Chapter XV: Part 15

"Well, miss, to speak equal-like, that was about the size of it. The old liar said she had seen you before, that you were--well, there you are!--a gold mine, a--a blessed gold mine. Her very words nearabout." At that, in an insuppressible gush of happiness I laughed out with him, like a flageolet in a concourse of bassoons.

"But he didn't see me, Adam. I took good care of that."

"That's just," said Adam, with a tug at his black cravat, "what's going to give the pair of them a mighty unpleasant afternoon."

I dismissed him, smiled at the whimpering greyhound, smiled at Rose, whose shyness at me had unaccountably whelmed over her again, and followed in Adam's wake towards the house. But not to enter it. "A blessed"--oh, most blessed "_Gold Mine_!" The word so sang in me that the whole garden--espaliered wall, and bird, and flower--leapt into life and beauty before my eyes. Then my prayer (_what_ prayer?) had been answered. I squared my shoulders, shuddered--a Lazarus come to life. Away I went, and seating myself in a sunny corner, a few paces from a hive of bees, plucked a nectarine, and surrendered myself to the intoxication of an idea. Not "Your Master is dead," but "Your mistress is come to life again!" I whispered to the bees. And if I had been wearing a scarlet garter I would have tied it round their skep.

Money! Money!--a few even of my handfuls of that, and I was free. I would teach "them" a lesson. I would redeem myself. Ah, if only I had had a fraction of Fanny's courage, should I so long have remained wilting and festering at No. 2? The sweet, sharp juices of the clumsy fruit quenched my thirst. To and fro swept the bees along their airy highway. A spiked tree of late-blooming bugloss streamed its blue and purple into my eyes. A year ago, the very thought of exhibiting myself for filthy (or any kind of) lucre would have filled me with unspeakable shame. But what else had I been doing those long, dragging months? What had Miss M. hired herself out to be but a pot of caviare to the gourmets? Puffed up with conceit and complacency, I had been merely feeding on the world's contempt sauced up as flattery. Nonsensical child.

"Ah, I can make honey, too," I nodded at the bees; whereupon a wasp pounced out of nowhere upon my oozy fruit, and I thrust it away into the weeds. But how refreshing a draught is the thought of action, how comforting the first returning trickle of self-esteem. My body sank into motionlessness. The shadows lengthened. The August sun slid down the sky.

Dusk was abroad in the colder garden, and the last bee home, when, with plans resolved on, I stretched my stiffened limbs and made my way into the house. Excellent augury--so easy had been my daily habits that no one had noticed my absence. Supper was awaiting me. I was ravenous. Up and down I stumped, gnawing my biscuit and sipping my sweet country milk. I had suddenly realized what the world meant to Fanny--an oyster for her sword. Somewhere I have read that every man of genius hides a woman in his breast. Well, perhaps in mine a _man_ was now stirring--the man that had occupied my Aunt Kitilda's skirts. It was high time.

A moon just past its quarter was sinking in the heavens and silvering the jessamine at my window. My bosom swelled with longing at the breath of the slow night airs. Monk's House--I, too, had my ghosts and would face them down, would vanquish fate with the very weapons it had forged for my discomfiture. In that sheltered half-light I stood myself before a down-tilted looking-glass. If I had been malshapen, limbless, contorted, I would have drowned myself in mud rather than feed man's hunger for the monstrous and obscene. No, I was a beautiful thing, even if God had been idly at play when He had shaped me, and had then flung away the mould; even if to Mrs Monnerie I was nothing much better than a disreputable marionette. So I boasted myself. Percy's Chartreuse had been mere whey compared with the fleeting glimpse of a tame circus elephant.

I tossed out on to the floor the old Lyndsey finery which some homesick impulse had persuaded me to bring away in my trunk. Seated there with busy needle under the window, sewing in every gewgaw and scrap of tinsel and finery I could lay hands on, I prepared for the morrow. How happy I was. Bats in the dewy dusk-light cast faint, flitting shadows on the casements. A large dark moth hawked to and fro above my head. It seemed I could spend eternity in this gentle ardent busyness. To think that God had given me what might have been so dreadful a thing as solitude, but which in reality, while my thoughts and fingers were thus placidly occupied, could be so sweet. When at length I leaned out on the cold sill, my work done, wrists and shoulders aching with fatigue, Croomham clock struck two. The moon was set. But there, as if in my own happy mind, away to the East shone Orion. Why, Sirius, then, must be in hiding under that quiet shoulder of the downs. A dwindling meteor silvered across space; I breathed a wish, shivered, and drew in.

And there came that night a curious dream. I dreamt that I was a great soldier, and had won an enormous unparalleled battle. Glaring light streamed obliquely across a flat plain, humped and hummocked with the bodies of the dead lying in disorder. I was standing in arrogant reverie alone, a few paces distant--though leagues away in being--from a group of other officers, who were looking at me. And I suffered the streaming light to fall upon me, as I gazed into my joy and triumph with a kind of severe nonchalance. But though my face under my three-cornered hat can have expressed only calmness and resolution, I knew in my heart that my thoughts were merely a thin wisp of smoke above the crater of a suppressed volcano. Lest I should be detected in this weakness, I turned out of the glare, and without premeditation, began to step lightly and abstractedly from huddling mound to mound. And, as these heaps of the dead increased in size in the gloom after the white western light was gone, so I diminished, until I was but a kind of infinitesimal will-o'-the-wisp gliding from peak to peak of an infernal mausoleum of which every eye, though dead, was watching me. But there was _one_ Eye....

And that is all of the dream that I could remember. For then I awoke, looking into the dark. A pencil ray of moonlight was creeping across my bed. Peace unutterable. Over my drowsy eyes once more the clouds descended, and once more I fell asleep.

Chapter Forty-Six

Next day, after a long lying-in-wait, I intercepted Adam Waggett and beckoned him into the shrubbery. First I questioned him. A bill of the circus, he told me, had already been left at the lodge. Its tents and booths and Aunt Sallies were even now being pitched in a meadow three or four miles distant and this side the neighbouring town. So far, so good. I told him my plan. He could do nothing but look at me like a fish, with his little black eyes, as I sat on a tree stump and marshalled my instructions.

But my first crucial battle had been fought with Adam Waggett in the garden at Lyndsey. He had neither the courage nor even the cowardice to gainsay me. After a tedious siege of his sluggish wits, greed for the reward I promised him, the assurance that if we were discovered the guilt should rest on me, and maybe some soupcon of old sake's sake won him over. The branches of the trees swayed and creaked above us in the sunshine; and at last, looking down on me with a wry face, Adam promised to do my bidding.

Six had but just struck that evening when there came the rap of his knuckles on my bedroom door. He found me impatiently striding up and down in a scintillating bodice and skirts of scarlet, lemon, and silver--as gay and gaudy an object as the waxen Russian Princess I had seen in one of Mrs Monnerie's cabinets. My flaxen hair was plaited German-wise, and tied in two thumping pigtails with a green ribbon; I stood and looked at him. He fumblingly folded his hands in front of him as he stood and looked back at me. I was quivering like a flame in a lamp. And never have I been so much flattered as by the silly, stupefied stare on his face.

How I was to be carried to the circus had been one of our most difficult problems. This cunning creature had routed out from some lumber-room in the old house a capacious old cage--now rusty, but stout and solidly made--that must once have housed the aged Chakka.

"There, miss," he whispered triumphantly; "that's the ticket, and right to a hinch."

I confess I winced at his "ticket." But Adam had cushioned and padded it for me, and had hooded it over with a stout piece of sacking, leaving the ring free. Apart from our furtive preparations, evening quiet pervaded the house. The maids were out sweethearting, he explained. Mrs French had retired as usual to her own sitting-room; Fortune seemed to be smiling upon me.

"Then, Adam," I whispered, "the time has come. Jerk me as little as possible; and if questions are asked, you are taking the cage to be mended, you understand? And when we get there, see no one but the man or the woman who spoke to you at the gates."

"Well, miss, it's a rum go," said Adam, eyeing me with a grotesque grimace of anxiety.

I looked up at him from the floor of the cage. "The rummer the go is, Adam, the quicker we ought to be about it."

He lowered the wiry dome over my head; I bunched in my skirts; and with the twist of a few hooks I was secure. The faint squeak of his boots told me that he had stolen to the door to listen.

"All serene," he whispered hoarsely through the sacking. I felt myself lifted up and up. We were on our way. Then, like flies, a cloud of misgivings settled upon my mind. As best I could I drove them away, and to give myself confidence began to count. A shrill false whistling broke the silence. Adam was approaching the lodge; a mocking screech of its gates, and we were through. After that, apart from the occasional beat of hoofs or shoes, a country "good-night," or a husky cough of encouragement from Adam, I heard nothing more. The gloom deepened. The heat was oppressive; I became a little seasick, and pressing my mouth to a small slit between the bars, sucked in what fresh air I could.

Midway on our journey Adam climbed over a stile to rest a while, and, pushing back a corner of the sacking, he asked me how I did.

"Fine, Adam," said I, panting. "We are getting along famously."

The fields were sweet and dusky. It was a clear evening, and refreshingly cool.

"You may smoke a pipe, Adam, if you wish," I called softly. And while he puffed, and I listened to the chirping of a cricket, he told me of a young housemaid that was always chaffing and ridiculing him at No. 2. "It may be that she has taken a passing fancy to you," said I, looking up into the silent oak tree under which we were sitting. "On the other hand, you may deserve it. What is she like, Adam?"

"Black eyebrows," said Adam. "Shows her teeth when she laughs. But that's no reason why she should make a fool of a fellow."

"The real question is, is she a nice modest girl?" said I, and my bangles jangled as I raised my hand to my hair. "Come, Adam, there's no time to waste; are you ready?"

He grunted, his mind still far away. "She's a fair sneak," he said, rapping his pipe-bowl on a stone. And so, up and on.

Time seemed to have ceased to be, in this jolting monotony, unbroken except by an occasional giddying swing of my universe as Adam transferred the cage from hand to hand. Swelteringly hot without, but a little cold within, I was startled by a far-away blare of music. I clutched tight the slender bars; the music ceased, and out of the quiet that followed rose the moaning roar of a wild beast.

My tongue pressed itself against my teeth; the sacking trembled, and a faint luminousness began to creep through its hempen strands. Shouting and screaming, catcalls and laughter swelled near. And now by the medley of smells and voices, and the glint of naked lights floating in on me, I realized that we had reached our goal.

Adam came to a standstill. "Where's the boss?" The tones were thick and muffled. A feeble smile swept over my face: I discovered I was holding my breath.

A few paces now, the din distanced a little and the glare diminished. Then sounded another voice hoarse and violent, high above my head.

The cage bumped to the ground. And I heard Adam cringingly explain: "I've got a bird here for you, mister."

"A bird," rang the jeer, "who wants your bloody bird? Be off."

"Ay, but it won't be a bloody bird," gasped Adam cajolingly, "when you've seen her pretty feathers."

At this, apparently, recollection of Adam's face or voice returned to the showman. He remained silent while with palsied fingers Adam unlatched my bolts and bars. Bent almost double and half-stifled, I sat there in sight, my clothes spread brightly out about me. The cool air swirled in, and for a while my eyes dazzled at the bubbling blaze of a naphtha lamp suspended from the pole of the tent above the criss-cross green-bladed grass at my feet. I lifted my head.

There stood Adam, in his black tail-coat rubbing his arm; and there the showman. Still to the tips of my fingers, I sat motionless, gazing up into the hard, high-boned, narrow-browed face with its small restless eyes voraciously taking me in. Fortunately the choked beating of my heart was too small a sound for his ear; and he was the first to withdraw from the encounter.

"My God," he muttered, and spat into a corner of the canvas booth--with its one dripping lamp, its rough table and chair, and a few oddments of his trade.

"And what, my handsome young lady," he went on in a low, carneying tone, and fidgeting with his hands, "what might be your little imbroglio?"

In a gush, presence of mind returned to me, and fear passed away. I quietly listened to myself explaining without any concealment precisely what was my little imbroglio. He burst out laughing.

"Stage-struck, eh? There's a young lady now! Well, who's to blame 'ee?"

He asked me my age, my name, where I came from, if I could dance, sing, ride; and stared so roundly at me that I seemed to see my garish colours reflected in the metallic grey of his eyes.

All this was on his side of the bargain. Now came mine. I folded tight my hands in my lap, glanced up at the flaming lamp. How much would he pay me?

It was as if a shutter had descended over his face. "Drat me," said he, "when a young lady comes selling anything, she _asks_ her price."

So I asked mine--fifteen guineas for four nights' hire.... To look at that human animal you might have supposed the actual guineas had lodged in his throat. It may be that Shylock's was a more modest bargain. I cannot say.

At first thought it had seemed to me a monstrous sum, but at that time I was ignorant of what a really fine midget fetched. It was but half my old quarterly allowance, with L2 over for Adam. I should need every penny of it. And I had not come selling my soul without having first decided on its value. The showman fumed and blustered. But I sat close on Chakka's abandoned stage, perfectly still, making no answer; finding, moreover, in Adam an unexpected stronghold, for the wider gawked his frightened eyes at the showman's noise and gesticulations, the more resolved I became. With a last dreadful oath, the showman all but kicked a hole in my cage.

"Take me away, Adam," I cried quaveringly; "we are wasting this gentleman's time."

I smiled to myself, in spite of the cold tremors that were shaking me all over; with every nerve and sinew of his corpulent body he was coveting me: and with a curse he at last accepted my terms. I shrugged my shoulders, but still refused to stir a finger until our contract had been written down in black and white. Maybe some tiny love-bird of courage roosts beneath every human skull, maybe my mother's fine French blood had rilled to the surface. However that may be, there could be no turning back.

He drew out a stump of pencil and a dirty envelope. "That, my fine cock," he said to Adam, as he wrote, "that's a woman; and you make no mistake about it. To hell with your fine ladies."

It remains, if not the most delicate, certainly one of the most substantial compliments I ever earned in my life.

"That's that," he pretended to groan, presenting me with his scrawl. "Ask a shark for a stamp, and if ruined I must be--ruined I am."

I leapt to my feet, shook out my tumbled finery, smiled into his stooping face, and tucked the contract into my bodice. "Thank you, sir," I said, "and I promise you shan't be ruined if _I_ can help it." Whereupon Adam became exceedingly merry, the danger now over.

Such are the facts concerning this little transaction, so far as I can recall them; yet I confess to being a little incredulous. Have I, perhaps, gilded my side of the bargaining? If so, I am sure my showman would be the last person to quarrel with me. I am inclined to think he had taken a fancy to me. Anyhow I had won--what is, perhaps, even better--his respect. And though the pay came late, when it was no longer needed, and though it was the blackest money that ever touched my fingers, it came. And if anybody was the defaulter, it was I.

There was no time to lose. My gipsy woman was sent for from the shooting gallery. I shook hands with her; she shook hands with Adam, who was then told to go about his business and to return to the tent when the circus was over. The three of us, showman, woman, and I, conferred together, and with extreme cordiality agreed what should be my little part in the performance. The booth in which we had made our bargain was hastily prepared for my "reception." Its table was to be my dais. A loose flap of canvas was hung to one side of it to screen me off from prying eyes when I was not on show. My only dangerous rival, it appeared, was the Spotted Boy.

There followed a deafening pealing of panpipes, drumming of drum, and yelling of voices. In that monstrous din I was past thinking, just _being_; and I bridled to myself like a schoolgirl caught in a delicious naughtiness, to hear the fine things--the charms and marvels--which my showman was bawling about me. Then one by one, at first a little owlishly, the Great Public, at the charge of 6d. per adult and half price for children (or "full-growns under 3 foot") were admitted to the presence of the "_Signorina Donna Angelique, the Fairy Princess of Andalusia in Spain_." So at any rate declares the printed handbill.

In the attitude of Madame Recamier in the picture, I reclined on a lustrous spread of crimson satin and rabbit-skin draped over a small lump of wood for bolster to give support to my elbow. And out of my paint and powder, from amid this oasis--and with repeated warnings "not to touch" screamed by my gipsy--I met as pleasantly and steadily as I could the eyes of the grinning, smirking, awestruck faces--townsfolk and village folk, all agape and all sound Kentish stock.

"That isn't real, she's a doll," lisped a crepe-bonneted little girl who with skimpy legs dangling out of her petticoat had been hoisted up under her armpits for a clearer view. I let a little pause come, then turned my head on my hand and smiled, leaned over and eased my tinselled slipper. An audible sigh, sweet as incense, went up under the hollow of the booth. I looked on softly from face to face--another dream. Some captive beast mewed and brushed against the sides of a cage drawn up a yard or two from where I lay. The lamp poured flame and smoke. The canvas quietly flapped, and was still. Wild ramped the merry-go-round with its bells and hootings; and the panpipes sobbed their liquid decoy. The Signorina's first reception was over.

News of her spread like wildfire. I could hear the showman bellowing at the press of people. His guineas were fructifying. And a peculiar rapturous gravity spread over me. When one's very self is wrapt in the ordeal of the passing moment, is lost like that, out of time and space, it seems, well--another presence had stolen into my mind, had taken possession. I cannot explain. But in this, it may be, all men _are_ equal, whatever their lot. So, I suppose, a flower breaks out of the bud, and butterflies put off the mask of the chrysalis, and rainbows mount the skies. But I must try not to rhapsodize. All I know is that even in that low self-surrender, some tiny spark of life in me could not be content to let my body remain a mere mute stock for the ignorant wonder of those curious eyes.

The actual impulse, however, came from a young woman who, when next the people had streamed in, chanced to be standing close beside me. She was a weak-looking thing, yet reminded me in a sorrowful fashion of Fanny. Caught back by her melancholy, empty eyes, I seemed to lose myself in their darkness; to realize that she, too, was in trouble. I craned up from my wooden bolster and whispered in her hair: "Patience, patience. There shall be a happy issue, my dear, out of all your afflictions."

Only she herself and a weedy, sallow young man in her company could have heard these words. A glint of fright and desperation sprang into her large-pupilled eyes. But I smiled, and we exchanged kindness. She moistened her lips, turned from me, and clutching at the young man's arm, edged her way out of the throng and vanished.

"And what sort be this un?" roared an ox-faced, red-haired man from the back. "This un" hung on his shoulder, tiptoe, fair, young, and blowsy.

"She'll _coin_ you money," I cried pleasantly, "and spend it. The hand that rocks the cradle rules the world."

"And him, and him? the toad!" cried the girl half-angrily at the shout of merriment that had shaken the tent.

"Why, pretty maid," piped I, "the nearer the wine the sweeter the cork; the plumper the pig the fatter the pork." The yell that followed was a better advertisement than drum or panpipes. The showman had discovered an oracle! For the next half-hour my booth was a mass of "Sixpennies"--the squirming Threepennies were told to wait. It filled and emptied again and again like a black bottle in the Dog Days. And when the spirit moved me, I singled out a tell-tale face and told its fortune--not less shrewdly on the whole, I think, than Mrs Ballard's _Book of Fate_.

But it was a strangely exhausting experience. I was inexpressibly relieved when it was over; when the tent-flap descended for the last time, and I could rest from my labours, puffed up, no doubt, with far too rich a conceit of myself, but immeasurably grateful and happy. Comparative quiet descended on the meadows. From a neighbouring tent broke shattering bursts of music, clapping and thumping, the fretful growling of the beasts, the elephant's trumpeting, the firing of guns, whoops, caterwauling, and the jangling of harness. The Grand Circus was in progress, and fantasy made a picture for me of every sound.

Presently my showman reappeared, leading in a pacing, smooth-skinned, cinnamon-and-milk-dappled pony, bridled and saddled with silver and scarlet, his silky mane daintily plaited, his tail a sweeping plume. He stood, I should guess, about half a hand higher than my childhood's Mopsa--the prettiest pygmy creature, though obviously morose and unsettled in temper. I took a good long look at his pink Albino eye. But a knack once acquired is quickly recovered. I mounted him. The stirrup was adjusted, one of my German plaits was dandled over my shoulder, and after a leisurely turn or two in the open, I nodded that the highborn Angelique was ready.

The showman, leering avariciously at me out of his shifty eyes, led us on towards the huge ballooning tent, its pennon fluttering darkly against the stars. I believe if in that spirituous moment he had muttered, "Fly with me, fairest!" all cares forgotten, I'd have been gone. He held his peace.

The brass band within wrenched and blared into the tune of "The Girl I Left behind Me." Chafing, pawing, snorting, my steed, with its rider, paused in the entry. Then with a last smirk of encouragement from the gipsy woman, the rein was loosed, I bowed my head, and the next moment, as if in a floating vat of light, I found myself cantering wellnigh soundlessly round the ring, its circumference thronged tier above tier in the smoke-laden air with ghost-white rings of faces.

I smiled fixedly, tossing my fingers. A piebald clown came wambling in to meet me, struck his hand on his foolish heart, and fell flat in the tan. Love at first sight. Over his prostrate body we ambled, the ill-tempered little beast naggling at its bit, and doing his utmost to unseat me. The music ceased. The cloud of witnesses loured. Come Night, come Nero, I didn't care! Edging the furious little creature into the centre of the ring, I mastered him, wheeled him, in a series of obeisances--North, South, East, West. A hurricane--such as even Mr Bowater can never have outridden--a hurricane of applause burst bounds and all but swept me out of the saddle. "Good-bye, Sweetheart, Good-bye!" sang cornet and trombone. With a toss, I swept my plaits starwards, brandished my whip at the faces, and galloped out into the night.

My _debut_ was over. I confess it--the very memory of it carries me away even now. And even now I would maintain that it was at least a little more successful than that other less professional _debut_ which poor Mr Crimble and Lady Pollacke had left unacclaimed in Beechwood High Street.

Chapter Forty-Seven

My showman, his hard face sleek with sweat, insisted on counting out three huge platelike crown pieces into my lap--for a douceur. I brushed them off on to the ground. "Only to clinch the bargain," he said. His teeth grinned at me as if he would gladly have swallowed me whole.

"Pick up the money," said I coldly, determined once and for all to keep him in his place. "It's early days yet." But when my back was turned, covetous Adam took charge of it.

While we trudged along homeward--for in the deserted night the cage was unnecessary, until I was too tired to go further--I listened to the coins clanking softly together in Adam's pocket It was an intoxicating lullaby. But such are the revulsions of success, for hours and hours that night I lay sleepless. Once I got up and put my hand in where the crowns were, to assure myself I was awake. But the dream which visited me--between the watches of remorse--I shall keep to myself.

With next day's sun, the Signorina had become the talk of the country-side, and Adam's vacant face must have stood him in good stead. She had been such "a draw," he told me, that the showman had decided to stay two more nights on the same pitch: which was fortunate for us both. Especially as on the third afternoon heavy rain fell, converting the green field into a morass. With evening the clouds lifted, and a fulling moon glazed the puddles, and dimmed the glow-worm lamps. Impulse is a capricious master. I did my best, for even when intuition fails my sex, there's obstinacy to fall back upon; but all that I had formerly achieved with ease had to be forced out of me that night with endless effort. The Oracle was unwilling. When a genteel yet foxy looking man, with whiskers and a high stiff collar under his chin, sneakishly invited me to tell his fortune, and I replied that "Prudent chickens roost high," the thrust was a little too deft. My audience was amused, but nobody laughed.

He seemed to be well known, and the green look he cast me proved that the truth is not always palatable or discreet. Unseduced by the lumps of sugar which I had pilfered for him, my peevish mount jibbed and bucked and all but flung the Princess of Andalusia into the sodden ring. He succeeded in giving a painful wrench to her wrist, which doubled the applause.

A strange thing happened to me, too, that night. When for the second or third time the crowd was flocking in to view me, my eyes chanced to fall on a figure standing in the clouded light a little apart. He was dressed in a high-peaked hat and a long and seemingly brown cassock-like garment, with buttoned tunic and silver-buckled leather belt. Spurs were on his boots, a light whip in his hand. Aloof, his head a little bowed down, his face in profile, he stood there, framed in the opening, dusky, level-featured, deep-eyed--a Stranger.

What in me rushed as if on wings into his silent company? A passionate longing beyond words burned in me. I seemed to be carried away into a boundless wilderness--stunted trees, salt in the air, a low, enormous stretch of night sky, space; and this man, master of soul and solitude.

He never heeded me; raised not an eyelid to glance into my tent. If he had, what then? I was a nothing. When next, after the press of people, I looked, he was gone; I saw him no more. Yet the girlish remembrance remains, consoling this superannuated heart like a goblet of flowers in that secret chamber of the mind we call the imagination.

The fall from that giddy moment into this practical world was abrupt. Sulky, tired with the rain and the cumbersome cage and the showman's insults, on our arrival at Monk's House Adam was completely unnerved when he found our usual entry locked and bolted.

He gibbered at me like a mountebank in the windy moonlight, his conical head blotting out half the cloud-wracked sky. These gallivantings were as much as his place was worth. He would wring the showman's neck. He had a nail in his shoe. He had been respectable all his life; and what was I going to do about it? A nice kettle of fish. Oh, yes, he had had "a lick or two of the old lady's tongue" already, and he didn't want another. What's more, there was the mealy-mouthed Marvell to reckon with.

Once free of the cage, I faced him and desired to know whether he would be happier if I wrote at once to Mrs Monnerie and absolved him there and then. "Look at yourself in your own mind," I bade him. "What a sight is a coward!" And I fixed him with none too friendly an eye under the moon.

His clumsiness in opening a window disturbed Mrs French. She came to the head of the staircase and leaned over, while we crouched in a recess beneath. But while the beams of the candle she carried were too feeble to pierce the well of darkness between us, by twisting round my head I could see every movement and changing expression of the shape above me--the frilled, red-flannel dressing-gown, the shawl over her head, and her inflamed peering face surmounted with a "front" of hair in pins. She was talking to herself in peculiar guttural mutterings. But soon, either because she was too sleepy or too indolent to search further, she withdrew again; and Adam and I were free to creep up the glooming shallow staircase into safety.

Last but not least, when I came to undress, I found that my grandfather's little watch was gone. In a fever I tumbled my clothes over again and again. Then I sat down and in memory went over the events of the evening, and came at last to the thief. There was no doubt of him--a small-headed, puny man, who almost with tears in his eyes had besought me to give him one of my buttons to take home to his crippled little daughter. He had pressed close: my thoughts had been far away. I confess this loss unnerved me--a haggard face looked out of my glass. I scrambled into bed, and sought refuge as quickly as possible from these heart-burnings.

After such depressing experiences Adam's resolution was at an even lower ebb next morning. We met together under the sunny whispering pine-trees. I wheedled, argued, adjured him in vain. Almost at my wits' end at last, I solemnly warned him that if we failed the showman the following evening, he would assuredly have the law against us. "A pretty pair we shall look, Adam, standing up there in the dock--with the black cap and the wigs and the policemen and everything. And not a penny for our pains."

He squinted at me in unfeigned alarm at this; the lump in his throat went up and down; and though possibly I had painted the picture in rather sombre colours, this settled the matter. I hope it taught Adam to fight shy ever afterwards of adventuresses. It certainly taught _this_ adventuress that the mind may be "subdued to what it works in, like the dyer's hand." I cast a look of hatred after the weak, silly man as he disappeared between the trees.

The circus, so the showman had warned me, was moving on that day to another market town, Whippington--six miles or so from its present pitch, though not more than four miles further away from Croomham. This would mean a long and wearisome trudge for us the next evening, as I found on consulting an immense map of Kent. Yet my heart sighed with delight at the discovery that, as the dove flies, we should be a full five miles nearer to Beechwood. If this little church on the map was St Peter's, and this faint shading the woody contour of the Hill, why, then, that square dot was Wanderslore. I sprawled over the outspread county with sublime content. My very "last appearance" was at hand; liberty but a few hollow hours away.

It is true I had promised my showman to think over his invitation to me to "sign on" as a permanent member of his troupe of clowns, acrobats, wild beasts, and monstrosities. He had engaged in return to pay me in full, "with a bit over," at the close of the last performance. But I had merely laughed and nodded. Not that I was in any true sense ashamed of what I had done. Not _ashamed_.

But you cannot swallow your pride and your niceness without any discomfort. I was conscious of a hardening of the skin, of a grimness stealing over my mouth, and of a tendency to stare at the world rather more boldly than modesty should. At least, so it seemed. In reality it may have been that Life was merely scraping off the "cream." Quite a wholesome experience.

On the practical side, all was well. Two pounds to Adam, which I had promised to make three if he earned it, would leave me with thirteen or twelve pounds odd, apart from my clumsy "douceur." I thirsted for my wages. With that sum--two five-pound notes and say, four half-sovereigns--sewn up, if possible, in my petticoat, I should once more be my own mistress; and I asked no more for the moment. The future must take care of itself. On one thing I was utterly resolved--never, never to return to Monk's House, or to No. 2--to that old squalid luxury, dissembling and humiliation.

No: my Monnerie days were over; even though it had taken a full pound of their servile honey to secrete this ounce of rebellious wax.

How oddly chance events knit themselves together. That very morning I had received a belated and re-addressed letter which smote like sunbeams on my hopes and plans. It was from Mrs Bowater:--

"DEAR MISS M.,--I send this line to say that I am still in the land
of the living. I have buried my poor husband but have hopes some
day of bringing him home. England is England when all's said and
done, and I can't say I much approve of foreign parts. It's a fine
town and not what you might call foreign to look at the buildings,
but moist and flat and the streets like a draughtboard. And the
thought of the cattle upsets me. Everything topsy-turvy too with
Spring coming along and breaking out and we here on the brink of
September. It has been an afflicting time though considering all
things he made a peaceful end, with a smile on his face as you
would hardly consider possible.

"The next fortnight will see me on board the steamer again, which I
can scarcely support the thought of, though, please God, I shall
see it through. I have spent many days alone here and the
strangeness of it all and the foreign faces bring up memories which
are happier forgotten. But I'm often thinking what fine things you
must be doing in that fine place. Not as I think riches will buy
everything in this world--and a mercy too--or that I'm not anxious
at times you don't come to harm with that delicate frame and all.
Wrap up warm, miss, be watchful of your victuals and keep early
hours. Such being so, I'm still hoping when I come home, if I'm
spared, you may be of a mind to come to Beechwood Hill again and
maybe settle down.

"I may say that I had my suspicions for some time that that young
Mr Anon was consumptive in the lungs. But from what I gathered he
isn't, only suffering from a stomach cough--bad cooking and
exposing himself in all weathers. I will say nothing nearer. I
shall be easier off as money goes, but you and me needn't think of
that. Fanny doesn't write much and which I didn't much expect. She
is of an age now which must reap as it has sown, though even
allowing for the accident of birth, as they say, a mother's a
mother till the end of the chapter. I must now close. May the Lord
bless you, miss, wherever you may be.

Yours truly,

"E. BOWATER (MRS)."

Surely this letter was a good omen. It cheered me, and yet it was disquieting, too. That afternoon I spent in the garden, wandering irresolutely up and down under the blue sky, and fretting at the impenetrable wall of time that separated me from the longed-for hour of freedom. On a sunny stone near a foresty bed of asparagus I sat down at last, tired, and a little dispirited. I was angry with myself for the last night's failure, and for a kind of weakness that had come over me. Yet how different a creature was here to-day from that of only a week ago. From the darkened soil the stalks sprang up, stiffened and green with rain. A snail reared up her horns beneath my stone. An azure butterfly alighted on my knee, slowly fanning its turquoise wings, patterned with a delicate narrow black band on the one side, and spots of black and orange like a Paisley shawl beneath. Between silver-knobbed antennae its furry perplexed face and shining eyes looked out at me, sharing my warmth. I watched it idly. How long we had been strangers. And surely the closer one looked at anything that was not of man's making.... My thoughts drifted away. I began day-dreaming again.

And it seemed that life was a thing that had neither any plan nor any purpose; that I was sunk, as if in a bog, in ignorance of why or where or who I truly was. The days melted on, to be lost or remembered, the Spring into Summer, and then Winter and death. What was the meaning of it all--this enormous ocean of time and space in which I was lost? Never else than a stranger. That couldn't be true of the men and women who really keep the world's "pot boiling." All _I_ could pray for was to sit like this for a while, undisturbed and at peace with my own heart. Peace--did I so much as know the meaning of the word? How dingy a patchwork I had made of everything. And how customary were becoming these little passing fits of repining and remorse. The one sole thing that comforted me--apart from my blue butterfly--was an echo in my head of those clapping hands, whoops and catcalls--and the white staring faces in the glare. And a few months ago this would have seemed an incredible degradation.

There stole into memory that last evening at Wanderslore. What would he think of me now? I had done worse than forget him, had learned in one single instant that for ever and ever, however dearly I liked and valued him and delighted in his company, I could not be "in love" with him. I hid my face in my hands. Yet a curious quiet wish for his company sprang up in me. How stiff-necked and affected I had been. Love was nothing but cheating. Let me but confess, explain, ask forgiveness, unburden myself. Those hollow temples, that jutting jaw, the way he stooped on his hands and coughed. My great-aunt, Kitilda, had died in her youth of consumption. A sudden dread, like a skeleton out of the sky, stood up in my mind. There was no time to delay. To-morrow night, Adam or no Adam, I would set off to find him: all would be well.

As if in response to my thought, a shadow stole over the stones beside me. I looked up and--aghast--saw Fanny.

Chapter Forty-Eight

Her head was turned away from me, a striped parasol leaned over her shoulder. With a faintly defiant tilt of her beautiful head, as if exclaiming, "See, Strangeness, I come!" she stepped firmly on over the turf. A breath of some delicate indoor perfume was wafted across to my nostrils. I clung to my stone, watching her.

Simply because it seemed a meanness to play the spy on her in her solitude, I called her name. But her start of surprise was mere feigning. The silk of her parasol encircled her shoulders like an immense nimbus. Her eyes dwelt on me, as if gathering up the strands of an unpleasing memory.

"Ah, Midgetina," she called softly, "it is you, is it, on your little stone? Are you better?" The very voice seemed conscious of its own cadences. "What a delicious old garden. The contrast!"

The contrast. With a cold gathering apprehension at my heart I glanced around me. Why was it that of all people only Fanny could so shrink me up like this into my body? And there floated back to remembrance the vast, dazzling room, the flower-clotted table, and, in that hideous vertigo, a face frenzied with disgust and rage, a hand flung out to cast me off. But I entered her trap none the less.

"Contrast, Fanny?"

"No, _no_, now, my dear! Not quite so disingenuous as all that, _please_. You can't have quite forgotten the last time we met."

"There was nothing in that, Fanny. Only that the midge was drunk. You should see the wasps over there in the nectarines."

"Only?" she echoed lightly, raising her eyebrows. "I am not sure that every one would put it quite like that. You couldn't see yourself, you see. They call you little Miss Cassandra now. Woe! Woe! you know. Mrs Monnerie asked me if I thought you were--you know--'all there,' as they say."

"I don't care what they say."

"If I weren't an old friend," she returned with crooked lip, "you might be made to care. I have brought the money you were kind enough to lend me; I'll give it you when I have unpacked--to-morrow night."

My body sank into a stillness that might well have betrayed its mind's confusion to a close observer. _Had_ she lingered satirically, meaningly, on those two last words? "I don't want the money, Fanny: aren't you generous enough to accept a gift?"

"Well," said she, "it needs a good deal of generosity sometimes. Surely, a gift depends upon the spirit in which it is given. That last little message, now--was that, shall we say, an acceptable gift?" Her tones lost their silkiness. "See here, Midgetina," she went on harshly, "you and I are going to talk all this out. But I'm thirsty. I hate this spawning sun. Where are the nectarines?"

Much against my will I turned my back on her, and led her off to the beehives.

"One for you," she said, stooping forward, balancing the sheeny toe of her shoe on the brown mould, "and the rest for me. Catch!" She dropped a wasp-bitten, pulpy fruit into my hands. "Now then. It's shadier here. No eavesdroppers. Just you and me and God. _Please_ sit down?"

There was no choice. Down I sat; and she on a low wooden seat opposite me in the shade, her folded parasol beside her, the leaf-hung wall behind. She bit daintily into the juicy nectarine poised between finger and thumb, and watched me with a peculiar fixed smile, as if of admiration, on her pale face.

"Tell me, pretty Binbin," she began again, "what is the name of that spiked red and blue and violet thing behind your back? It colours the edges of your delicate china cheeks. Most becoming!"

It was viper's bugloss--a stray, I told her, shifting my head uneasily beneath her scrutiny.

"Ah, yes, _viper's_ bugloss. Personally I prefer the common variety. Though no doubt that may stray, too. But fie, fie! You naughty thing," she sprang up and plucked another nectarine, "you have been blacking your eyebrows. I shouldn't have dreamt it of you. What would mother say?"

"Listen, Fanny," I said, pronouncing the words as best I could with a tongue that seemed to be sticking to the roof of my mouth; "I am tired of the garden. What do you really want to say to me? I don't much care for your--your fun."

"And I just beginning to enjoy it! There's contrariness!--To _say_? Well, now, a good deal, my dear. I thought of writing. But it's better--safer to talk. The first thing is this. While you have been malingering down here I have had to face the whole Monnerie orchestra. It hasn't been playing quite in tune; and you know why. That lovesick Susan, now, and her nice young man. But since you seem to be quite yourself again--more of yourself than ever, in fact: listen." I gazed, almost hypnotized, through the sunshine into her shady face.

"What I am going to suggest," she went on smoothly, "concerns only you and me. If you and I are to go on living in the same house--which heaven forbid--I give you fair warning that we shall have nothing more to do with one another than is absolutely inevitable. I am not so forgiving as I ought to be, Midgetina, and insults rankle. Treachery, still more." The low voice trembled.

"Oh, yes, you may roll your innocent little eyes and look as harmless as a Chinese god, but answer me this: Am _I_ a hypocrite? Am I? And while you are thinking it over, hadn't you better tumble that absurd little pumpkin off your knee? It's staining your charming frock."

"I never said you were a hypocrite," I choked.

"No?" The light gleamed on the whites of her eyes as they roved to and fro. "Then I say, _you_ are. Fair to face, false to back. Who first trapped me out star-gazing in the small hours, then played informer? Who wheedled her way on with her mincing humbug--poof! _naivete!_--and set my own mother against me? Who told some one--_you_ know who--that I was not to be trusted, and far better cast-off? Who stuffed that lackadaisical idiot of a Sukie Monnerie with all _those_ old horrors? Who warned that miserable little piece of deformity that I might come--borrowing? Who hoped to betray me by sending an envelope through the post packed with mousey bits of paper? Who made me a guy, a laughing-stock and poisoned---- Oh, it's a long score, Miss M. When I think of it all, what I've endured--well, honestly when a wasp crawls out of my jam, I remind myself that it's stinged."

The light smouldering eyes held me fast. "You mean, I suppose, Fanny, that you'd just kill it," I mumbled, looking up into her distorted face. "I don't think I should much mind even that. But it's no use. It would take hours to answer your questions. You have only put them your own way. They may sound true. But in your heart you know they are false. Why should you bother to hurt me? You know--you know how idiotically I loved you."

"_Loved me, false, kill_," echoed Fanny scornfully, with a leer which transformed her beauty into a mere vulgar grimace. "Is there any end to the deceits of the little gaby? Do you really suppose that to be loved is a new experience for me; that I'm not smeared with it wherever I go; that I care a snap of my fingers whether I'm loved or not; that I couldn't win through without that? Is that what you suppose? Well, then, here's one more secret. Open your ears. I am going to marry Percy Maudlen. Yes, _that_ weed of a creature. You may remember my little prophecy when he brought his Aunt Alice's manikin some lollipops. Well, the grace of God is too leisurely, and since you and I are both, I suppose, of the same sex, I tell you I care no more for him than that----" She flung the nectarine stone at the beehive. "And I _defy_ you, defy you to utter a word. I am glad I was born what I am. All your pretty little triumphs, first to last, what are they?--accidents and insults. Isn't half the world kicking down the faces of those beneath them on the ladder? _I_ have had to fight for a place. And I tell you this: I am going to teach these supercilious money-smelling ladies a lesson. I am going to climb till I can sneer down on _them_. And Mrs Monnerie is going to help me. She doesn't care a jot for God or man. But she enjoys intelligence, and loves a fighter. Is that candour? Is it now?"

"I detest Percy Maudlen," I replied faintly. "And as for sneering, that only makes another wall. Oh, Fanny, do listen to yourself, to what you are. I swear I'm not the sneak you think me. I'd help you, if I could, to my last breath. Indeed, I would. Yes, and soon I _can_."