Chapter VIII: Part 8

Whenever I parted from him, his remembrance was like that of one of those strange figures which thrust themselves as if out of the sleep-world into the mind's wakefulness; vividly, darkly, impress themselves upon consciousness, and then are gone. So I sometimes wonder if I ever really knew him, if he was ever perfectly real to me; like Fanny, for instance. Yet he made no pretence to be mysterious, and we were soon talking together almost as naturally as if we were playmates of childhood who had met again after a long separation.

He confessed that, quite unknown to me, he had watched me come and go in the cold mornings of winter, when frost had soon driven me home again out of the bare, frozen woods. He had even been present, I think, when Fanny and I had shared--or divided--the stars between us. A faint distaste at any rate showed itself on his face when he admitted that he had seen me not alone. I was unaccustomed to that kind of interest, and hardly knew whether to be pleased or angry.

"But you know I come here to be alone," I said as courteously as possible.

"Yes," he answered, with face turned away. "That's how I saw you."

Without my being aware of it, too, he played a kind of chess with me, seizing each answer in turn for hook on which to hang another question. What had I to conceal? Of my short history, though not of myself, I told him freely; yet asked him few questions in return. Nor at that time did I even consider how strange a chance had brought two such human beings as he and I to this place of meeting. Yet, after all, whales are but little creatures by comparison with the ocean in which they roam, and glow-worm will keep tryst with glow-worm in forests black as night.

Through all he said was woven a thread of secrecy. So low and monotonous was his voice (not lifting itself much, but only increasing in resonance when any thought angered or darkened his mind); so few were his gestures that he might have been talking in his sleep. Not once that long morning did he laugh, not even when I mischievously proffered him my parasol (as he sat a few paces away) to screen him from the March sun! Solemnly he shared Mrs Bowater's biscuits with me, scattering the crumbs to a robin that hopped up between us, as if he had been invited to our breakfast.

His head hung so low between his heavy shoulders that it reminded me of a flower stooping for want of water. Not that there was anything limp or fragile or gentle in his looks. He was, far rather, clumsy and ugly in appearance, yet with a grace in his look like that of an old, haggled thorn-tree when the wind moves its branches. And anyhow, he was come to be my friend--out of the unknown. And when I looked around at the serene wild loveliness of the garden, it seemed to be no less happy a place because it was no longer quite a solitude.

"You read," he said, glancing reflectively, but none too complimentarily, at my book.

"It isn't wise to think too much." I replied solemnly, shutting Miss Austen up. "Besides, as I haven't the opportunity of seeing many people in the flesh, you know, the next best thing is to meet them in books--specially in this kind of book. If only I were Jane Austen; my gracious, I would enjoy myself! Her people are just the same as people are now--inside. I doubt if leopards really want to change their spots. But of course"--I added, since he did not seem inclined to express any opinion--"I read other kinds of books as well. That's the best of being a dunce--there's so much to learn! Just lately I have been learning to tie knots."

I laughed, and discovered that I was blushing.

He raised his eyes slowly to my face, then looked so long and earnestly at my hands, that I was forced to hide them away under my bag. Long before I had noticed that his own hands were rather large and powerful for his size. Fanny's face I had loved to watch for its fairness and beauty--it would have been as lovely if she had not been within. To watch Mrs Bowater's was like spelling out bits of a peculiar language. I often found out what she was feeling or thinking by imitating her expression, and then translating it, after she was gone. This young man's kept me engrossed because of the self that brooded in it--its dark melancholy, too; and because even then, perhaps, I may have remotely and vaguely realized that flesh and spirit could not be long of one company. He himself was, as it were, a foreigner to me, and I felt I must make the best and most of him before he went off again.

Perhaps memory reads into this experience more than in those green salad days I actually found there. But of this at least I am certain--that the morning sped on unheeded in his company, and I was even unconscious of how cold I was until he suddenly glanced anxiously into my face and told me so. So now we wandered off together towards the great house--which hitherto I had left unapproached. We climbed the green-stained scaling steps from terrace to terrace, tufted with wallflower and snapdragon amongst the weeds, cushioned with bright moss, fretted with lichen. Standing there, side by side with him, looking up--our two figures alone, on the wide flowerless weed-grown terrace--hale, sour weeds some of them, shoulder-high--I scrutinized the dark, shut windows.

What was the secret that had kept it so long vacant, I inquired. Mrs Bowater had never given me any coherent answer to this question. My words dropped into the silence, like a pebble into a vast, black pool of water.

"There was a tale about," he replied indifferently, and yet, as I fancied, not so indifferently as he intended, "that many years ago a woman"--he pronounced the word almost as if it had reference to a different species from ourselves--"that a woman had hanged herself in one of its upper rooms."

"Hanged herself!" It was the kind of fable Mrs Ballard used to share with Adam Waggett's mother over their tea and shrimps. Frowning in horror and curiosity, I scanned his face. Was this the water I could dip for in his well? Alas, how familiar I was to become with the bucket.

He made a movement with his hands; at which I saw the poor creature up there in the darkness, suspended lifeless, poor, poor human, with head awry.

"Why?" I asked him, pondering childishly over this picture.

"It was mere gossip," he replied, "and true or not, such as 'they' make up to explain their own silly superstitions. Just thinking long enough and hard enough would soon invite an evil spirit into any old empty house. Human beings are no better than sheep, though they don't always see the dogs and shepherds that drive them."

"And does it," I faltered, glancing covertly up the walls, and conscious of a novel vein of interest in this strangely inexhaustible world, "does the evil spirit ever look out of the windows?"

He turned his face to me, smiling; and inquired if I had ever heard the phrase, "the eyelids of the dawn." "There's Night, too," he said.

"But whose spirit? Whose?" I persisted. "When I am here alone in the garden, why, it is just peace. How could that be, if an evil spirit haunted here?"

"Yes," he said, "but a selfish, solitary peace. Dead birds don't sing. Don't come when you can't get back; or the clouds are down."

"You are trying to frighten me," I said, in a louder voice. "And I have been too much alone for that. Of course things must look after themselves. Don't _we_? And you said an _evil_ spirit. What is the good of dreaming when you are wide awake?"

"Then," said he, almost coldly, "do you deny that Man is an evil spirit? He distorts and destroys."

But with that the words of my mother came back to me out of a far-away morning: "He made us of His Power and Love." Yet I could not answer him, could only wait, as if expectant that by mere silence I should be able to share the thoughts he was thinking. And, all the while, my eyes were brooding in some dark chamber of my mind on Fanny, and not, as they well might have, on the dark bark of Mr Crimble tossing in jeopardy beneath its fleeting ray of hope.

Truly this stranger was making life very interesting, even if he was only prodding over its dead moles. And truly I was an incorrigibly romantic young lady; for when, with a glance at my grandfather's watch, I discovered that it was long past noon, and told him I must be gone; without a single moment's hesitation, I promised to come again to meet him on the very first fine morning that showed. So strong within me was the desire to do so, that a profound dismay chilled my mind when, on turning about at the end of the terrace--for he had shown no inclination to accompany me--I found that he was already out of sight. I formally waved my hand towards where he had vanished in case he should be watching; sighed, and went on.

It was colder under the high, sunless trees. I gathered my cloak closer around me, and at that discovered not only that Miss Austen had been left behind, but that Fanny's letter still lay in undisturbed concealment beneath its stone. It was too late to return for them now, and a vague misgiving that had sprung up in me amid the tree-trunks was quieted by the assurance that for these--rather than for any other reason--I must return to Wanderslore as soon as I could. So, in remarkably gay spirits, I hastened light-heeled on my way in the direction of civilized society, of nefarious Man, and of my never-to-be-blessed-too-much Mrs Bowater.

Chapter Twenty-Three

My landlady was already awaiting me at the place appointed, and we walked off together towards the house. It had been a prudent arrangement, for we met and passed at least half a dozen strangers before we arrived there, and one and all by the unfeigned astonishment with which they turned to watch our two figures out of sight (for I stooped once or twice, as if to tie my shoelace, in order to see), clearly proved themselves to belong to that type of humanity to which my new acquaintance had referred frigidly as THEY. Vanity of vanities, when one old loitering gentleman did not so much as lift an eyelid at me--he was so absorbed in own thoughts--I felt a pang of annoyance.

As soon as I was safely installed in my own room again, I confided in Mrs Bowater a full account of my morning's adventure. Not so much because I wished to keep free of any further deceit, as because I simply couldn't contain myself, and must talk of my Stranger. She heard me to the end without question, but with an unusual rigidity of features. She compressed her lips even tighter before beginning her catechism.

"What was the young man's name," she inquired; "and where did he live?"

My hope had been that she herself would be able to supply these little particulars. With a blank face, I shook my head: "We just talked of things in general."

"I see," she said, and glanced at me, as if over her spectacles. Her next question was even less manageable. "Was the young fellow a gentleman?"

Alas! she had fastened on a flaw in my education. This was a problem absolutely new to me. I thought of my father, of Mr Waggett, Dr Grose, Dr Phelps, the old farmer in the railway train, of Sir Walter Pollacke, my bishop, Heathcliff, Mr Bowater, Mr Clodd, even Henry--or rather all these male phantoms went whisking across the back of my mind, calling up every other two-legged creature of the same gender within sight or hearing. Meanwhile, Mrs Bowater stood like Patience on her Brussels carpet, or rather like Thomas de Torquemada, watching these intellectual contortions.

"Well, really, do you know, Mrs Bowater," I was forced to acknowledge at last, with a sigh and a smile, "I simply can't say. I didn't think of it. That seems rather on _his_ side, doesn't it? But to be quite, quite candid, perhaps _not_ a gentleman; not _exactly_, I mean."

"Which is no more than I supposed," was her comment, "and if _not_--and any kind of not, miss--what was he, then? And _if_ not, why, you can never go there again!"

"Indeed, but I must," I said, as if to myself.

"With your small knowledge of the world," she retorted unmovedly, "you must, if you please, be guided by those with more. Who isn't a gentleman couldn't be desirable company if chanced on like a stranger in a young lady's lonely rambles. And _how_ tall did you say? And what's more," she continued, not pausing for an answer, and gathering momentum on her way, "if he _is_ a gentleman, I'd better come along with you, miss, and see for myself."

A rebellious and horrified glance followed her retreating figure out of the room. So this was the reward for being open and above-board. What a ridiculous figure I should cut, tippeting along behind my landlady. What would my stranger think of me? What would she think of him? _Was_ he a "gentleman"? To decide whether or not the Spirit of Man is an evil spirit had been an easy problem by comparison. _Gentle man_--why, of course, self muttered in shame to self convicted of yet another mean little snobbery. He had been almost absurdly gentle--had treated me as if I were an angel rather than a young woman.

But the nettlerash produced by Mrs Bowater's bigotry was not to be so easily allayed as all that. It had invited yet another kind of THEM in. An old, green, rotting board hung over the wicket gate that led up the stony path into Wanderslore--"Trespassers will be prosecuted." Why couldn't one put boards up in the Wanderslore of one's mind? My landlady had never inquired if Lady Pollacke was a gentlewoman. How mechanical things were in their unexpectedness. That morning I had gone out to free myself from the Crimble tangle, merely to return with a few more knots in the skein.

A dead calm descended on me. I was adrift in the Sargasso Sea--in the Doldrums, and had dropped my sextant overboard. Even a long stare at the master-mariner on the wall gave me no help. Yet I must confess that these foolish reflections made me happy. I would share them with Fanny--perhaps with the "gentleman" himself, some day. I leaned over the side of my small vessel, more deeply interested in the voyage than I had been since Pollie had carried me out of my girlhood into the Waggetts' wagonette. And as I sat there, simmering over these novelties, a voice, clear as a cockcrow, exclaimed in my mind, "If father hadn't died, I'd have had nothing of all this." My hands clenched damp in my lap at this monstrosity. But I kept my wits and managed to face it. "If father hadn't died," I answered myself, "you don't know _what_ would have happened. And if you think that, because I am happy now, anything could make me _not_ wish him back, it's a lie." But I remained a little less comfortable in mind.

The evening post brought me a letter and a registered parcel. I turned them over and over, examining the unfamiliar handwriting, the bright red seals; but all in vain. In spite of my hard-won knotlore, I was still kneeling over the package and wrestling with string and wax, when Mrs Bowater, folding _her_ letter away in its envelope, announced baldly: "She's not coming home, it seems, at all these holidays, having been invited by some school friend into the country--Merriden, or some such place. Not that you might expect Fanny to write plain, when she doesn't _mean_ plain."

"Oh, Mrs Bowater! Not at all?"

Cold fogs of disappointment swept in, blotting out my fool's paradise. That inward light without which life is dark indeed died in eclipse. The one thought and desire which I now realized I had been feeding on from hour to hour, had been snatched away. To think that they had been nothing but waste. "Oh, Fanny," I whispered bitterly to myself, "oh, Fanny!" But the face I lifted to her mother showed only defiance.

"Well," I muttered, "who cares? Let's hope she will enjoy herself better than mooning about in this dingy old place."

Mrs Bowater merely continued to look quietly over the envelope at me.

"Oh, but you know, Mrs Bowater," I quaked miserably, "it's not dingy to _me_. Surely a promise is a promise, whoever you make it to!"

With that I stooped my face over the stuffy-smelling brown paper, and attacked the last knot with my teeth. With eyes still a little asquint with resentment I smoothed away the wrappings from the shape within. Then every thought evaporated in a sigh. For there, of a delicate veined fairness against the white paper, lay a minute copy in ivory of none but lovely Hypnos. Half-blindly I stared at it--lost in a serenity beyond all hope of my poor, foolish life--then lifted it with both hands away from my face: "A present--to me! Look!" I cried, "look!"

Mrs Bowater settled her face over the image as if it had been some tropical and noxious insect I was offering for her inspection. But I thrust it into her hand and opened my letter:--

"MY DEAR YOUNG LADY,--I am no poet, and therefore cannot hope to
share with you the music of 'the flaming drake,' but we did share
my Hypnos. Only a replica, as I told you, but none the less one of
the most beautiful things I possess. Will you, then, give me the
pleasure of accepting the contents of the little package I am
having posted with this--as a small token of the delight your
enthusiasm gave Yours most sincerely,--

"WALTER POLLACKE.

"PS.--Lady Pollacke tells me that we may perhaps again look forward
to your company to tea in a few days, please do not think, then, of
acknowledging this little message by post."

But I did acknowledge it, not with that guardedness of the feelings which Miss Austen seemed to recommend, but from the very depths of my heart. Next morning came Lady Pollacke's invitation:--

"DEAR MISS M.,--I hasten to renew my invitation of last Thursday.
Will you give us the pleasure of your company at tea on Friday
afternoon? Mrs Monnerie--the younger daughter, as you will
remember, of Lord B.--has expressed an exceedingly warm wish to
make your acquaintance, and Mr. Pellew, who is giving us a course
of sermons at St. Peter's during Holy Week, will also be with us.
May we, perhaps, share yet another of those _delightful_
recitations?

"Believe me,

"Yours sincerely,

"LYDIA PRESTON POLLACKE."

I searched my memory for memorial of Lord B.; alas, in vain. This lapse made the thought of meeting his younger daughter a little alarming. Yet I must confess to having been pleasantly flattered by these attentions. Even the black draught administered by Fanny, who had not even thought it worth her while to send me a word of excuse or explanation, lost much of its bitterness. I asked Mrs Bowater if she supposed I might make Sir Walter a little present in return for his. Would it be a proper thing to do, would it be _lady_like?

"What's meant kindly," she assured me, after a moment's reflection, "even if taken amiss, which, to judge from his letter, it won't be, is nothing to be thought of but only _felt_."

This advice decided me, and early on my Friday morning I trimmed and freshened up as well as I could one of my grandfather's dwarf cedar-trees which, in the old days, had stood on my window balcony. Its branches were now a little dishevelled, but it was still a fresh and pretty thing in its grey-green pot.

Chapter Twenty-Four

With this dwarf tree in my arms, when came the auspicious afternoon, I followed Lady Pollacke's parlourmaid--her neat little bonnet tied with a bow under her ear--down my Bateses, and was lifted by Mrs Bowater into the carriage. How demure a greeting we exchanged when, the maid and I having seated ourselves together under its hood, my glance fell upon the bloodstone brooch pinned conspicuously for the occasion near the topmost button of her trim, outdoor jacket. It gave me so much confidence that even the sudden clatter of conversation that gushed out over me in the doorway of Lady Pollacke's drawing-room failed to be disconcerting. The long, flowery room was thronged with company, and everybody was talking to everybody else. On my entry, as if a seraph had spoken, the busy tongues sank instantly to a hush. I stood stilettoed by a score of eyes. But Sir Walter had been keeping good watch for me, and I at once delivered my great pot into his pink, outstretched hands.

"My dear, dear young lady," he cried, stooping plumply over me, "the pleasure you give me! A little masterpiece: and real old Nankin. Alas, my poor Hypnos!"

"But it is me, _me_," I cried. "If I could only tell you!"

A murmur of admiration rippled across the room, in which I distinctly heard a quavering, nasal voice exclaim, "Touching, touching!"

The words--as if a pleasant sheep had bleated--came, I fancied, from a rather less fashionable lady with a lorgnette, who was sitting almost alone on the outskirts of the room, and who I afterwards discovered was only a widowed sister of Lady Pollacke's. But I could spare her but one startled glance, for, at the same moment, I was being presented to the younger daughter of Lord B. Mrs Monnerie sat amply reclining in an immense gilded chair--a lady with a large and surprising countenance. Lady Pollacke's "_younger_" had misled my fancy. Far from being the slim, fair, sylphlike thing of my expectations, Mrs Monnerie cannot have been many years the junior of my godmother, Miss Fenne.

Her skin had fallen into the queerest folds and puckers. Her black swimming eye under a thick eyebrow gazed down her fine, drooping nose at me with a dwelling expression at once indulgent, engrossed, and amused. With a gracious sweep of her hand she drew aside her voluminous silk skirts so that I could at once install myself by her side in a small, cane-seated chair that had once, I should fancy, accommodated a baby Pollacke, and had been brought down from the nursery for this occasion.

Thus, then, I found myself--the exquisitely self-conscious centre of attention--striving to nibble a biscuit, nurse my child-size handleless tea-cup, and respond to her advances at one and the same time.

Lady Pollacke hung like a cloud at sunset over us both, her cheek flushed with the effort to be amused at every sentence which Mrs Monnerie uttered and to share it as far as possible with the rest of her guests.

"A little pale, eh?" mused Mrs Monnerie, brooding at me with her great eye. "She wants sea-air; sea-air--just to _tinge_ that rose-leaf porcelain. I must arrange it."

I assured her that I was in the best of health.

"Not at all," she replied. "All young people boast of their health. When I was your age every thought of illness was as black as a visitation of the devil. _That's_ the door where we must lay all such evils, isn't it, Mr Pellew?"

A lean, tall, birdlike figure, the hair on his head still showing traces of auburn, disengaged itself from a knot of charmed spectators.

"Ah," he said. "But I doubt, now," he continued, with a little deprecating wave of his tea-cup at me, "if Miss M. can remember me. When we first met we were precisely one week old, precisely one week old."

Why, like Dr Phelps, Mr Pellew referred to me as _we_ I had not time to consider, for he was already confiding to Mrs Monnerie that he had never baptized an infant who more strenuously objected to Holy Water than had I. I looked at his long, fair eyelashes and the smile-line on his cheek as he bent with a sort of jocular urbanity over her chair, but could not recall his younger face, though during my christening I must, of course, have gazed at him even more absorbedly.

"'Remember' you--I'll be bound she did," cried Mrs Monnerie with enthusiasm, "or was it the bachelor thumb? The mercy is you didn't drop her into the font. Can you swim, my dear?"

"I couldn't at a week," I replied as archly as possible. "But I _can_ swim; my father taught me."

"But how wonderful!" broke our listeners into chorus.

"There we are, then," asserted Mrs Monnerie; "sea-bathing! And are _we_ a swimmer, Mr Pellew?"

Mr Pellew seemed not to have caught her question. He was assuring me that Miss Fenne had kept him well informed--well informed of all my doings. He trusted I was comfortable with the excellent Mrs Bowater, and hoped that some day I should be able to pay a visit to his rectory in Devonshire. "Mrs Pellew, he knew...." What he knew about Mrs Pellew, however, was never divulged, for Mrs Monnerie swallowed him up:--

"Devonshire, my dear Mr Pellew! no, indeed. Penthouse lanes, redhot fields, staring cows. Imagine it! She would be dried up like a leaf. What she wants is a mild but bracing sea-air. It shall be arranged. And who is this Mrs Bowater?"

At this precise moment, among the strange faces far above me, I descried that of Mr Crimble, modestly peering out of the background. He coughed, and in a voice I should scarcely have recognized as his, informed Mrs Monnerie that my landlady was "a most res--an admirable woman." He paused, coughed again, swept my soul with his glance--"I assure you, Mrs Monnerie, in view of--of all the circumstances, one couldn't be in better hands. Indeed the house is on the crest of the hill, well out of the town, yet not a quarter of an hour's walk from my mother's."

"Hah!" remarked Mrs Monnerie, with an inflection that I am sure need not have brought a warmth to my cheek, or a duskier pallor to Mr Crimble's.

"You have perhaps heard the tragic story of Wanderslore," persisted Mr Crimble; "Miss M.'s--er--lodgings are immediately adjacent to the park."

"Hah!" repeated Mrs Monnerie, even more emphatically. "Mrs Bowater, eh? Well, I must see for myself. And I'm told, Miss M.," she swept down at me, "that you have a beautiful gift for recitation." She looked round, patted her lap imperiously, and cried, "Come, now, who's to break the ice?"

In _fact_, no doubt, Mrs Monnerie was not so arbitrary a mistress of Lady Pollacke's little ceremony as this account of it may suggest. But that is how she impressed me at the time. She the sun, and I the least--but I hope not the least grateful--of her obsequious planets. Lady Pollacke at any rate set immediately to breaking the ice. She prevailed upon a Miss Templemaine to sing. And we all sat mute.

I liked Miss Templemaine's appearance--brown hair, straight nose, dark eyelashes, pretty fringe beneath her peak-brimmed hat. But I was a little distressed by her song, which, so far as I could gather, was about two persons with more or less broken hearts who were compelled to part and said, "Ah" for a long time. Only physically distressed, however, for though I seemed to be shaken in its strains like a linnet in the wind, its adieux were protracted enough to enable me to examine the rest of the company at my leisure. Their eyes, I found, were far more politely engaged the while in gazing composedly down at the carpet or up at the ceiling. And when I did happen to intercept a gliding glance in my direction, it was almost as if with a tiny explosion that it collided with mine and broke away.

Mrs Monnerie's eyelids, on the other hand, with a faintly fluttering motion, remained closed from the first bar to the last--a method of appreciation I experimented with for a moment but quickly abandoned; while at the first clash of the keys, Sir Walter had dexterously contrived to slide himself out of the room by the door at which he had unexpectedly entered it on my first visit. Such was the social situation when, after murmurs of gratitude and applause, Miss Templemaine took up her gloves and rose from the piano, and Mrs Monnerie reopened herself to the outer world with the ejaculation, "That's right. _Now_, my dear!"

The summons was to me. My moment had come, but I was prepared for it. In my last ordeal I had broken down because I had chosen a poem that was a kind of secret thing in my mind. So, after receiving Lady Pollacke's letter, I had hunted about for a recitation as short, but less personal: one, I mean, whose sentiments I didn't mind. And since Mrs Bullace had chosen two of Mrs Browning's pieces for her triumph on New Year's Eve, I argued that she knew the parish taste, and that I could do no better. Of course, too, composure over what I was going to do was far more important than the composition.

"Prepared for it," I said just now, but I meant it only in the sense that one prepares for a cold bath. There was still the plunge. I clasped my hands, stood up. Ceiling and floor gently rocked a little. There seemed to be faces--faces everywhere, and every eye in them was fixed on me. Thus completely encompassed, I could find no refuge from them, for unfortunately my Hypnos was completely obliterated from view by the lady with the lorgnette. So I fixed my attention, instead, on the window, where showed a blank break of clear, fair, blue sky between the rain-clouds of afternoon. A nervous cough from Lady Pollacke plunged me over, and I announced my title: "The Weakest Thing," by Elizabeth Barrett Browning:--

"Which is the weakest thing of all
Mine heart can ponder?
The sun, a little cloud can pall
With darkness yonder!
The cloud, a little wind can move
Where'er it listeth;
The wind, a little leaf above,
Though sere, resisteth!

What time that yellow leaf was green,
My days were gladder:
Now on its branch each summer-sheen
May find me sadder!
Ah, me! a _leaf_ with sighs can wring
My lips asunder--
Then is my heart the weakest thing
Itself can ponder.

Yet, Heart, when sun and cloud are pined
And drop together;
And at a blast which is not wind,
The forests wither,
Thou, from the darkening, deathly curse
To glory breakest,--
The Strongest of the Universe
Guarding the weakest."

The applause, in which Miss Templemaine generously joined, was this time quite unconcealed, and Lady Pollacke's sister's last "Touching" had hardly died away when Mrs Monnerie added _her_ approbation.

"Charming, perfectly charming," she murmured, eyeing me like a turtle-dove. "But tell me, my dear, why that particular poem? It seemed to have even less sense than usual."

"No-o; ye-es," breathed Lady Pollacke, and many heads nodded in discreet accord.

"Doesn't--er--perhaps, Mrs Browning dwell rather assiduously on the tragic side of life?" Mr Crimble ventured to inquire.

Lady Pollacke jerked her head, either in the affirmative or in the negative, and looked inquiringly at Mrs Monnerie, who merely drooped her eyes a little closer towards me and smiled, almost as if she and I were in a little plot together.

"What do _you_ say, Miss M.?"

"Well, Mrs Monnerie," I replied a little nervously, for all eyes were turned on me, "I don't think I know myself what _exactly_ the poem means--the who's and what's--and what the blast was which was not wind. But I thought it was a poem which every one would understand as much as _possible_ of."

To judge from the way she quivered in her chair, though quite inaudibly, Mrs Monnerie was extremely amused at this criticism.

"And that is why you chose it?"

"Well, yes," said I, "you see, when one is listening to poetry, not reading it to oneself, I mean, one hasn't time to pry about for all its bits of meaning, but only just to get the general--general--"

"Aroma?" suggested Mrs Monnerie.

"Yes--aroma."

"And the moral?"

The silence that hung over this little exchange was growing more and more dense. Luckless Miss M.! She only plunged herself deeper into it by her reply that, "Oh, there's nothing very much in the moral, Mrs Monnerie. That's quite ordinary. At least I read about that in _prose_, why, before I was seven!"

"Touch--" began that further voice, but was silenced by a testy lift of Mrs Monnerie's eyelid. "Indeed!" she said, "and couldn't you, wouldn't you, now, give me the prose version? That's more my mark."

"It was in a little nursery lesson-book of mine, called _The Observing Eye_; letters about snails and coral insects and spiders and things----" I paused. "A book, rather, you know, for Sundays. But my--my family and I----"

"Oh, but do," cried Lady Pollacke in a voice I should hardly have recognized, "I _adore_ snails."

Once more I was cornered. So I steeled myself anew, and stumbled through the brief passage in the squat, blue book. It tells how,--

"The history of each one of the animals we have now considered,
teaches us that our kind God watches over the wants and the
pleasures of the meanest of His creatures. We see that He gives to
them, not only the sagacity and the instruments which they need for
catching their food, but that He also provides them with some means
of defending themselves. We learn by their history that the
gracious Eye watches under the mighty waters, as well as over the
earth, and that no creature can stop doing His will without His eye
seeing it."

Chapter Twenty-Five

Once more I sat down, but this time in the midst of what seemed to me a rather unpleasant silence, as if the room had grown colder: a silence which was broken only by the distant whistlings of a thrush. At one and the same moment both Mr Pellew and Mr Crimble returned to tea-cups which I should have supposed must have, by this time, been empty, and Lady Pollacke's widowed sister folded up her lorgnette.

"My dear Miss M.," said Mrs Monnerie dryly, with an almost wicked ray of amusement in her deep-set eyes, "wherever the top of Beechwood Hill may be, and whatever supplies of food may be caught on its crest, there is no doubt that _you_ have been provided with the means of defending yourself. But tell me now, what do you think, perhaps, Mr _Pellew's_ little 'instruments' are? Or, better still--mine? Am I a mollusc with a hard shell, or a scorpion with a sting?"

Lady Pollacke rose to her feet and stood looking down on me like a hen, though not exactly a motherly one. But this was a serious question over which I must not be flustered, so I took my time. I folded my hands, and fixed a long, long look on Mrs Monnerie. Even after all these years, I confess it moves me to recall it.

"Of course, really and truly," I said at last, as deferentially as I could, "I haven't known you long enough to say. But I should think, Mrs Monnerie, you always knew the truth."

I was glad I had not been too impetuous. My reply evidently pleased her. She chuckled all over.

"Ah," she said reposefully, "the truth. And that is why, I suppose, like Sleeping Beauty, I am so thickly hedged in with the thorns and briers of affection. Well, well, there's one little truth we'll share alone, you and I." She raised herself in her chair and stooped her great face close to my ear: "We must know more of one another, my dear," she whispered. "I have taken a great fancy to you. We must meet again." She hoisted herself up. Sir Walter Pollacke had hastened in and stood smiling, with arm hooked, and genial, beaming countenance in front of her. Mr Crimble had already vanished. Mr Pellew was talking earnestly with Lady Pollacke. Conversation broke out, like a storm-shower, on every side. For a while I was extraordinarily alone.

Into this derelict moment a fair-cheeked, breathless lady descended, and surreptitiously thrusting a crimson padded birthday book and a miniature pencil into my lap, entreated my autograph--"Just your signature, you know--for my small daughter. How she would have _loved_ to be here!"

This lady cannot have been many years older than I, and one of those instantaneous, fleeting affections sprang up in me as I looked up at her for the first and only time, and seemed to see that small daughter smiling at me out of her face.

Alas, such is vanity. I turned over the leaves to August 30th and found printed there, for motto, a passage from Shakespeare:--

"He that has had a little tiny wit,--
With hey, ho, the wind and the rain,--
Must make content with his fortunes fit,
For the rain it raineth every day."

The 29th was little less depressing, from Samuel Taylor Coleridge:--

"He prayeth best who loveth best
All creatures great and small."

This would never do. I bent double over the volume, turned back hastily three or four leaves, and scrawled in my name under August 25th on a leaf that bore the quotation:--

"Fie on't; ah, fie! 'tis an unweeded garden,
That grows to seed; things rank and gross in nature
Possess it merely. That it should come to this!"

and beneath the quotation, the signature of Josephine Mildred Spratte.

"Thank you, _thank_ you, she will be overjoyed," blushed the fair-haired lady. A sudden hunger for solitude seized upon me. I rose hastily, conscious for the first time of a headache, caused, no doubt, by the expensive and fumey perfumes in the air. Threading my way between the trains and flounces and trouser-legs around me, at last my adieux were over. I was in the porch--in the carriage. The breezes of heaven were on my cheek. My blessed parlourmaid was once more installed beside me. Yet even now the Pollacke faces were still flocking in my mind. The outside world was very sluggishly welling in. Looking up so long had stiffened my neck. I fixed my eyes on the crested back buttons of Lady Pollacke's stiff-looking coachman, and committed myself to my thoughts.

It was to a Miss M., with one of her own handkerchiefs laid over her brows, and sprinkled with vinegar and lavender water, that Mrs Bowater brought in supper that evening. We had one of our broken talks together, none the less. But she persisted in desultory accounts of Fanny's ailments in her infancy; and I had to drag in Brunswick House by myself. At which she poked the fire and was mum. It was unamiable of her. I longed to share my little difficulties and triumphs. Surely she was showing rather too much of that discrimination which Lady Pollacke had recommended.

She snorted at Mr Pellew, she snorted at my friendly parlourmaid and even at Mrs Monnerie. Even when I repeated for her ear alone my nursery passage from _The Observing Eye_, her only comment was that to judge from _some_ fine folk she knew of, there was no doubt at all that God watched closely over the pleasures of the meanest of His creatures, but as for their doing His will, she hadn't much noticed it.

To my sigh of regret that Fanny had not been at home to accompany me, she retorted with yet another onslaught on the fire, and the apophthegm, that the world would be a far better place if people kept themselves _to_ themselves.

"But Mrs Bowater," I argued fretfully, "if I did that, I should just--distil, as you might say, quite away. Besides, Fanny would have been far, far the--the gracefullest person there. Mrs Monnerie would have taken a fancy to _her_, now, if you like."

Mrs Bowater drew in her lips and rubbed her nose. "God forbid," she said.

But it was her indifference to the impression that I myself had made on Mrs Monnerie that nettled me the most. "Why, then, who _is_ Lord B.?" I inquired impatiently at last, pushing back the bandage that had fallen over my eyes.

"From what I've heard of Lord B.," said Mrs Bowater shortly, "he was a gentleman of whom the less heard of's the better."

"But surely," I protested, "that isn't Mrs Monnerie's fault any more than Fanny's being so lovely--I mean, than I being a midget was my father's fault? Anyhow," I hurried on, "Mrs Monnerie says I look pale, and must go to the sea."

Mrs Bowater was still kneeling by the fire, just as Fanny used to kneel. And, like Fanny, when one most expected an answer, she remained silent; though, unlike Fanny, it seemed to be not because she was dreaming of something else. How shall I express it?--there fell a kind of loneliness between us. The severe face made no sign.

"Would you--would you miss me?" some silly self within piped out pathetically.

"Why, for the matter of that," was her sardonic reply, "there's not very much of you to miss."

I rose from my bed, flung down the bandage, and ran down my little staircase. "Oh, Mrs Bowater," I said, burying my face in her camphory skirts, "be kind to me; be kind to me! I've nobody but you."

The magnanimous creature stroked my vinegar-sodden hair with the tips of her horny fingers. "Why there, miss. I meant no harm. Isn't all the gentry and nobility just gaping to snatch you up? You won't want your old Mrs Bowater very long. What's more, you mustn't get carried away by yourself. You never know where that journey ends. If sea it is, sea it must be. Though, Lord preserve us, the word's no favourite of mine."

"But suppose, suppose, Mrs Bowater," I cried, starting up and smiling enrapturedly into her face, "suppose we could go together!"

"That," said she, with a look of astonishing benignity, "would be just what I was being led to suppose was the heighth of the impossible."

At which, of course, we at once began discussing ways and means. But, delicious though this prospect seemed, I determined that nothing should persuade me to go unless all hope of Fanny's coming home proved vain. Naturally, from Fanny memory darted to Wanderslore. I laughed up at my landlady, holding her finger, and suggested demurely that we should go off together on the morrow to see if my stranger were true to his word.

"We have kept him a very long time, and if, as you seem to think, Mrs Monnerie isn't such a wonderful lady, you may decide that after all _he_ is a gentleman."

She enjoyed my little joke, was pleased that I had been won over, but refused to accept my reasoning, though the topic itself was after her heart.

"The point is, miss, not whether your last conquest is a wonderful lady, or a grand lady, or even a perfect lady for the matter of that, but, well, a _lady_. It's that's the kind in my experience that comes nearest to being as uncommon a sort as any sort of a good woman."

This was a wholly unexpected vista for me, and I peered down its smooth, green, aristocratic sward with some little awe.

"As for the young fellow who made himself so free in his manners," she went on placidly, so that I had to scamper back to pick her up again, "I have no doubt seeing will be believing."

"But what is the story of Wanderslore?" I pressed her none too honestly.

The story--and this time Mrs Bowater poured it out quite freely--was precisely what I had been told already, but with the addition that the young woman who had hanged herself in one of its attics had done so for jealousy.

"Jealousy! But of whom?" I inquired.

"Her husband's, not her own: driven wild by his."

"You really mean," I persisted, "that she couldn't endure to live any longer because her husband loved her so much that he couldn't bear anybody else to love her too?"

"In some such measure," replied Mrs Bowater, "though I don't say he didn't help the other way round. But she was a wild, scattering creature. It was just her way. The less she cared, the more they flocked. She couldn't _collect_ herself, and say, 'Here I am; who are you?' so to speak. Ah, miss, it's a sickly and dangerous thing to be too much admired."

"But you said 'scattering': was she mad a little?"

"No. Peculiar, perhaps, with her sidelong, startled look. A lovelier I've never seen."

"You've seen her!"

"Thirty years ago, perhaps. Alive _and_ dead."

"Oh, Mrs Bowater, poor thing, poor thing."

"That you may well say, for lovely in the latter finding she was not."

My eyes were fixed on the fire, but the picture conjured up was dark even amidst the red-hot coals. "And he? did he die too? At least his jealousy was broken away."

"And I'm not so sure of that," said Mrs Bowater. "It's like the men to go on wanting, even when it comes to scrabbling at a grave. And there's a trashy sort of creature, though well-set-up enough from the outside, that a spark will put in a blaze. I've no doubt he was that kind."

I thought of my own sparks, but questioned on: "Then there's nothing else but--but her ghost there now?"

"Lor, _ghosts_, miss, it's an hour, I see, when bed's the proper place for you and me. I look to be scared by that kind of gentry when they come true."

"You don't believe, then, in _Destroyers_, Mrs Bowater?"

"Miss, it's those queer books you are reading," was the evasive reply. "'Destroyers'! Why, wasn't it cruel enough to drive that poor feather-brained creature into a noose!"

Candle and I and drowsing cinders kept company until St Peter's bell had told only the sleepless that midnight was over the world. It seemed to my young mind that there was not a day, scarcely an hour, I lived, but that Life was unfolding itself in ever new and ravishing disguises. I had not begun to be in the least tired or afraid of it. Smallest of bubbles I might be, tossing on the great waters, but I reflected the universe. What need of courage when no danger was apparent? Surely one need not mind being different if that difference added to one's share in the wonderful Banquet. Even Wanderslore's story was only of what happened when the tangle was so harshly knotted that no mortal fingers could unravel it. And though my own private existence now had Mrs Monnerie--and all that _she_ might do and mean and be--to cope with, as well as my stranger who was yet another queer story and as yet mine alone, these complications were enticing. One must just keep control of them; that was all. At which I thought a little unsteadily of Fanny's "pin," and remembered that that pin was helping to keep her and Mr Crimble from being torn apart.

He had seemed so peering a guest at Brunswick House. Mrs Monnerie hadn't so much as glanced at him when he had commented on Mrs Browning's poems. There seemed to be a shadow over whatever he did. It was as though there could be a sadness in the very coursing of one's blood. How thankful I felt that mine hadn't been a really flattering reply to Mrs Monnerie's question. She was extremely arrogant, even for a younger daughter of a lord. On the other hand, though, of course, the sheer novelty of me had had something to do with it, she had certainly singled me out afterwards to know what I _thought_, and in thoughts there is no particular size, only effusiveness--no, _piercingness_. I smiled to myself at the word, pitied my godmother for living so sequestered a life, and wondered how and why it was that my father and mother had so obstinately shut me away from the world. If only Fanny was coming home--what a difference she would find in her fretful Midge! And with that, I discovered that my feet were cold and that my headache had ached itself away.

Chapter Twenty-Six

There had been no need to reserve the small hours for these ruminations. The next few days were wet and windy; every glance at the streaming panes cast my mind into a sort of vacancy. The wind trumpeted smoke into the room; I could fix my mind on nothing. Then the weather faired. There came "a red sky at night," and Spica flashing secrets to me across the darkness; and that supper-time I referred as casually as possible to Mr Anon.

"I suppose one _must_ keep one's promises, Mrs Bowater, even to a stranger. Would half-past six be too early to keep mine, do you think? Would it look too--forward? Of course he may have forgotten all about me by this time."

Mrs Bowater eyed me like an owl as I bent my cheeks over my bowl of bread and milk, and proceeded to preach me yet another little sermon on the ways of the world. Nevertheless, the next morning saw us setting out together in the crisp, sparkling air to my tryst, with the tacit understanding that she accompanied me rather in the cause of propriety than romance.

Owing, I fancy, to a bunion, she was so leisurely a walker that it was I who must set my pace to hers. But the day promised to be warm, and we could take our ease. As we wandered on among the early flowers and bright, green grass, and under the beeches, a mildness lightened into her face. Over her long features lay a vacant yet happy smile, of which she seemed to be unaware. This set me off thinking in the old, old fashion; comparing my lot with that of ordinary human beings. How fortunate I was. If only she could have seen the lowlier plants as I could--scarcely looking down on any, and of the same stature as some among the taller of them, so that the air around me was dyed and illumined with their clear colours, and burthened with their breath.

The least and humblest of them--not merely crisp-edged lichen, speckle-seed whitlow-grass and hyssop in the wall--are so close to earth, the wonder, indeed, is that common-sized people ever see them at all. They must, at any rate, I thought, commit themselves to their stomachs, or go down on their knees to see them _properly_. So, on we went, Mrs Bowater and I, she pursuing her private musings, and I mine.

I smiled to myself at remembrance of Dr Phelps and his blushes. After all, if humanity should "dwindle into a delicate littleness," it would make a good deal more difference than he had supposed. What a destruction would ensue, among all the lesser creatures of the earth, the squirrels, moles, voles, hedgehogs, and the birds, not to mention the bees and hornets. _They_ would be the enemies then--the traps and poisons and the nets! No more billowy cornfields a good yard high, no more fine nine-foot hedges flinging their blossoms into the air. And all the long-legged, "doubled," bloated garden flowers, gone clean out of favour. It would be a little world, would it be a happier? The dwarfed Mrs Bowaters, Dr Phelpses, Miss Bullaces, Lady Pollackes.

But there was little chance of such an eventuality--at least in my lifetime. It was far likelier that the Miss M.'s of the world would continue to be a by-play. Yet, as I glanced up at my companion, and called to mind other such "Lapland Giants" of mine, I can truthfully avouch that I did not much envy their extra inches. So much more thin-skinned surface to be kept warm and unscratched. The cumbersome bones, the curious distance from foot and fingertip to brain, too; and those quarts and quarts of blood. I shuddered. It was little short of a miracle that they escaped continual injury; and what an extended body in which to die.

On the other hand, what real loss was mine--with so much to my advantage? These great spreading beech-trees were no less shady and companionable to me than to them. Nor, thought I, could moon or sun or star or ocean or mountain be any the less silvery, hot, lustrous, and remote, forlorn in beauty, or vast in strangeness, one way or the other, than they are to ordinary people. Could there be any doubt at all, too, that men had always coveted to make much finer and more delicate things than their clumsiness allowed?