It was as minute a speech as was she whom it flattered, and far more graceful. Nothing, of course, would satisfy its audience when the toast had been honoured, but that Miss M. should reply. One single, desperate glance I cast at Mrs Monnerie. She sat immovable as the Sphinx. There was no help for it. Knees knocking together, utterly tongue-tied, I stood up in my chair, and surveyed the two converging rows of smiling, curious faces. Despair gave me counsel. I stooped, raised my glass, and half in dread, half in bravado, tossed down its burning contents at a gulp.

The green syrup coursed along vein and artery like molten lead. A horrifying transparency began to spread over my mind. It seemed it had become in that instant empty and radiant as a dome of glass. All sounds hushed away. Things near faded into an infinite distance. Every face, glossed with light as if varnished, became lifeless, brutal, and inhuman, the grotesque caricature of a shadowy countenance that hung somewhere remote in memory, yet was invisible and irrevocable. In this dead moment--the whole blazing scene like a nowhere of the imagination--my wandering eyes met Fanny's. She was softly languishing up at Captain Valentine, her fingers toying with a rose. And it seemed as though her once loved spirit cried homelessly out at me from space, as if for refuge and recognition; and a long-hidden flood broke bounds in my heart. All else forgotten, and obeying mechanically the force of long habit, I stepped up from my chair on to the table, and staggered towards her, upsetting, as I went, a shallow glass of bubbling wine. It reeked up in the air around me.

"Fanny, Fanny," I called to her out of my swoon, "Ah, Fanny. Holy Dying, Holy Dying! _Sauve qui peut!_" With empty, shocking face, she started back, appalled, like a wounded snake.

"Oh!" she cried in horror into the sleep that was now mounting my body like a cloud, "oh!" Her hand swept out blindly in my direction as if to fend me off. At best my balance was insecure; and though the velvet petals of her rose scarcely grazed my cheek, the insane glaze of my mind was already darkening, I toppled and fell in a heap beside her plate.

FOOTNOTE:

[1] To be truthful, this is not my family motto (_nor_ crest); but the real motto seemed a little too satirical to share with Mrs Monnerie; and however overweening its substitute may appear, I have now hopes, and now misgivings, that it is true.

Monk's House

Chapter Forty-Four

Thus then I came of age, though not on St Rosa's day. However dramatic and memorable, I grant it was not a courteous method of acknowledging Lord Chiltern's courtesy. In the good old days the drunken dwarf would have been jovially tossed from hand to hand. From mind to mind was my much milder penalty. And yet this poor little _contretemps_ was of a sort that required "hushing up"; so it kept tongues wagging for many a day. It was little comfort that Percy shared my disgrace, and even Susan, for "giving way."

She it was who had lifted my body from the table and carried it up into darkness and quiet. In the half light of my bedroom I remember I opened my eyes for a moment--eyes which refused to stay still in their sockets, but were yet capable of noticing that the left hand which clasped mine had lost its ring. I tried to point it out to her. She was crying.

Philippina sober was awakened the next morning by the fingers of Mrs Monnerie herself. She must have withdrawn the kindly sheet from my face, and, with nightmare still babbling on my lips, I looked up into the familiar features, a little grey and anxious, but creased up into every appearance of goodwill.

"Not so excessively unwisely, then," she rallied me, "and only the least little thought too well. We have been quite anxious about Bebe, haven't we, Fleming?"

"Quite, madam. A little indigestion, that's all."

"Yes, yes; a little indigestion, that's all," Mrs Monnerie agreed: "and I am sure Poppet doesn't want those tiresome doctors with their horrid physic."

I sat up, blinking from one to the other. "I think it was the green stuff," I muttered, tongue and throat as dry as paper. I could scarcely see out of my eyes for the racking stabs of pain beneath my skull.

"Yes, yes," was the soothing response. "But you mustn't agitate yourself, silly child. Don't open your eyes like that. The heat of the room, the excitement, some little obstinate dainty. Now, one of those darling little pills, and a cooling draught, perhaps. Thank you, Fleming."

The door closed, we were left alone. Mrs Monnerie's scrutiny drifted away. Their shutters all but closed down on the black-brown pupils. My head pined for its pillows, my shoulders for some vestige of defence, but pined in vain. For the first time I felt afraid of Mrs Monnerie. She was thinking so densely and heavily.

Yet, as if out of a cloud of pure absentmindedness, dropped softly her next remark. "Does pretty Pusskin remember what she _said_ to Miss Bowater?... No?... Well, then, if she can't, it's quite certain nobody else can--or wishes to. I inquired merely because the poor thing, who has been really nobly devoting herself to her duties, seems so hurt. Well, it shall be a little lesson--to us all. Though one swallow does not make a summer, my child, one hornet can make things extremely unpleasant. Not that I----" A vast shrug of the shoulders completed the sentence. "A little talk and tact will soon set _that_ right; and I am perfectly satisfied, perfectly satisfied with things as they are. So that's settled. Some day you must tell me a little more about your family history. Meanwhile, rest and quiet. No more excitement, no more company, and no more"--she bent low over me with wagging head--"no more _green stuff_. And then"--her eyes rested on me with a peculiar zest rather than with any actual animosity--"then we must see what can be done for you."

There came a tap--and Percy showed in the doorway.

"I thought, Aunt Alice, I thought----" he began, but at sight of the morose, heavy countenance lifted up to him, he shut his mouth.

"Thank you," said Mrs Monnerie, "thank you, Sir Galahad; you did nothing of the kind."

Whereupon her nephew wheeled himself out of the room so swiftly that I could not detect what kind of exotics he was carrying in a little posy in his hand.

So the invalid, now a burden on the mind of her caretaker many times her own weight, was exiled for ever from No. 2. Poor Fleming, sniffier and more disgusted than ever, was deputed to carry me off to the smaller of Mrs Monnerie's country retreats, a long, low-roofed, shallow-staired house lying in the green under the downs at Croomham. There I was to vegetate for a time and repent of my sins.

Percy's fiery syrup took longer to withdraw its sweet influences than might have been foreseen. Indeed, whenever I think of him, its effects are faintly renewed, though not, I trust, to the detriment of my style! None too strong physically, the Miss M. that sat up at her latticed window at Monk's House during those few last interminable August days, was very busy with her thoughts. As she looked down for hours together on the gnarled, thick-leafed old mulberry-tree in the corner of the lawn that swept up to the very stones of the house, and on the walled, sun-drugged garden beyond, she was for ever debating that old, old problem; what could be done _by_ herself _with_ herself?

The doves crooned; the cawing rooks flapped black into the blue above the neighbouring woods; the earth drowsed on. It was a scene of peace and decay. But I seemed to have lost the charm that could have made it mine. I was an Ishmael. And worse--I was still a prisoner. No criminal at death's door can have brooded more laboriously on his chances of escape. No wonder the voices of childhood had whispered, Away!

There came a long night of rain. I lay listening to the whisper and clucking of its waters. Far away the lapwings called: Ee-ooeet! Ee-ooeet! What follies I had been guilty of. How wilily circumstance had connived at them. Yet I was no true penitent. My heart was empty, so parched up that neither love nor remorse had any place in it. Revenge seemed far sweeter. Driven into this corner, I sent a desperate word to Sir W. It remained unanswered, and this friend followed the rest into the wilderness of my ingratitude.

But that brought me no relief. For of all the sins I have ever committed, envy and hatred seem to me the most unpleasant to practise. I was to learn also that "he who sows hatred shall gather rue," and "bed with thistles." With eyes at last as anxious as Jezebel's, I resumed my watch at the window. But even if Percy had ridden from London solely to order Fleming to throw me down, she would not have "demeaned" herself to set hands on me. She might be bold, but she, too, was fastidious.

Then Fleming herself one afternoon softly and suddenly vanished away--on her summer's holiday. Poor thing; so acute was the chronic indigestion caused by _her_ obstinate little dainty that she did not even bid me good-bye.

She left me in charge of the housekeeper, Mrs French, a stout, flushed, horse-faced woman, who now and then came in and bawled good-humouredly at me as if I were deaf, but otherwise ignored me altogether. I now spent most of my time in the garden, listlessly wandering out of sight of the windows (and gardeners), along its lank-flowered, rose-petalled walks, hating its beauty. Or I would sit where I could hear the waterdrops in a well. The very thought of company was detestable. I sat there half-dead, without book or needle, with scarcely a thought in my head. In my library days at No. 2 I had become a perfect slave to pleasures of the intellect. But now dyspepsia had set in there too.

My nights were pestered with dreams and my days with their vanishing spectres; and I had no Pollie to tell me what they forecast. I suppose one must be more miserable and hunted in mind even than I was, _never_ to be a little sentimental when alone. I would lean over the cold mouth of the well, just able to discern in the cold mirror of water, far beneath, the face I was almost astonished to find reflected there. "Shall I come too?" I would morbidly whisper, and dart away.

Still, just as with a weed in winter, life was beginning to renew the sap within me; and Monk's House was not only drowsy with age but gentle with whispers. Once at least in every twenty-four hours I would make a pilgrimage to its wrought-iron gates beside the square white lodge, to gloat out between the metal floriations at the dusty country lane beyond--with its swallows and wagtails and dragon-flies beneath the heat-parched tranquil elms. A slim, stilted greyhound on one such visit stalked out from the lodge. Quite unaware of his company, I turned about suddenly and stared clean down his arched throat--white teeth and lolling tongue. It was as if I had glanced into the jaws of destiny. He turned his head, whiningly yawned, and stalked back into the shade.

A day or two afterwards I made the acquaintance of the lodge-keeper's daughter, a child named Rose, about five years of age, with a mop of copper-coloured curls bound up with a pale blue bow. At first glimpse of me she had hopped back as if on springs into the house. A moment after, her white-aproned mother appeared in the porch, and with a pleasant nod at me bade the child smile at the pretty little lady. Finger in mouth, Rose wriggled and stared. In a few days she grew accustomed to my small figure. And though I would sometimes discover her saucer-blue eyes fixed on me with a peculiar intensity, we almost came to be friends. She was not a very bright little girl; yet I found myself wooing her with all the arts I knew--in a scarcely conscious attempt, I suppose, to creep back by this small lane into the world's and my own esteem.

I made her wristlets of little flowers, hacked her out cockle boats from the acorns, told her half-forgotten stories, and once had to trespass into the kitchen at the back of the lodge to tell her mother that she was fallen asleep. Was it mere fancy that read in the scared face she twisted round on the pretty little lady from over her saucepan, "Avaunt, Evil Eye!"? I had become abominably self-conscious.

Chapter Forty-Five

One such afternoon Rose and I were sitting quietly together in the sunshine on the green grass bank when a smart, short step sounded in the lane, and who should come springily pacing out of the country through the gates but Adam Waggett--red hands, black boots, and Londonish billycock hat all complete. Adam must have been born in a fit of astonishment; and when he dies, so he will enter Paradise. He halted abruptly, a ring of shifting sunshine through the leaves playing on his purple face, and, after one long glance of theatrical astonishment, he burst into his familiar guffaw.

This time the roar of him in the open air was nothing but a pleasure, and the mere sound and sight of him set Rose off laughing, too. Her pink mouth was as clustered about with milk-teeth as a fragment of honeycomb is with cells.

"Well, there I never, miss," he said at last, with a slow, friendly wink at the child, "Where shall us three meet again, I wonder." He flicked the dust off his black button boots with his pocket-handkerchief, mopped his high, bald forehead, and then positively exploded into fragments of information--like my father's fireworks on Guy Fawkes' Day.

He talked of young Mr Percy's "goings-on," of the august Mr Marvell, of life at No. 2. "That Miss Bowater, now, she's a bit of all right, she's toffee, she is." But, his hat! there _had_ been a row. And the captain, too. Not that there was anything in that; "just a bit of silly jealousy; _like_ the women!" He could make a better guess than that. He didn't know what "the old lady" would do without that Miss Bowater--the old lady whose carriage would in a few days be rolling in between these very gates. And then--he began whistling a Highland Reel.

The country air had evidently got into his head. Hand over hand he was swarming up the ladder of success. His "_joie de vivre_" gleamed at every pore. And I?--I just sat there, passively drinking in this kitchen-talk, without attempting to stop him. After all, he was out of my past; we were children of Israel in a strange land; and that hot face, with its violent pantomime, and hair-plastered temples, was as good as a play.

He was once more settling his hat on his head and opening his mouth in preparation for a last bray of farewell, when suddenly in the sunny afternoon hush a peculiar, melancholy, whining cry rose over the treetops, and slowly stilled away. As if shot from a bow, Rose's greyhound leapt out of the lodge and was gone. With head twisted over his shoulder, Adam stood listening. Somewhere--where? when?--that sound had stirred the shadows of my imagination. The day seemed to gather itself about me, as if in a plot.

In the silence that followed I heard the dust-muffled grinding of heavy wheels approaching, and the low, refreshing talk of homely, Kentish, country voices. Adam stepped to the gate. I clutched Rose's soft, cool fingers. And spongily, ponderously, there, beyond the bars, debouched into view a huge-shouldered, mole-coloured elephant, its trunk sagging towards the dust, its small, lash-fringed eye gleaming in the sun, its bald, stumpy, tufted tail stiff and still behind it.

On and on, one after another, in the elm-shaded beams of the first of evening, the outlandish animals, the wheeled dens, the gaudy, piled-up vans of pasteboard scenery, the horses and ponies and riff-raff of a travelling circus wound into, and out of, view before my eyes. It was as if the lane itself were moving, and all the rest of the world, with Rose and myself clutched hand in hand on our green bank, had remained stark still. Probably the staring child supposed that this was one of my fairy-tales come true. My own mind was humming with a thought far more fantastic. Ever and again a swarthy face had glanced in on our quiet garden. The lion had glared into Africa beyond my head. But I was partly screened from view by Rose, and it was a woman, and she all but the last of the dusty, bedraggled company, that alone caught a full, clear sight of me.

One flash of eye to eye--we knew each other. She was the bird-eyed, ear-ringed gipsy of my railway journey with Pollie from Lyndsey to Beechwood. Even more hawklike, bonier, striding along now like a man in the dust and heat in her dingy coloured petticoats and great boots, with one steel-grey dart of remembrance, she swallowed me up, like flame a moth. Her mouth relaxed into a foxy smile while her gaze tightened on me. She turned herself about and shrilled out a strange word or two to some one who had gone before. A sudden alarm leapt up in me. In an instant I had whisked into hiding, and found myself, half-suffocated with excitement, peeping out of a bush in watch for what was to happen next.

So swift had been my disappearance she seemed doubtful of her own senses. A cage of leopards, with a fair-skinned, gold-haired girl in white stockings lolling asleep on the chained-up tail-board, trundled by; and then my gipsy was joined by a thick-set, scowling man. His face was bold and square, and far more lowering than that of the famous pugilist, Mr Sayers--to whose coloured portrait I had become almost romantically attached in the library at No. 2. This dangerous-looking individual filled me with a tremulous excitement and admiration. If, as in a dream, my past seemed to have been waiting for that solitary elephant; then my future was all of a simmer with _him_.

He drew his thick hand out of his stomach-pocket and scratched his cheek. The afternoon hung so quiet that I heard the rasp of his finger nail against his sprouting beard. He turned to mutter a sullen word or two at the woman beside him. Then, more civilly, and with a jerk of his squat thumb in my direction, he addressed himself to Adam. Adam listened, his red ears erect on either side of his hat. But his only answer was so violent a wag of his head that it seemed in danger of toppling off his body. Softly I laughed to myself. The woman yelped at him. The man bade her ferociously "shut her gob." Adam clanged-to the gates. They moved on. Beast, cage, and men were vanished like a daydream. A fitful breeze rustled the dry elm-leaves. The swifts coursed on in the shade.

When the last faint murmur had died away, I came out from behind my bush. "A country circus," I remarked unconcernedly. "What did the man want, Adam?"

"That hairy cat frowned at Rosie," whispered the child, turning from me to catch at Adam's coat-tails. "Not _eat_ Rosie?"

Adam bent himself double, and with an almost motherly tenderness stroked her bright red hair. He straightened himself up, spat modestly in the dust, and, with face still mottled by our recent experience, expressed the opinion that the man was "one of them low blackguards--excusing plain English, miss--who'd steal your chickens out of the very saucepan." As for the woman--words failed him.

I waited until his small, round eye had rolled back in my direction. "Yes, Adam," I said, "but what did he _say_? You mean she told him about _me_?"