Chapter V: Part 5

Hope died out in me, leaving an almost physical nausea, a profound hatred of myself and even of being alive. "Well," a cold voice said in my ear, "that's how we are treated; that comes of those eyes we cannot forget. Cheated, cheated again, my friend."

In those young days disappointment set my heart aching with a bitterness less easy to bear than it is now. No doubt I was steeped in sentimentality and folly. It was the vehemence of this new feeling that almost terrified me. But my mind was my world; it is my only excuse. I could not get out of _that_ by merely turning a tiny key in a Brahma lock. Nor could I betake myself to bed. How sleep in such an inward storm of reproaches, humiliation, and despised love?

I drew down my veil, wrapped my shawl closer round my shoulders, descended my staircase, and presently stood in the porch in confrontation of the night. Low on the horizon, at evens with me across space, and burning with a limpid fire, hung my chosen--Sirius. The sudden sight of him pouring his brilliance into my eyes brought a revulsion of feeling. He was "cutting me dead." I brazened him down. I trod with exquisite caution down the steps, daring but one fleeting glance, as I turned, at Fanny's window. It was blinded, empty. Toiling on heavily up the hill, I sourly comforted myself with the vow that she should realize how little I cared, that her room had been sweeter than her company. Never more would I put trust in "any child of man."

Gradually, however, the quiet night received me into its peace (just as, poor soul, did the Moor Desdemona), and its influence stole into my darkened mind. The smooth, columnar boughs of the beeches lifted themselves archingly into the sky. Soon I was climbing over the moss-bound roots of my customary observatory. But this night the stars were left for a while unsignalled and unadmired. The crisped, frost-lined leaves scattered between the snake-like roots sparkled faintly. Years seemed to have passed away, dwindled in Time's hour-glass, since my previous visit. That Miss M. had ghosted herself away for ever. In my reverie the vision of Fanny re-arose into my imagination--that secret still fountain--of herself. Asleep now.... I could no more free myself from her sorcery than I could disclaim the two hands that lay in my lap. She was indeed more closely mine than they--and nearer in actuality than I had imagined.

A faint stir in the woods suddenly caught my attention. The sound neared. I pressed my hand to my breast, torn now between two incentives, two desires--to fly, to stay. And on the path by which I had come, appeared, some yards distant, in the faint trickling light, the dark figure of my dreams.

She was dressed in a black cloak, its peaked old-fashioned hood drawn over her head. The moonbeams struck its folds as she moved. Her face was bowed down a little, her hand from within clutching her cloak together. And I realized instinctively and with joy that the silence and solitude of the woods alarmed her. It was I who was calm and self-contained. She paused and looked around her--stood listening with lips divided that yet could not persuade themselves to call me by name. For my part, I softly gathered myself closer together and continued to gloat. And suddenly out of the far-away of the woods a nightbird loosed its cry: "A-hoo.... Ahoo-oo-oo-hooh!"

There is a hunter in us all. I laughed inwardly as I watched. A few months more and I was to watch a lion-tamer ... but let me keep to one thing at a time. I needled myself in, and, almost hooting the sound through my mouth, as if in echo of the bird, I heard myself call stealthily across the air, "Fanny!--Fanny Bowater!"

The cloaked figure recoiled, with lifted head, like the picture of a fawn I have seen, and gazed in my direction. Seeing nothing of me amidst the leaves and shadows, she was about to flee, when I called again:--

"It is I, Fanny. Here: here!"

Instantly she woke to herself, came near, and looked down on me. No movement welcomed her. "I was tired of waiting," I yawned. "There is nothing to be frightened about."

Many of her fellow creatures, I fancy, have in their day wearied of waiting for Fanny Bowater, but few have had the courage or sagacity to tell her so. She had not recovered her equanimity fully enough to refrain from excuses.

"Surely you did not expect me while mother was moving? I am not accustomed, Miss M., to midnight wanderings."

"I gave up expecting you, and was glad to be alone."

The barb fell short. She looked stilly around her. The solemn beeches were like mute giants overarching with their starry, sky-hung boughs the dark, slim figure. What consciousness had they, I wonder, of those odd humans at their roots?

"Alone! Here!" she returned. "But no wonder. It's what you are all about."

A peculiar elation sprang up in me at this none too intelligible remark.

"I wonder, though," she added, "you are not frozen like--like a pebble, sitting there."

"But I am," I said, laughing softly. "It doesn't matter in me, because I'm so easy to thaw. You ought to know that. Oh, Miss Bowater, think if this were summer time and the dew and the first burning heat! Are you wrapped up? And shall we sit here, just--just for one dance of the Sisters: thou lost dove, Merope?"

For there on high--and I had murmured the last words all but inaudibly to myself--there played the spangling Pleiads, clear above her head in the twig-swept sky.

"What sisters?" she inquired, merely humouring me, perhaps.

"The Six, Fanny, look! You cannot see their Seventh--yet she is all that _that_ is about." South to north I swept my hand across the powdery firmament. "And I myself trudge along down Watling Street; that's the Milky Way. I don't think, Fanny, I shall ever, ever be weaned. Please, may I call you that?"

She frowned up a moment into the emptiness, hesitated, then--just like a white peacock I had once seen when a child from my godmother's ancient carriage as we rolled by an old low house with terraces smooth as velvet beneath its cedars--she disposed her black draperies upon the ground at a little distance, disclosing, in so doing, beneath their folds the moon-blanched flounces of her party gown. I gazed spellbound. I looked at the white and black, and thought of what there was within their folds, and of the heart within that, and of the spirit of man. Such was my foolish fashion, following idly like a butterfly the scents of the air, flitting on from thought to thought, and so missing the full richness of the one blossom on which I might have hovered.

"Tell me some more," broke suddenly the curious voice into the midst of this reverie.

"Well, there," I cried, "is fickle Algol; the Demon. And over there where the Crab crawls, is the little Beehive between the Roses."

"Praesepe," drawled Fanny.

"Yes," said I, unabashed, "the Beehive. And crane back your neck, Fanny--there's little Jack-by-the-Middle-Horse; and far down, oh, far down, Berenice's Hair, which would have been Fanny Bowater's Hair, if you had been she."

Even as I looked, a remote film of mist blotted out the infinitesimal cluster. "And see, beyond the Chair," I went on, laughing, and yet exalted with my theme, "that dim in the Girdle is the Great Nebula--s-sh! And on, on, that chirruping Invisible, _that_, Fanny, is the Midget. Perhaps you cannot even dream of her: but she watches."

"Never even heard of her," said Fanny good-humouredly, withdrawing the angle of her chin from the Ecliptic.

"Say not so, Horatia," I mocked, "there are more things...."

"Oh, yes, I know all about that. And these cold, monotonous old things really please you? Personally, I'd give the whole meaningless scramble of them for another moon."

"But your old glutton has gobbled up half of them already."

"Then my old glutton can gobble up what's left. Who taught you about them? And why," she scanned me closely, "why did you pick out the faintest; do you see them the best?"

"I picked out the faintest because they were meant especially for me so that I could give them to you. My father taught me a little about them; and _your_ father the rest."

"_My_ father," echoed Fanny, her face suddenly intent.

"His book. Do you miss him? Mine is dead."

"Oh, yes, I miss him," was the serene retort, "and so, I fancy, does mother."

"Oh, Fanny, I am sorry. She told me--something like that."

"You need not be. I suppose God chooses one's parents quite deliberately. Praise Him from Whom all blessings flow!" She smoothed out her black cloak over her ankles, raised her face again into the dwindling moonlight, and gently smiled at me. "I am glad I came, Midgetina, though it's suicidally cold. '_Pardi! on sent Dieu bien a son aise ici._' We are going to be great friends, aren't we?" Her eyes swept over me. "Would you like that?"

"Friends," indeed! and as if she had offered me a lump of sugar.

I gravely nodded. "But I must come to you. You can't come to me. No one has; except, perhaps, my mother--a little."

"Oh, yes," she replied cautiously, piercing her eyes at me, "that _is_ a riddle. You must tell me about your childhood. Not that I love children, or my own childhood either. I had enough of that to last me a lifetime. I shan't pass it on; though I promise you, Midgetina, if I ever _do_ have a baby, I will anoint its little backbone with the grease of moles, bats, and dormice, and make it like you. Was your mother----" she began again, after a pause of reflection. "Are _you_ sorry, I mean, you aren't--you aren't----?"

Her look supplied the missing words. "Sorry that I am a midget, Fanny? People think I must be. But why? It is all I am, all I ever was. I am myself, inside; like everybody else; and yet, you know, not quite like everybody else. I sometimes think"--I laughed at the memory--"I was asking Dr Phelps about that. Besides, would _you_ be--alone?"

"Not when I was alone, perhaps. Still, it must be rather odd, Miss Needle-in-a-Haystack. As for being alone"--once again our owl, if owl it was, much nearer now, screeched its screech in the wintry woods--"I hate it!"

"But surely," expostulated the wiseacre in me, "that's what we cannot help being. We even die alone, Fanny."

"Oh, but I'm going to help it. I'm not dead yet. Do you ever think of the future?"

For an instant its great black hole yawned close, but I shook my head.

"Well, that," replied she, "is what Fanny Bowater is doing all the time. There's nothing," she added satirically, "so important, so imperative for teachers as learning. And you must learn your lesson, my dear, before you are heard it--if you want to escape a slapping. Every little donkey knows that."

"I suppose the truth is," said I, as if seized with a bright idea, "there are two kinds of ambitions, of wants, I mean. We are all like those Chinese boxes; and some of us want to live in the biggest, the outsidest we can possibly manage; and some in the inmost one of all. The one," I added a little drearily, "no one can share."

"Quite, quite true," said Fanny, mimicking my sententiousness, "the teeniest, tiniest, ickiest one, which no mortal ingenuity has ever been able to open--and so discover the nothing inside. I know your Chinese Boxes!"

"Poor Fanny," I cried, rising up and kneeling beside the ice-cold hand that lay on the frosty leaves. "All that I have shall help you."

Infatuated thing; I stooped low as I knelt, and stroked softly with my own the outstretched fingers on which she was leaning.

I might have been a pet animal for all the heed she paid to my caress. "Fanny," I whispered tragically, "will you please sing to me--if you are not frozenly cold? You remember--the Moon Song: I have never forgotten it; and only three notes, yet it sometimes wakes me at night. It's queer, isn't it, being you and me?"

She laughed, tilting her chin; and her voice began at once to sing, as if at the scarcely opened door of her throat, and a tune so plain it seemed but the words speaking:--

"Twas a Cuckoo, cried 'cuck-oo'
In the youth of the year;
And the timid things nesting,
Crouched, ruffled in fear;
And the Cuckoo cried, 'cuck-oo,'
For the honest to hear.

One--two notes: a bell sound
In the blue and the green;
'Cuck-oo: cuck-oo: cuck-oo!'
And a silence between.

Ay, mistress, have a care, lest
Harsh love, he hie by,
And for kindness a monster
To nourish you try--
In your bosom to lie:
'Cuck-oo,' and a 'cuck-oo,'
And 'cuck-oo!'"

The sounds fell like beads into the quiet--as if a small child had come up out of her heart and gone down again; and she callous and unmoved. I cannot say why the clear, muted notes saddened and thrilled me so. Was _she_ the monster?

I had drawn back, and stayed eyeing her pale face, the high cheek, the delicate straight nose, the darkened lips, the slim black eyebrows, the light, clear, unfathomable eyes reflecting the solitude and the thin brilliance of the wood. Yet the secret of herself remained her own. She tried in vain not to be disturbed at my scrutiny.

"Well," she inquired at last, with motionless glance fixed on the distance. "Do you think you could honestly give me a testimonial, Miss Midget?"

It is strange. The Sphinx had spoken, yet without much enlightenment. "Now look at me," I commanded. "If I went away, you couldn't follow. When you go away, you cannot escape from me. I can go back and--and _be_ where I was." My own meaning was half-concealed from me; but a startled something that had not been there before peeped out of those eyes so close to mine.

"If," she said, "I could care like that too, yet wanted nothing, then I should be free too."

"What do you mean?" said I, lifting my hand from the unanswering fingers.

"I mean," she exclaimed, leaping to her feet, "that I'm sick to death of the stars and am going home to bed. Hateful, listening old woods!"

I turned sharp round, as if in apprehension that some secret hearer might have caught her remark. But Fanny stretched out her arms, and, laughing a foolish tune, in affected abandonment began softly to dance in the crisp leaves, quite lost to me again. So twirling, she set off down the path by which she had come trespassing. A physical exhaustion came over me. I watched her no more, but stumbled along, with unheeding eyes, in her wake. What had I not given, I thought bitterly, and this my reward. Thus solitary, I had gone only a little distance, and had reached the outskirts of the woods, when a far from indifferent Fanny came hastening back to intercept me.

And no wonder. She had remembered to attire herself becomingly for her moonlight tryst, but had forgotten the door key. We stood looking at one another aghast, as, from eternity, I suppose, have all fellow-conspirators in danger of discovery. It was I who first awoke to action. There was but one thing to be done, and, warning Fanny that I had never before attempted to unlatch the big front door of her mother's house, I set off resolutely down the hill.

"You walk so slowly!" she said suddenly, turning back on me. "I will carry you."

Again we paused. I looked up at her with an inextricable medley of emotions struggling together in my mind, and shook my head.

"But why, why?" she repeated impatiently. "We could get there in half the time."

"If you could _fly_, Fanny, I'd walk," I replied stubbornly.

"You mean----" and her cold anger distorted her face. "Oh, pride! What childish nonsense! And you said we were to be friends. Do you suppose I care whether...?" But the question remained unfinished.

"I _am_ your friend," said I, "and that is why I will not, I _will_ not give way to you." It was hardly friendship that gleamed out of the wide eyes then. But mine the victory--a victory in which only a tithe of the spoils, unrecognized by the vanquished, had fallen to the victor.

Without another word she turned on her heel, and for the rest of our dejected journey she might have been mistaken for a cross nurse trailing on pace for pace beside a rebellious child. My dignity was less ruffled than hers, however, and for a brief while I had earned my freedom.

Arrived at the house, dumbly hostile in the luminous night, Fanny concealed herself as best she could behind the gate-post and kept watch on the windows. Far away in the stillness we heard a footfall echoing on the hill. "There is some one coming," she whispered, "you must hurry." She might, I think, have serpented her way in by my own little door. Where the _head_ leads, the heart may follow. But she did not suggest it. Nor did I.

I tugged and pushed as best I could, but the umbrella with which from a chair I at last managed to draw the upper bolt of the door was extremely cumbersome. The latch for a while resisted my efforts. And the knowledge that Fanny was fretting and fuming behind the gatepost hardly increased my skill. The house was sunken in quiet; Mrs Bowater apparently was sleeping without her usual accompaniment; only Henry shared my labours, and he sat moodily at the foot of the stairs, refusing to draw near until at the same moment Fanny entered, and he leapt out.

Once safely within, and the door closed and bolted again, Fanny stood for a few moments listening. Then with a sigh and a curious gesture she bent herself and kissed the black veil that concealed my fair hair.

"I am sorry, Midgetina," she whispered into its folds, "I was impatient. Mother wouldn't have liked the astronomy, you know. That was all. And I am truly sorry for--for----"

"My dear," I replied in firm, elderly tones, whose echo is in my ear to this very day; "My dear, it was my mind you hurt, not my feelings." With that piece of sententiousness I scrambled blindly through my Bates's doorway, shut the door behind me, and more disturbed at heart than I can tell, soon sank into the thronging slumber of the guilty and the obsessed.

Chapter Fourteen

When my eyes opened next morning, a strange, still glare lay over the ceiling, and I looked out of my window on a world mantled and cold with snow. For a while I forgot the fever of the last few days in watching the birds hopping and twittering among the crumbs that Mrs Bowater scattered out on the windowsill for my pleasure. And yet--their every virtue, every grace, Fanny Bowater, all were thine! The very snow, in my girlish fantasy, was the fairness beneath which the unknown Self in her must, as I fondly believed, lie slumbering; a beauty that hid also from me for a while the restless, self-centred mind. How believe that such beauty is any the less a gift to its possessor than its bespeckled breast and song to a thrush, its sheen to a starling? It is a riddle that still baffles me. If we are all shut up in our bodies as the poets and the Scriptures say we are, then how is it that many of the loveliest seem to be all but uninhabited, or to harbour such dingy tenants; while quite plain faces may throng with animated ghosts?

Fanny did not come to share my delight in the snow that morning. And as I looked out on it, waiting on in vain, hope flagged, and a sadness stole over its beauty. Probably she had not given the fantastic lodger a thought. She slid through life, it seemed, as easily as a seal through water. But I was not the only friend who survived her caprices. In spite of her warning about the dish-washing, Mr Crimble came to see her that afternoon. She was out. With a little bundle of papers in his hand he paused at the gate-post to push his spectacles more firmly on to his nose and cast a kind of homeless look over the fields before turning his face towards St Peter's. Next day, Holy Innocents', he came again; but this time with more determination, for he asked to see me.

To rid myself, as far as possible, of one piece of duplicity, I at once took the bull by the horns, and in the presence of Mrs Bowater boldly invited him to stay to tea. With a flurried glance of the eye in her direction he accepted my invitation.

"A cold afternoon, Mrs Bowater," he intoned. "The cup that cheers, the cup that cheers."

My landlady left the conventions to take care of themselves; and presently he and I found ourselves positively _tete-a-tete_ over her seed cake and thin bread and butter.

But though we both set to work to make conversation, an absent intentness in his manner, a listening turn of his head, hinted that his thoughts were not wholly with me.

"Are you long with us?" he inquired, stirring his tea.

"I am quite, quite happy here," I replied, with a sigh.

"Ah!" he replied, a little wistfully, taking a sip, "how few of us have the courage to confess that. Perhaps it flatters us to suppose we are miserable. It is this pessimism--of a mechanical, a scientific age--which we have chiefly to contend against. We don't often see you at St Peter's, I think?"

"You wouldn't see _very_ much of me, if I did come," I replied a little tartly. Possibly it was his "we" that had fretted me. It seemed needlessly egotistical. "On the other hand," I added, "wouldn't there be a risk of the congregation seeing nothing else?"

Mr Crimble opened his mouth and laughed. "I wish," he said, with a gallant little bow, "there were more like you."

"More like _me_, Mr Crimble?"

"I mean," he explained, darting a glance at the furniture of my bedroom, whose curtains, to my annoyance, hung withdrawn, "I mean that--that you--that so many of us refuse to see the facts of life. To look them in the face, Miss M. There is nothing to fear."

We were getting along famously, and I begged him to take some of Mrs Bowater's black currant jam.

"But then, I have plenty of time," I said agreeably. "And the real difficulty is to get the facts to face me. Dear me, if only, now, I had some of Miss Bowater's brains."

A veil seemed suddenly to lift from his face and as suddenly to descend again. So, too, he had for a moment stopped eating, then as suddenly begun eating again.

"Ah, Miss Bowater! She is indeed clever; a--a brilliant young lady. The very life of a party, I assure you. And, yet, do you know, in parochial gatherings, try as I may, I occasionally find it very difficult to get people to mix. The little social formulas, the prejudices. Yet, surely, Miss M., religion _should_ be the great solvent. At least, that is my view."

He munched away more vigorously, and gazed through his spectacles out through my window-blinds.

"Mixing people must be very wearisome," I suggested, examining his face.

"'Wearisome,'" he repeated blandly. "I am sometimes at my wits' end. No. A curate's life is not a happy one." Yet he confessed it almost with joy.

"And the visiting!" I said. And then, alas! my tongue began to run away with me. He was falling back again into what I may call his company voice, and I pined to talk to the real Mr Crimble, little dreaming how soon that want was to be satiated.

"I sometimes wonder, do you know, if religion is made difficult enough."

"But I assure you," he replied, politely but firmly, "a true religion is exceedingly difficult. 'The eye of a needle'--we mustn't forget that."

"Ah, yes," said I warmly; "that 'eye' will be narrow enough even for a person with my little advantages. I remember my mother's cook telling me, when I was a child, that in the old days, really wicked people if they wanted to return to the Church, had to do so in a sheet, with ashes on their heads, you know, and carrying a long lighted candle. She said that if the door was shut against them, they died in torment, and went to Hell. But she was a Roman Catholic, like my grandmother."

Mr Crimble peered at me as if over a wall.

"I remember, too," I went on, "one summer's day as a very little girl I was taken to the evening service. And the singing--bursting out like that, you know, with the panting and the yowling of the organ, made me faint and sick; and I jumped right out of the window."

"Jumped out of the window!" cried my visitor in consternation.

"Yes, we were at the back. Pollie, my nursemaid, had put me up in the niche, you see; and I dragged her hand away. But I didn't hurt myself. The grass was thick in the churchyard; I fell light, and I had plenty of clothes on. I rather enjoyed it--the air and the tombstones. And though I had my gasps, the 'eye' seemed big enough when I was a child. But afterwards--when I was confirmed--I thought of Hell a good deal. I can't _see_ it so plainly now. Wide, low, and black, with a few demons. _That_ can't be right."

"My dear young lady!" cried Mr Crimble, as if shocked, "is it wise to attempt it? It must be admitted, of course, that if we do not take advantage of the benefits bestowed upon us by Providence in a Christian community, we cannot escape His displeasure. The absence from His Love."

"Yes," I said, looking at him in sudden intimacy, "I believe that." And I pondered a while, following up my own thoughts. "Have you ever read Mr Clodd's _Childhood of the World_, Mr Crimble?"

By the momentary confusion of his face I gathered that he had not. "Mr Clodd?... Ah, yes, the writer on Primitive Man."

"This was only a little book, for the young, you know. But in it Mr Clodd says, I remember, that even the most shocking old forms of religion were not invented by devils. They were 'Man's struggles from darkness to twilight.' What he meant was that no man _loves_ darkness. At least," I added, with a sudden gush of remembrances, "not without the stars."

"That is exceedingly true," replied Mr Crimble. "And, talking of stars, what a wonderful sight it was the night before last, the whole heavens one spangle of diamonds! I was returning from visiting a sick parishioner, Mr Hubbins." Then it was _his_ foot that Fanny and I had heard reverberating on the hill! I hastily hid my face in my cup, but he appeared not to have noticed my confusion. He took another slice of bread and butter; folded it carefully in two, then peered up out of the corner of his round eye at me, and added solemnly: "Sick, I regret to say, no longer."

"Dead?" I cried from the bottom of my heart, and again looked at him.

Then my eyes strayed to the silent scene beyond the window, silent, it seemed, with the very presence of poor Mr Hubbins. "I should not like to go to Hell in the snow," I said ruminatingly. Out of the past welled into memory an old ballad my mother had taught me:--

"This ae nighte, this ae nighte
--_Every nighte and alle_,
Fire and sleet and candle-lighte,
_And Christe receive thy saule_!"

"Beautiful, beautiful," murmured Mr Crimble, yet not without a trace of alarm in his dark eyes. "But believe me, I am not suggesting that Mr Hubbins---- His was, I am told, a wonderfully peaceful end."

"Peaceful! Oh, but surely not in his mind, Mr Crimble. Surely one must be more alive in that last hour than ever--just when one's going away. At any rate," and I couldn't refrain a sigh, almost of envy, "I hope _I_ shall be. Was Mr Hubbins a good man?"

"He was a most regular church-goer," replied my visitor a little unsteadily; "a family-man, one of our Sidesmen, in fact. He will be greatly missed. You may remember what Mr Ruskin wrote of his father: 'Here lies an entirely honest merchant.' Mr Ruskin, senior, was, as a matter of fact, in the wine trade. Mr Hubbins, I believe, was in linen, though, of course, it amounts to the same thing. But haven't we," and he cleared his throat, "haven't we--er--strayed into a rather lugubrious subject?"

"We have strayed into a rather lugubrious world," said I.

"Of course, of course; but, believe me, we mustn't always _think_ too closely. 'Days and moments quickly flying,' true enough, though hardly appropriate, as a matter of fact, at this particular season in the Christian year. But, on the other hand, 'we may make our lives sublime.' Does not yet another poet tell us that? Although, perhaps, Mr Hub----"

"Yes," I interposed eagerly, the lover of books in me at once rising to the bait, "but what do you think Longfellow absolutely _meant_ by his 'sailor on the main' of life being comforted, you remember, by somebody else having been shipwrecked and just leaving _footprints_ in the sand? I used to wonder and wonder. Does the poem imply, Mr Crimble, that merely to be born is to be shipwrecked? I don't think that can be so, because Longfellow was quite a cheerful man, wasn't he?--at least for a poet. For my part," I ran on, now thoroughly at home with my visitor, and on familiar ground, "I am sure I prefer poor Friday. Do you remember how Robinson Crusoe described him soon after the rescue from the savages as 'without Passions, Sullenness, or Designs,' even though he did, poor thing, 'have a hankering stomach after some of the Flesh'? Not that I mean to suggest," I added hastily, "that Mr Hubbins was in any sense a cannibal."

"By no means," said Mr Crimble helplessly. "But there," and he brushed his knees with his handkerchief, "I fear you are too much of a reader for me, and--and critic. For that very reason I do hope, Miss M., you will sometimes contrive to pay a visit to St Peter's. Mother Church has room for all, you know, in her--about her footstool." He smiled at me very kindly. "And our organist, Mr Temple, has been treating us to some charmingly quaint old carols--at least the words seem a little quaint to a modern ear. But I cannot boast of being a _student_ of poetry. Parochial work leaves little time even for the classics:--

"Odi profanum vulgus, et arceo.
Favete linguis...."

He almost chirped the delightful words in a high, pleasant voice, but except for the first three of them, they were too many for my small Latin, and I afterwards forgot to test the aptness of his quotation. I was just about to ask him (with some little unwillingness) to translate the whole ode for me, when I heard Fanny's step at the door. I desisted.

At her entry the whole of our conversation, as it hung about in Mrs Bowater's firelit little parlour, seemed to have become threadbare and meaningless. My visitor and I turned away from each other almost with relief--like Longfellow's shipwrecked sailors, perhaps, at sight of a ship.

Fanny's pale cheeks beneath her round beaver hat and veil were bright with the cold--for frost had followed the snow. She eyed us slowly, with less even than a smile in her eyes, facing my candles softly, as if she had come out of a dream. Whatever class of the community Mr Crimble may have meant to include in his _Odi_, the celerity with which he rose to greet her made it perfectly clear that it was not Miss Bowater's. She smiled at the black sleeve, cuff, and signet ring outstretched towards her, but made no further advance. She brought him, too, a sad disappointment, simply that she would be unable to sing at his concert on the last night of the year. At this blow Mr Crimble instinctively folded his hands. He looked helpless and distressed.

"But, Miss Bowater," he pleaded, "the printer has been waiting nearly two days for the names of your songs. The time is very short now."

"Yes," said Fanny, seating herself on a stool by the fire and slowly removing her gloves. "It is annoying. I hadn't a vestige of a cold last night."

"But indeed, indeed," he began, "is it wise in this severe weather----?"

"Oh, it isn't the weather I mind," was the serene retort, "it's the croaking like a frog in public."

"'A frog!'" cried Mr Crimble beguilingly, "oh, no!"

But all his protestations and cajoleries were unavailing. Even to a long, silent glance so private in appearance that it seemed more courteous to turn away from it, Fanny made no discernible response. His shoulders humped. He caught up his soft hat, made his adieu--a little formal, and hasty--and hurried off through the door to the printer.

When his muffled footsteps had passed away, I looked at Fanny.

"Oh, yes," she agreed, shrugging her shoulders, "it was a lie. I said it like a lie, so that it shouldn't deceive him. I detest all that wheedling. To come here two days running, after.... And why, may I ask, if it is beneath your dignity to dance to the parish, is it not beneath mine to sing? Let the silly sheep amuse _themselves_ with their bleating. I have done with it all."

She rose, folded her gloves into a ball and her veil over her hat, and once more faced her reflection in her mother's looking-glass. I had not the courage to tell her that the expression she wore on other occasions suited her best.

"But surely," I argued uneasily, "things are different. If I were to dance, stuck up there on a platform, you know very well it would not be the dancing that would amuse them, but--just me. Would you care for that if you were--well, what I am?"

"Ah, you don't know," a low voice replied bitterly, "you don't know. The snobs they are! I have soaked in it for years, like a pig in brine. Boxed up here in your pretty little doll's house, you suppose that all that matters is what you think of other people. But to be perfectly frank, you are out of the running, my dear. _I_ have to get my own living, and all that matters is not what I think of other people but what other people think of me. Do you suppose I don't know what _he_, in his heart, thinks of me--and all the rest of them? Well, I say, wait!"

And she left me to my doll's house--a more helpless slave than ever.

Not only one "star" the fewer, then, dazzled St Peter's parish that New Year's Eve, but Fanny and I never again shared an hour's practical astronomy. Still, she would often sit and talk to me, and the chain of my devotion grew heavy. Perhaps she, on her side, merely basked in the flattery of my imagination. It was for her a new variety of a familiar experience. Perhaps a curious and condescending fondness for me for a while sprang up in her--as far as that was possible, for, apart from her instinctive heartlessness, she never really accustomed herself to my physical shortcomings. I believe they attracted yet repelled her. To my lonely spirit she was a dream that remained a dream in spite of its intensifying resemblance to a nightmare.

I realize now that she was desperately capricious, of a cat-like cruelty by nature, and so evasive and elusive that frequently I could not distinguish her soft, furry pads from her claws. But whatever her mood, or her treatment of me, or her lapses into a kind of commonness to which I deliberately shut my eyes, her beauty remained. Whomsoever we love becomes unique in that love, and I suppose we are responsible for what we give as well as for what we accept. The very memory of her beauty, when I was alone, haunted me as intensely as if she were present. Yet in her actual company, it made her in a sense unreal. So, often, it was only the ghost of her with whom I sat and talked. How sharply it would have incensed her to know it. When she came to me in my sleep, she was both paradise and seraph, and never fiddle entranced a Paganini as did her liquid lapsing voice my small fastidious ear. Yet, however much she loved to watch herself in looking-glass or in her mind, and to observe her effects on others, she was not vain.

But the constant, unbanishable thought of anything wearies the mind and weakens the body. In my infatuation, I, too, was scarcely more than a ghost--a very childish ghost perhaps. I think if I could call him for witness, my small pasha in the train from Lyndsey would bear me out in this. As for what is called passion, the only burning of it I ever felt was for an outcast with whom I never shared so much as glance or word. Alas, Fanny, I suppose, was merely a brazen image.

Long before the dark day of her departure--a day which stood in my thoughts like a barrier at the world's end--I had very foolishly poured out most of my memories for her profit and amusement, though so immobile was she when seated in a chair beside my table, or standing foot on fender at the chimney-piece, that it was difficult at times to decide whether she was listening to me or not. What is more important, she told me in return in her curious tortuous and contradictory fashion, a good deal about herself, and of her childhood, which--because of the endless violent roarings of her nautical father, and the taciturn discipline of poor Mrs Bowater--filled me with compassion and heaped fuel on my love. And not least of these bonds was the secret which, in spite of endless temptation, I managed to withhold from her in a last instinctive loyalty to Mrs Bowater--the discovery that her own mother was long since dead and gone.

She possessed more brains than she cared to exhibit to visitors like Dr Phelps and Mr Crimble. Even to this day I cannot believe that Mr Crimble even so much as guessed how clever she was. It was just part of herself, like the bloom on a plum. Hers was not one of those gesticulating minds. Her efforts only intensified her Fannyishness. Oh dear, how simple things are if only you leave them unexplained. Her very knowledge, too (which for the most part she kept to herself) was to me like finding chain armour when one is in search of a beating heart. She could shed it all, and her cleverness too, as easily as a swan water-drops. What could she not shed, and yet remain Fanny? And with all her confidences, she was extremely reticent. A lift of the light shoulders, or of the flat arched eyebrows, a sarcasm, a far-away smile, at the same time illuminated and obscured her talk. These are feminine gifts, and yet past my mastery. Perhaps for this reason I admired them the more in Fanny--just as, in reading my childhood's beloved volume, _The Observing Eye_, I had admired the crab's cuirass and the scorpion's horny rings--because, being, after all, myself a woman, I faintly understood their purpose.

Thus, when Fanny told me of the school she taught in; and of the smooth-haired drawing-master who attended it with his skill, on Mondays, Wednesdays, and Fridays; and of the vivacious and saturnine "Monsieur Crapaud," who, poked up in a room under the gables, lived in the house; or of that other parish curate who was a nephew of the head-mistress's, the implacable Miss Stebbings, and who, apparently, preached Sunday after Sunday, with peculiar pertinacity, on such texts as "God is love"--when Fanny recounted to me these afflictions, graces, and mockeries of her daily routine as "literature" mistress, I could as easily bestow on her the vivifying particulars she left out, as a painter can send his portraits to be framed.

Once and again--just as I have seen a blackbird drop plumb from the upper boughs of a tree on a worm disporting itself in the dewy mould--once I did ask a question which produced in her one of those curious reactions which made her, rather than immaterial, an exceedingly vigilant image of her very self. "What will you do, Fanny, when you _can't_ mock at him?"

"Him?" she inquired in a breath.

"_The_ him!" I said.

"What him?" she replied.

"Well," I said, stumbling along down what was a rather black and unfamiliar alley to me, "my father was not, I suppose, particularly wise in anything, but my mother loved him very much."

"And _my_ father," she retorted, in words so carefully pronounced that I knew they must be dangerous, "my father was a first mate in the mercantile marine when he married your landlady."

"Well," I repeated, "what would you do, if--if _you_ fell in love?"

Fanny sat quite still, all the light at the window gently beating on her face, with its half-closed eyes. Her foot stirred, and with an almost imperceptible movement of her shoulder, she replied, "I shall go blind."

I looked at her, dumbfounded. All the days of her company were shrivelled up in that small sentence. "Oh, Fanny," I whispered hopelessly, "then you know?"

"'Know'?" echoed the smooth lips.

"Why, I mean," I expostulated, rushing for shelter fully as rapidly as my old friend the lobster must have done when it was time to change his shell, "I mean that's what that absurd little Frenchman is--'Monsieur Crapaud.'"

"Oh, no," said Fanny calmly, "_he_ is not blind, he only has his eyes shut. Mine," she added, as if the whole light of the wintry sky she faced were the mirror of her prediction, "mine will be wide open."

How did I know that for once the serene, theatrical creature was being mortally serious?

Chapter Fifteen

I grew a little weary of the beautiful snow in the days that followed my first talk with Mr Crimble, and fretted at the close air of the house. The last day of the year the wind was still in the north. It perplexed me that the pride which from my seed had sprung up in Fanny, and had prevented her from taking part in the parish concert, yet allowed her to attend it. She set off thickly veiled. Not even Mr Crimble's spectacles were likely to pierce her disguise. I had written a little letter the afternoon before and had myself handed it to Mrs Bowater with a large fork of mistletoe from my Christmas bunch. It was an invitation to herself and Fanny to sit with me and "see in" the New Year. She smiled at me over it--still her tranquil, though neglected self--and I was half-satisfied.

Her best black dress was donned for the occasion. She had purchased a bottle of ginger wine, which she brought in with some glasses and placed in the middle of the red and black tablecloth. Its white-lettered, dark-green label "haunts me still." The hours drew on. Fanny returned from the concert--entering the room like a cloud of beauty. She beguiled the dwindling minutes of the year with mocking echoes of it.

In a rich falsetto she repeated Mr Crimble's "few words" of sympathetic apology for her absence: "'I must ask your indulgence, ladies and gentlemen, for a lamentable hiatus in our programme.'" She gave us Miss Willett's and Mr Bangor's spirited rendering of "Oh, that we two"; and of the recitation which rather easily, it appeared, Mrs Bullace had been prevailed upon to give as an encore after her "Abt Vogler": "The Lady's 'Yes,'" by Elizabeth Barrett Browning. And what a glance of light and fire she cast me when she came to stanza six of the poem:--

"Lead her from the festive boards,
Point her to the starry skies!..."

And she imitated Lady Pollacke's niece's--Miss Oran's--'cello obligato to "The Lost Chord," with a plangency that stirred even the soul of Henry as he lay curled up in my landlady's lap. The black head split like a pomegranate as he yawned his disgust.

At this Mrs Bowater turned her bony face on me, her hands on her knees, and with a lift of her eyes disclosed the fact that she was amused, and that she hoped her amusement would remain a confidence between us. She got up and put the cat out: and on her return had regained her solemnity.

"I suppose," she said stiffly, staring into the sparkling fire that was our only illumination, "I suppose, poor creatures, they did their best: and it isn't so many years ago, Fanny, since you were as put-about to be allowed to sing at one of the church concerts as a bird is to hop out of its cage."

"Yes," said Fanny, "but in this world birds merely hop out of one cage into another; though I suppose the larger are the more comfortable." This retort set Mrs Bowater's countenance in an impassive mask--so impassive that every fitfully-lit photograph in the room seemed to have imitated her stare. "And, mother," added Fanny seductively, "who _taught_ me to sing?"

"The Lord knows," cried Mrs Bowater, with conviction, "_I_ never did."

"Yes," muttered Fanny in a low voice, for my information, "but does He care?" I hastily asked Mrs Bowater if she was glad of to-morrow's New Year. As if in reply the kitchen clock, always ten minutes fast, began to chime twelve, half-choking at every stroke. And once more the soul of poor Mr Hubbins sorrowfully took shape in a gaze at me out of vacancy.

"To them going downhill, miss," my landlady was replying to my question, "it is not the milestones are the pleasantest company--nor that the journey's then of much account until it is over. By which I don't mean to suggest there need be _gloom_. But to you and Fanny here--well, I expect the little that's the present for you is mostly wasted on the future." With that, she rose, and poured out the syrupy brown wine from the green bottle, reserving a remarkably little glass which she had rummaged out of her years' hoardings for me.

Fanny herself, with musing head--her mockings over--was sitting drawn-up on a stool by the fire. I doubt if she was thinking. Whether or not, to my enchanted eyes some phantom within her seemed content merely to be her beauty. And in rest, there was a grace in her body--the smooth shoulder, the poised head that, because, perhaps, it was so transitory, seemed to resemble the never-changing--that mimicry of the unknown which may be seen in a flower, in a green hill, even in an animal. It is as though, I do think, what we love most in this life must of necessity share two worlds.

Faintly out of the frosty air was wafted the knelling of midnight. I rose, stepped back from the firelight, drew the curtain, and stole a look into space. Away on the right flashed Sirius, and to east of him came gliding flat-headed Hydra with Alphard, the Red Bird, in his coil. So, for a moment in our history, I and the terrestrial globe were alone together. It seemed indeed that an intenser silence drew over reality as the earth faced yet one more fleeting revolution round her invisible lord and master. But no moon was risen yet.

I turned towards the shape by the fire, and without her perceiving it, wafted kiss and prayer in her direction. Cold, careless Fanny--further than Uranus. We were alone, for at first stroke of St Peter's Mrs Bowater had left the room and had opened the front door. She was smiling; but _was_ she smiling, or was that vague bewitchingness in her face merely an unmeaning guile of which she was unaware? It might have been a mermaid sitting there in the firelight.

The bells broke in on our stillness; and fortunately, since there was no dark man in the house to bring us luck, Henry, already disgusted with the snow and blacker in hue than any whiskered human I have ever seen, seized his opportunity, and was the first living creature to cross our threshold from one year into another.

This auspicious event renewed our spirits which, in waiting, had begun to flag. From far away came a jangling murmur of shouting and instruments and bells, which showed that the rest of the parish was sharing our solemn vigil; and then, with me on my table between them, a hand of each clasping mine, Mrs Bowater, Fanny, and I, after sipping each other's health, raised the strains of "Auld Lang Syne." There must have been Scottish blood in Mrs Bowater; she certainly made up for some little variation from the tune by a heartfelt pronunciation of the words. Hardly had we completed this rite than the grandfather's clock in the narrow passage staidly protested its own rendering of eternity; and we all--even Mrs Bowater--burst out laughing.

"Good-night, Midgetina; an immense happy New Year to you," whispered a voice to me about half an hour afterwards. I jumped out of bed, and peeped through my curtains. On some little errand Fanny had come down from her bedroom, and with a Paisley shawl over her shoulders stood with head and candle thrust in at the door. I gazed at her fairness. "Oh, Fanny!" I cried. "Oh, Fanny!"

New Year's Day brought a change of weather. A slight mist rose over the fields, it began to thaw. A kind of listlessness now came over Fanny, which I tried in vain to dispel. Yet she seemed to seek my company; often to remain silent, and occasionally to ask me curious questions as if testing one answer against another. And one discovery I made in my efforts to keep her near me: that she liked being read to. Most of the volumes in Mrs Bowater's small library were of a nautical character, and though one of them, on the winds and tides and seas and coasts of the world, was to console me later in Fanny's absence, the majority defied even my obstinacy. Fanny hated stories of the sea, seemed to detest Crusoe; and smiled her slow, mysterious smile while she examined my own small literary treasures. By a flighty stroke of fortune, tacked up by an unskilled hand in the stained brown binding of a volume on Disorders of the Nerves, we discovered among her father's books a copy of _Wuthering Heights_, by Emily Bronte.

The very first sentence of this strange, dwelling book, was a spell: "1801.--I have just returned from a visit to my landlord--the solitary neighbour that I shall be troubled with."... And when, a few lines farther on, I read: "He little imagined how my heart warmed towards him when I beheld his black eyes withdraw so suspiciously under their brows"--the apparition of who but Mr Crumble blinked at me out of the print, and the enchantment was complete. It was not only gaunt enormous Yorkshire with its fells and wastes of snow that seized on my imagination, not only that vast kitchen with its flagstones, green chairs, and firearms, but the mere music and aroma of the words, "I beheld his black eyes"; "a range of gaunt thorns"; "a wilderness of crumbling griffins"; "a huge, liver-coloured bitch pointer"--they rang in my mind, echoed on in my dreams.

And though in the wet and windy afternoons and evenings which Fanny and I thus shared, she, much more than poor Mr Crimble, resembled Heathcliff in being "rather morose," and in frequently expressing "an aversion to showing displays of feeling," she was more attracted by my discovery than she condescended to confess. _Jane Eyre_, she said, was a better story, "though Jane herself was a fool." What cared I? To me this book was like the kindling of a light in a strange house; and that house my mind. I gazed, watched, marvelled, and recognized, as I kneeled before its pages. But though my heart was torn, and my feelings were a little deranged by the scenes of violence, and my fancy was haunted by that stalking wolfish spectre, I took no part. I surveyed all with just that sense of aloofness and absorption with which as children Cathy and Heathcliff, barefoot in the darkness of the garden, had looked in that Sunday evening on the Lintons' crimson taper-lit drawing-room.