Chapter IX: Part 9

What fantastic creatures they were!--with their vast mansions, pyramids, palaces, scores of sizes too large either for carcass or mind. Their Satan a monster on whose wrist the vulture of the Andes could perch like an aphis on my thumb; yet their Death but skeleton-high, and their Saviour of such a stature that wellnigh without stooping He could have laid His fingers on my head.

Time's sands had been trickling fast while I thought these small thoughts that bright spring daybreak. So, though we had loitered on our way, it seemed we had reached our destination on the wings of the morning. Alas, Mrs Bowater's smile can have been only skin-deep; for, when, lifting my eyes from the ground I stopped all of a sudden, spread out my hands, and cried in triumph, "There! Mrs Bowater"; she hardly shared my rapture.

She disapproved of the vast, blank "barn of a place," with its blackshot windows and cold chimneys. The waste and ruination of the garden displeased her so much that I grew a little ashamed of my barbarism.

"It's all going to wrack and ruin," she exclaimed, snorting at my stone summer-house no less emphatically than she had snorted at Mrs Monnerie. "Not a walkable walk, nor the trace of a border; and was there ever such a miggle-maggle of weeds! A fine house in its prime, miss, but now, money melting away like butter in the sun."

"But," said I, standing before her in the lovely light amid the dwelling dewdrops, "really and truly, Mrs Bowater, it is only going back to its own again. What you call a miggle-maggle is what these things were made to be. They are growing up now by themselves; and if you could look as close as I can, you'd see they breathe only what each can spare. They are just racing along to live as wildly as they possibly can. It's the tameness," I expostulated, flinging back my hood, "that would be shocking to _me_."

Mrs Bowater looked down at me, listening to this high-piped recitative with an unusual inquisitiveness.

"Well, that's as it may be," she retorted, "but what _I'm_ asking is, Where's the young fellow? He don't seem to be as punctual as they were when I was a girl."

My own eyes had long been busy, but as yet in vain.

"I did not come particularly to see him," was my airy reply. "Besides, we said no time--_any_ fine day. Shall we sit down?"

With a secretive smile Mrs Bowater spread a square of waterproof sheeting over a flat stone that had fallen out of the coping of the house, unfolded a newspaper over the grass, and we began our breakfast. Neither of us betrayed much appetite for it; she, I fancy, having already fortified herself out of her brown teapot before leaving the house, and I because of the odour of india-rubber and newspaper--an odour presently intensified by the moisture and the sun. Paying no heed to my fastidious nibblings, she munched on reflectively, while I grew more and more ill at ease, first because the "young fellow" was almost visibly sinking in my old friend's esteem, and next because her cloth-booted foot lay within a few inches of the stone beneath which was hidden Fanny's letter.

"It'll do you good, the sea," she remarked presently, after sweeping yet one more comprehensive glance around her, "and we can only hope Mrs Monnerie will be as good as her word. A spot like this--trespassing or not--is good for neither man nor beast. And when you are young the more human company you get, with proper supervising, the better."

"Were _you_ happy as a girl, Mrs Bowater?" I inquired after a pause.

Our voices went up and up into the still, mild air. "Happy enough--for my own good," she said, neatly screwing up her remaining biscuits in their paper bag. "In my days children were brought up. Taught to make themselves useful. I would as soon have lifted a hand against my mother as answer her back."

"You mean she--she whipped you?"

"If need be," my landlady replied complacently, folding her thread-gloved hands on her lap and contemplating the shiny toecaps of her boots. "She had large hands, my mother; and plenty of temper kept well under control. What's more, if life isn't a continual punishment for the stoopidities and wickedness of others, not to mention ourselves, then it must be even a darker story than was ever told me."

"And was, Mrs Bowater, Mr Bowater your--your first----" I looked steadily at a flower at my foot in case she might be affected at so intimate a question, and not wish me to see her face.

"If Mr Bowater was not the first," was her easy response, "he may well live to boast of being the last. Which is neither here nor there, for we may be sure he's enjoying attentive nursing. Broken bones are soon mended. It's when things are disjointed from the root that the wrench comes."

The storm-felled bole lay there beside us, as if for picture to her parable. I began to think rather more earnestly than I had intended to that morning. In my present state of conscience, it was never an easy matter to decide whether Mrs Bowater's comments on life referred openly to things in general or covertly to me in particular. How fortunate that the scent of Fanny's notepaper was not potent enough to escape from its tomb. And whether or not, speech seemed less dangerous than silence.

"It seems to me, Mrs Bowater," I began rather hastily, "at least to judge from my own father and mother, that a man _depends_ very much on a woman. Men don't seem to grow up in the same way, though I suppose they are practical enough as men."

"If it were one female," was the reply, "there'd be less to be found fault with. That poor young creature over there took her life for no better reason, even though the reason was turned inside out as you may say."

I met the frightful, louring stare of the house. "What was her name?" I whispered--but into nothing, for, bolt upright as she was, Mrs Bowater had shut her eyes, as if in preparation for a nap.

A thread-like tangle of song netted the air. We were, indeed, trespassers. I darted my glance this way and that, in and out of the pale green whispering shadows in this wild haunt. Then, realizing by some faint stir in my mind that the stiff, still, shut-away figure beside me was only feigning to be asleep, I opened the rain-warped covers of my _Sense and Sensibility_, and began plotting how to be rid of her for a while, so that my solitude might summon my stranger, and I might recover Fanny's letter.

Then once more I knew. Raising my eyes, I looked straight across at him, scowling there beneath his stunted thorn in a drift of flowers like fool's parsley. He was making signs, too, with his hands. I watched him pensively, in secret amusement. Then swifter than Daphne into her laurel, instantaneously _he_ vanished, and _I_ became aware that its black eyes were staring out from the long face of the motionless figure beside me, as might an owl's into an aviary.

"Did you hear a bird, Mrs Bowater?" I inquired innocently.

"When I was a girl," said the mouth, "sparrowhawks were a common sight, but I never heard one sing."

"But isn't a sparrowhawk quite a large bird?"

"We must judge," said Mrs Bowater, "not by the size, but the kind. Elseways, miss, your old friend might have been found sleeping, as they say, at her box." She pretended to yawn, gathered her legs under her, and rose up and up. "I'll be taking a little walk round. And you shall tell your young acquaintance that I mean him no harm, but that I mean you the reverse; and if show himself he won't, well, here I sit till the Day of Judgment."

An angry speech curled the tip of my tongue. But the simple-faced flowers were slowly making obeisance to Mrs Bowater's black, dragging skirts, and when she was nearly out of sight I sallied out to confront my stranger.

His face was black with rage and contempt. "_That_ contaminating scarecrow; who's she?" was his greeting. "The days I have waited!"

The resentment that had simmered up in me on his behalf now boiled over against him. I looked at him in silence.

"That contaminating scarecrow, as you are pleased to call her, is the best friend I have in the world. I need no other."

"And I," he said harshly, "have no friend in _this_ world, and need you."

"Then," said I, "you have lost your opportunity. Do you suppose I am a child--to be insulted and domineered over only because I am alone? Possibly," and my lips so trembled that I could hardly frame the words, "it is _your_ face I shall see when I think of those windows."

I was speaking wiselier than I knew. He turned sharply, and by a play of light it seemed that at one of them there stood looking down on us out of the distance a shape that so had watched for ever, leering darkly out of the void. And there awoke in me the sense of this stranger's extremity of solitude, of his unhappy disguise, of his animal-like patience.

"Why," I said, "Mrs Bowater! You might far rather be _thanking_ her for--for----"

"Curses on her," he choked, turning away. "There was everything to tell you."

"What everything?"

"Call her back now," he muttered furiously.

"That," I said smoothly, "is easily done. But, forgive me, I don't know your name."

His eyes wandered over the turf beneath me, mounted slowly up, my foot to my head, and looked into mine. In their intense regard I seemed to be but a bubble floating away into the air. I shivered, and turned my back on him, without waiting for an answer. He followed me as quietly as a sheep.

Mrs Bowater had already come sauntering back to our breakfast table, and with gaze impassively fixed on the horizon, pretended not to be aware of our approach.

I smiled back at my companion as we drew near. "This, Mrs Bowater," said I, "is Mr Anon. Would you please present him to Miss Thomasina of Bedlam?"

For a moment or two they stood facing one another, just as I have seen two insects stand--motionless, regardful, exchanging each other's presences. Then, after one lightning snap at him from her eye, she rose to my bait like a fish. "A pleasant morning, sir," she remarked affably, though in her Bible voice. "My young lady and I were enjoying the spring air."

Back to memory comes the darkness of a theatre, and Mrs Monnerie breathing and sighing beside me, and there on the limelit green of the stage lolls ass-headed Bottom the Weaver cracking jokes with the Fairies.

My Oberon addressed Mrs Bowater as urbanely as St George must have addressed the Dragon--or any other customary monster.

He seemed to pass muster, none the less, for she rose, patted her sheet, pushed forward her bonnet on to her rounded temples, and bade him a composed good-morning. She would be awaiting me, she announced, in an hour's time under my beech tree.

"I think, perhaps, _two_, Mrs Bowater," I said firmly.

She gave me a look--all our long slow evening firelit talks together seemed to be swimming in its smile; and withdrew.

The air eddied into quiet again. The stretched-out blue of the sky was as bland and solitary as if a seraph sat dreaming on its Eastern outskirts. Mr Anon and I seated ourselves three or four feet apart, and I watched the sidelong face, so delicately carved against the green; yet sunken in so sullen a stare.

Standing up on his feet against the background of Mrs Bowater's ink-black flounces, with his rather humped shoulders and straight hair, he had looked an eccentric, and, even to my view, a stunted figure. Now the whole scene around us seemed to be sorting itself into a different proportion before my eyes. He it was who was become the unit of space, the yard-stick of the universe. The flowers, their roots glintily netted with spider-webs, nodded serenely over his long hands. A peacock butterfly with folded colours sipped of the sunshine on a tuft nearly at evens with his cheek. The very birds sang to his size, and every rift between the woodlands awaited the cuckoo. Only his clothes were grotesque, but less so than in my parlour Mr Crimble's skirts, or even Lady Pollacke's treacherous bonnet.

I folded my white silk gloves into a ball. A wren began tweeting in a bush near by. "I am going away soon," I said, "to the sea."

The wren glided away out of sight amongst its thorns. I knew by his sudden stillness that this had been unwelcome news. "That will be very pleasant for me, won't it?" I said.

"The sea?" he returned coldly, with averted head. "Well, _I_ am bound still further."

The reply fretted me. I wanted bare facts just then. "Why are you so angry? What is your name? And where do you live?" It was my turn to ask questions, and I popped them out as if from a _Little by Little_.

And then, with his queer, croaking, yet captivating voice, he broke into a long, low monologue. He gave me his name--and "Mr Anon" describes him no worse. He waved his hand vaguely in the direction of the house he lived in. But instead of apologizing for his ill-temper, he accused me of deceiving and humiliating him; of being, so I gathered, a toy of my landlady's, of betraying and soiling myself.

Why all this wild stuff only seemed to flatter me, I cannot say. I listened and laughed, pressing flat with both hands the sorry covers of my book, and laughed also low in my heart.

"Oh, contempt!" he cried. "I am used to that."

The words curdled on his tongue as he expressed his loathing of poor Mrs Bowater and her kind--mere Humanity--that ate and drank in musty houses stuck up out of the happy earth like warts on the skin, that battened on meat, stalked its puddled streets and vile, stifling towns, spread its rank odours on the air, increased and multiplied. Monstrous in shape, automatic, blinded by habit, abandoned by instinct, monkey-like, degraded!

What an unjust tirade! He barked it all out at me as if the blame were mine; as if _I_ had nibbled the Apple. I turned my face away, smiling, but listening. Did I realize, he asked me, what a divine fortune it was to be so little, and in this to be All. On and on he raved: I breathed air "a dewdrop could chill"; I was as near lovely naught made visible as the passing of a flower; the mere mattering of a dream. And when I died my body would be but a perishing flake of manna, and my bones....

"Yes, a wren's picking," I rudely interrupted. "And what of my soul, please? Why, you talk like--like a poet. Besides, you tell me nothing new. I was thinking all that and more on my way here with my landlady. What has _size_ to do with it? Why, when I thought of my mother after she was dead, and peered down in the place of my imagination into her grave, I saw her spirit--young, younger than I, and bodiless, and infinitely more beautiful even than she had been in my dreams, floating up out of it, free, sweet, and happy, like a flame--though shadowy. Besides, I don't see how you can help _pitying_ men and women. They seem to fly to one another for company; and half their comfort is in their numbers."

Never in all my life had I put my thoughts into words like this; and he--a stranger.

There fell a silence between us. The natural quietude of the garden was softly settling down and down like infinitesimal grains of sand in a pool of water. It had forgotten that humans were harbouring in its solitude. And still he maintained that his words were not untrue, that he knew mankind better than I, that to fall into their ways and follow their opinions and strivings was to deafen my ears, and seal up my eyes, and lose my very self. "The Self everywhere," he said.

And he told me, whether in time or space I know not, of a country whose people were of my stature and slenderness. This was a land, he said, walled in by enormous, ice-capped mountains couching the furnace of the rising sun, and yet set at the ocean's edge. Its sand-dunes ring like dulcimers in the heat. Its valleys of swift rivers were of a green so pale and vivid and so flower-encrusted that an English--even a Kentish--spring is but a coarse and rustic prettiness by comparison. Vine and orange and trees of outlandish names gave their fruits there; yet there also willows swept the winds, and palms spiked the blue with their fans, and the cactus flourished with the tamarisk. Geese, of dark green and snow, were on its inland waters, and a bird clocked the hours of the night, and the conformation of its stars would be strange to my eyes. And such was the lowliness and simplicity of this people's habitations that the most powerful sea-glass, turned upon and searching their secret haunts from a ship becalmed on the ocean, would spy out nothing--nothing there, only world wilderness of snow-dazzling mountain-top and green valley, ravine, and condor, and what might just be Nature's small ingenuities--mounds and traceries. Yet within all was quiet loveliness, feet light as goldfinches', silks fine as gossamer, voices as of a watery beading of silence. And their life being all happiness they have no name for their God. And it seems--according to Mr Anon's account of it--that such was the ancient history of the world, that Man was so once, but had swollen to his present shape, of which he had lost the true spring and mastery, and had sunk deeper and deeper into a kind of oblivion of the mind, suffocating his past, and now all but insane with pride in his own monstrosities.

All this my new friend (and yet not so _very_ new, it seemed)--all this he poured out to me in the garden, though I can only faintly recall his actual words, as if, like Moses, I had smitten the rock. And I listened weariedly, with little hope of understanding him, and with the suspicion that it was nothing but a Tom o' Bedlam's dream he was recounting. Yet, as if in disproof of my own incredulity, there sat I; and over the trees yonder stood Mrs Bowater's ugly little brick house; and beyond that, the stony, tapering spire of St Peter's, the High Street. And I looked at him without any affection in my thoughts, and wished fretfully to be gone. What use to be lulled with fantastic pictures of Paradise when I might have died of fear and hatred on Mrs Stocks's doorstep; when everything I said was "touching, touching"?

"Well," I mockingly interposed at last, "the farthing dip's guttering. And what if it's all true, and there _is_ such a place, what then? How am I going to get there, pray? Would you like to mummy me and shut me up in a box and _carry_ me there, as they used to in Basman? Years and years ago my father told me of the pygmy men and horses--the same size as yours, I suppose--who lived in caves on the banks of the Nile. But I doubt if I believed in them much, even then. I am not so ignorant as all that."

The life died out of his face, just as, because of a cloud carried up into the sky, the sunlight at that moment fled from Wanderslore. He coughed, leaning on his hands, and looked in a scared, empty, hunted fashion to right and left. "Only that you might stay," he scarcely whispered. " ... I love you."

Instinctively I drew away, lips dry, and heart numbly, heavily beating. An influence more secret than the shadow of a cloud had suddenly chilled and darkened the garden and robbed it of its beauty. I shrank into myself, cold and awkward, and did not dare even to glance at my companion.

"A fine thing," was all I found to reply, "for a toy, as you call me. I don't know what you mean."

Miserable enough that memory is when I think of what came after, for now my only dread was that he might really be out of his wits, and might make my beloved, solitary garden for ever hateful to me. I drew close my cape, and lifted my book.

"There is a private letter of mine hidden under that stone," I said coldly. "Will you please be so good as to fetch it out for me? And you are never, never to say that again."

The poor thing looked so desperately ill and forsaken with his humped shoulders--and that fine, fantastic story still ringing in my ears!--that a kind of sadness came over me, and I hid my face in my hands.

"The letter is not there," said his voice.

I drew my fingers from my face, and glared at him from between them; then scrambled to my feet. Out swam the sun again, drenching all around us with its light and heat.

"Next time I come," I shrilled at him, "the letter _will_ be there. The thief will have put it back again! Oh, how unhappy you have made me!"

Chapter Twenty-Seven

I stumbled off, feeling smaller and smaller as I went, more and more ridiculous and insignificant, as indeed I must have appeared; for distance can hardly lend enchantment to any view of _me_. Not one single look did I cast behind; but now that my feelings began to quiet down, I began also to think. And a pretty muddle of mind it was. What had enraged and embittered me so? If only I had remained calm. Was it that my pride, my vanity, had in some vague fashion been a punishment of him for Fanny's unkindness to me?

"But he stole, he _stole_ my letter," I said aloud, stamping my foot on a budding violet; and--there was Mrs Bowater. Evidently she had been watching my approach, and now smiled benignly.

"Why, you are quite out of breath, miss; and your cheeks!... I hope you haven't been having words. A better-spoken young fellow than I had fancied; and I'm sure I ask his pardon for the 'gentleman.'"

"Ach," I swept up at my beech-tree, now cautiously unsheathing its first green buds in the lower branches, "I think he must be light in his head."

"And that often comes," replied Mrs Bowater, with undisguised _bonhomie_, "from being heavy at the heart. Why, miss, he may be a young nobleman in disguise. There's unlikelier things even than that, to judge from that trash of Fanny's. While, as for fish in the sea--it's sometimes wise to be contented with what we can catch."

Who had been talking to me about fish in the sea--quite lately? I thought contemptuously of Pollie and the Dream Book. "I am sorry," I replied, nose in air, "but I cannot follow the allusion."

The charge of vulgarity was the very last, I think, which Mrs Bowater would have lifted a finger to refute. My cheeks flamed hotter to know that she was quietly smiling up there. We walked on in silence.

That night I could not sleep. I was afraid. Life was blackening my mind like the mould of a graveyard. I could think of nothing but one face, one voice--that scorn and longing, thought and fantasy. What if he did love me a little? I might at least have been kind to him. Had I so many friends that I could afford to be harsh and ungrateful? How dreadfully ill he had looked when I scoffed at him. And now what might _not_ have happened to him? I seemed lost to myself. No wonder Fanny.... My body grew cold at a thought; the palms of my hands began to ache.

Half-stifled, I leapt out of bed, and without the least notion of what I was doing, hastily dressed myself, and fled out into the night. I must find him, talk to him, plead with him, before it was too late. And in the trickling starlight, pressed against my own gatepost--there he was.

"Oh," I whispered at him in a fever of relief and shame and apprehensiveness, "what are you doing here? You must go away at once, at once. I forgive you. Yes, yes; I forgive you. But--at once. Keep the letter for me till I come again." His hand was wet with the dew. "Oh, and never say it again. Please, please, if you care for me the least bit in the world, never, never say what you did again." I poured out the heedless words in the sweet-scented quiet of midnight. "Now--now go"; I entreated. "And indeed, indeed I am your friend."

The dark eyes shone quietly close to mine. He sighed. He lifted my fingers, and put them to my breast again. He whispered unintelligible words between us, and was gone. No more stars for me that night. I slept sound until long after dawn....

Softly as thistledown the days floated into eternity; yet they were days of expectation and action. April was her fickle self; not so Mrs Monnerie. Her letter to Mrs Bowater must have been a marvel of tact. Apartments had been engaged for us at a little watering-place in Dorsetshire, called Lyme Regis. Mrs Bowater and I were to spend at least a fortnight there alone together, and after our return Mrs Monnerie herself was to pay me a visit, and see with her own eyes if her prescription had been successful. After that, perhaps, if I were so inclined, and my landlady agreed with Mr Pellew that it would be good for me, I might spend a week or two with her in London. What a twist of the kaleidoscope. I had sown never a pinch of seed, yet here was everything laughing and blossoming around me, like the wilderness in Isaiah.

Indeed my own looking-glass told me how wan and languishing a Miss M. was pining for change of scene and air. She rejoiced that Fanny was enjoying herself, rejoiced that she was going to enjoy herself too. I searched Mrs Bowater's library for views of the sea, but without much reward. So I read over Mr Bowater's Captain Maury--on the winds and monsoons and tide-rips and hurricanes, freshened up my _Robinson Crusoe_, and dreamed of the Angels with the Vials. In the midst of my packing (and I spread it out for sheer amusement's sake), Mr Crimble called again. He looked nervous, gloomy, and hollow-eyed.

I was fast becoming a mistress in affairs of the sensibilities. Yet, when, kneeling over my open trunk, I heard him in the porch, I mimicked Fanny's "Dash!" and wished to goodness he had postponed his visit until only echo could have answered his knock. It fretted me to be bothered with him. And now? What would I not give to be able to say I had done my best and utmost to help him when he wanted it? Here is a riddle I can find no answer to, however long I live: How is it that our eyes cannot foresee, our very hearts cannot forefeel, the future? And how should we act if that future were plain before us? Yet, even then, what could I have said to him to comfort him? Really and truly I had no candle with which to see into that dark mind.

In actual fact my task was difficult and delicate enough. In spite of her vow not to write again, yet another letter had meanwhile come from Fanny. If Mr Crimble's had afforded "a ray of hope," this had shut it clean away. It was full of temporizings, wheedlings, evasions--and brimming over with Fanny.

It suggested, too, that Mrs Bowater must have misread the name of her holiday place. The half-legible printing of the postmark on the envelope--fortunately I had intercepted the postman--did not even begin with an M. And no address was given within. I was to tell Mr Crimble that Fanny was over-tired and depressed by the term's work, that she simply couldn't set her "weary mind" to anything, and as for decisions:--

"He seems to think only of himself. You couldn't believe,
Midgetina, what nonsense the man talks. He can't _see_ that all
poor Fanny's future is at stake, body and soul. Tell him if he
_wants_ her to smile, he must sit in patience on a pedestal, and
smile too. One simply can't trust the poor creature with cold,
sober facts. His mother, now--why, I could read it in your own
polite little description of her at your Grand Reception--she
smiles and smiles. So did the Cheshire Cat.

"'But oh, dear Fanny, time and your own true self, God helping,
would win her over.' So writes H. C. That's candid enough, if you
look into it; but it isn't sense. Once hostile, old ladies are
_not_ won over. They don't care much for mind in the young. Anyhow,
one look at me was enough for her--and it was followed by a sharp
little peer at poor Harold! She guessed. So you see, my dear, even
for youthful things, like you and me, time gathers roses a jolly
sight faster than we can, and it would have to be the _fait
accompli_, before a word is breathed to her. That is, if I could
take a deep breath and say, Yes.

"But I can't. I ask you: Can you _see_ Fanny Bowater a Right
Reverendissima? No, nor can I. And not even gaiters or an apron
here and now would settle the question off-hand. Why I confide all
this in you (why, for that matter, it has all been confided in
_me_), I know not. You want nothing, and if you did, you wouldn't
want it long. Now, would you? Perhaps that is the secret. But Fanny
wants a good deal. She cannot even guess how much. So, while Miss
Stebbings and Beechwood Hill for ever and ever would be hell before
purgatory, H. C. and St Peter's would be merely the same thing,
with the fires _out_. And I am quite sure that, given a chance,
heaven is our home.

"Oh, Midgetina, I listen to all this; mumbling my heart like a dog
a bone. What the devil has it got to do with _me_, I ask myself?
Who set the infernal trap? If only I could stop thinking and
mocking and find some one--not 'to love me' (between ourselves,
there are far too many of _them_ already), but capable of making me
love him. They say a woman can't be driven. I disagree. She _can_
be driven--mad. And apart from that, though twenty men only succeed
in giving me hydrophobia, one could persuade me to drink, if only
his name was Mr Right, as mother succinctly puts it.

"But first and last, I am having a real, if not a particularly
sagacious, holiday, and can take care of myself. And next and last,
play, I _beseech_ you, the tiny good Samaritan between me and
poor, plodding, blinded H. C.--even if he does eventually have to
go on to Jericho.

"And I shall ever remain, your most affec.--F."

How all this baffled me. I tried, but dismally failed, to pour a trickle of wine and oil into Mr Crimble's wounded heart, for his sake and for mine, not for Fanny's, for I knew in myself that his "Jericho" was already within view.

"I don't understand her; I don't understand her," he kept repeating, crushing his soft hat in his small, square hands. "I cannot reach her; I am not in touch with her."

Out of the fount of my womanly wisdom I reminded him how young she was, how clever, and how much flattered.

"You know, then, there are--others?" he gulped, darkly meeting me.

"That, surely, is what makes her so precious," I falsely insinuated.

He gazed at me, his eyes like an immense, empty shop-window. "That thought puts---- I can't," and he twisted his head on his shoulders as if shadows were around him; "I can't bear to think of her and--with--_others_. It unbalances me. But how can you understand?... A sealed book. Last night I sat at my window. It was raining. I know not the hour: and Spring!" He clutched at his knees, stooping forward. "I repudiated myself, thrust myself out. Oh, believe me, we are not alone. And there and then I resolved to lay the whole matter before"--his glance groped towards the door--"before, in fact, her _mother_. She is a woman of sagacity, of proper feeling in her station, though how she came to be the mother of---- But that's neither here nor there. We mustn't probe. Probably she thinks--but what use to consider it? One word to her--and Fanny would be lost to me for ever." For a moment it seemed his eyes closed on me. "How can I bring myself to speak of it?" a remote voice murmured from beneath them.

I looked at the figure seated there in its long black coat; and far away in my mind whistled an ecstatic bird--"The sea! the sea! You are going away--out, out of all this."

So, too, was Mr Crimble, if only I had known it. It was my weak and cowardly acquiescence in Fanny's deceits that was speeding him on his dreadful journey. None the less, a wretched heartless impatience fretted me at being thus helplessly hemmed in by my fellow creatures. How clumsily they groped on. Why couldn't they be happy in just living free from the clouds and trammels of each other and of themselves? The selfish helplessness of it all. It was, indeed, as though the strange fires which Fanny had burnt me in--which any sudden thought of her could still fan into a flickering blaze--had utterly died down. Whether or not, I was hardened; a poor little earthenware pot fresh from the furnace. And with what elixir was it brimmed.

I rose from my chair, walked away from my visitor, and peered through my muslin curtains at the green and shine and blue. A nursemaid was lagging along with a sleeping infant--its mild face to the sky--in a perambulator. A faint drift of dandelions showed in the stretching meadow. Kent's blue hems lay calm; my thoughts drew far away.

"Mr Crimble," I cried in a low voice: "is she _worth_ all our care for her?"

"'Our'--'our'?" he expostulated.

"Mine, then. When I gave her, just to be friends, because--because I loved her, a little ivory box, nothing of any value, of course, but which I have loved and treasured since childhood, she left it without a thought. It's in my wardrobe drawer--shall I show it to you? I _say_ it was nothing in itself; but what I mean is that she just makes use of me, and with far less generosity than--than other people do. Her eyes, her voice, when she moves her hand, turns her head, looks back--oh, I know! But," and I turned on him in the light, "does it mean anything? Let us just help her all we can, and--keep away."

It was a treachery past all forgiveness: I see that now. If only I had said, "Love on, love on: ask nothing." But I did not say it. A contempt of all this slow folly was in my brain that afternoon. Why couldn't the black cowering creature take himself off? What concern of mine was his sick, sheepish look? What particle of a fig did he care for Me? Had he lifted a little finger when I myself bitterly needed it? I seemed to be struggling in a net of hatred.

He raised himself in his chair, his spectacles still fixed on me; as if some foul insect had erected its blunt head at him.

"Then _you_ are against her too," he uttered, under his breath. "I might have known it, I might have known it. I am a lost man."

It was pitiful. "Lost fiddlesticks!" I snapped back at him, with bared teeth. "I wouldn't--I've never harmed a fly. Who, I should like to know, came to _my_ help when...?" But I choked down the words. Silence fell between us. The idiot clock chimed five. He turned his face away to conceal the aversion that had suddenly overwhelmed him at sight of me.

"I see," he said, in a hollow, low voice, with his old wooden, artificial dignity. "There's nothing more to say. I can only thank you, and be gone. I had not realized. You misjudge her. You haven't the---- How could it be expected? But there! thinking's impossible."

How often had I seen my poor father in his last heavy days draw his hand across his eyes like that? Already my fickle mind was struggling to find words with which to retract, to explain away that venomous outbreak. But I let him go. The stooping, hatted figure hastened past my window; and I was never to see him again.

Chapter Twenty-Eight

Yet, in spite of misgivings, no very dark foreboding companioned me that evening. With infinite labour I concocted two letters:--

"DEAR MR CRIMBLE,--I regret my words this afternoon. Bitterly.
Indeed I do. But still truth is important, isn't it? _One we know_
hasn't been too kind to either of us. I still say that. And if it
seems inconsiderate, please remember Shakespeare's lines about the
beetle (which I came across in a Birthday Book the other day)--a
creature I detest. Besides, we can return good for evil--I can't
help this sounding like hypocrisy--even though it is an extremely
tiring exchange. I _feel_ small enough just now, but would do
anything in the world that would help in the way we both want. I
hope that you will believe this and that you will forgive my
miserable tongue. Believe me, ever yours sincerely,--M. M."

My second letter was addressed to Fanny's school, "c/o Miss Stebbings":--

"DEAR FANNY,--He came again to-day and looks like a corpse. I can
do no more. You must know how utterly miserable you are making him;
that I can't, and won't, go on being so doublefaced. I don't call
_that_ being the good Samaritan. Throw the stone one way or the
other, however many birds it may kill. That's the bravest thing to
do. A horrid boy I knew as a child once aimed at a jay and
killed--a wren. Well, there's only one wren that I know of--your M.

"PS.--I hope this doesn't sound an angry letter. I thought only the
other day how difficult it must be being as fascinating as you are.
And, of course, we are _what_ we are, aren't we, and cannot, I
suppose, help acting like that? You can't think how he looked, and
talked. Besides, I am sure you will enjoy your holiday much more
when you have made up your mind. Oh, Fanny, I can't say what's in
mine. Every day there's something else to dread. And all that I do
seems only to make things worse. _Do_ write: and, though, of
course, it isn't my affair, do have a '_sagacious_' holiday, too."

Mrs Bowater almost squinted at my two small envelopes when she licked the stamps for me. "We can only hope," was her one remark, "that when the secrets of all hearts are opened, they'll excuse some of the letters we reach ourselves to write." But I did not ask her to explain.

Lyme Regis was but a few days distant when, not for the first time since our meeting at Mrs Bowater's gatepost, I set off to meet Mr Anon--this time to share with him my wonderful news. When showers drifted across the sun-shafted sky we took refuge under the shelter of the garden-house. As soon as the hot beams set the raindrops smouldering, so that every bush was hung with coloured lights, we returned to my smoking stone. And we watched a rainbow arch and fade in the windy blue.

He was gloomy at first; grudged me, I think, every moment that was to be mine at Lyme Regis. So I tempted him into talking about the books he had read; and about his childhood--far from as happy as mine. It hurt me to hear him speak of his mother. Then I asked him small questions about that wonderful country he had told me of, which, whether it had any real existence or not, filled me with delight as he painted it in his imagination. He was doing his best to keep his word to me, and I to keep our talk from becoming personal.

If I would trust myself to him, friend to friend--he suddenly broke out in a thick, low voice, when I least expected it--the whole world was open to us; and he knew the way.

"What way?" said I. "And how about poor Mrs Bowater? How strange you are. Where do you live? May I know?"

There was an old farm-house, he told me, on the other side of the park, and near it a few cottages--at the far end of Loose Lane. He lodged in one of these. Against my wiser inclinations he persuaded me to set off thither at once and see the farm for myself.

On the further side of Wanderslore, sprouting their pallid green frondlets like beads at the very tips of their black, were more yews than beeches. We loitered on, along the neglected bridle-path. Cuckoos were now in the woods, and we talked and talked, as if their voices alone were not seductive enough to enchant us onwards. Sometimes I spelled out incantations in the water; and sometimes I looked out happily across the wet, wayside flowers; and sometimes a robin flittered out to observe the intruders. How was it that human company so often made me uneasy and self-conscious, and nature's always brought peace?

"Now, you said," I began again, "that they have a God, and that they are so simple He hasn't a name. What did you mean by that? There can't be one God for the common-sized, and one for--for me; now, can there? My mother never taught me that; and I have thought for myself." Indeed I had.

"'God'!" he cried; "why, what is all this?"

All this at that moment was a clearing in the woods, softly shimmering with a misty, transparent green, in whose sunbeams a thousand flies darted and zigzagged like motes of light, and the year's first butterflies fluttered and languished.

"But if I speak," I said, "listen, now, my voice is just swallowed up. Out of just a something it faints into a nothing--dies. No, no;" (I suppose I was arguing only to draw him out), "all this cares no more for me than--than a looking-glass. Yet it is mine. Can you see Jesus Christ in these woods? Do you believe we are sinners and that He came to save us? I do. But I can see Him only as a little boy, you know, smiling, crystal, intangible: and yet I do not _like_ children much."

He paused and stared at me fixedly. "_My_ size?" he coughed.

"Oh, size," I exclaimed, "how you harp on that!"--as if _I_ never had. "Did you not say yourself that the smaller the body is, the happier the ghost in it? Bodies, indeed!"

He plunged on, hands in pockets, frowning, clumsy. And up there in the north-west a huge cloud poured its reflected lights on his strange face. Inwardly--with all my wits in a pleasant scatter--I laughed; and outwardly (all but) danced. Solemnly taking me at my word, and as if he were reading out of one of his dry old books, he began to tell me his views about religion, and about what we are, qualities, consciousness, ideas, and that kind of thing. As if you could be anything at any moment but just that moment's whole self. At least, so it seemed then: I was happy. But since in his earnestness his voice became almost as false to itself as was Mr Crimble's when he had conversed with me about Hell, my eyes stole my ears from him, and only a few scattered sentences reached my mind.

Nevertheless I enjoyed hearing him talk, and encouraged him with bits of questions and exclamations. Did he believe, perhaps, in the pagan Gods?--Mars and all that? Was there, even at this very moment, cramped up among the moss and the roots, a crazy, brutal Pan in the woods? And those delicious Nymphs and Naiads! What would he do if one beckoned to him?--or Pan's pipes began wheedling?

"Nymphs!" he grunted, "aren't you----"

"Oh," I cried, coming to a pause beside a holly-tree so marvellously sparkling with waterdrops on every curved spine of it that it took my breath away: "let's talk no more thoughts. They are only mice gnawing. I can hear _them_ at night."

"You cannot sleep?" he inquired, with so grave a concern that I laughed outright.

"Sleep! with that Mr Crimble on my nerves?" I gave a little nod in my mind to my holly, and we went on.

"Crimble?" he repeated. His eyes, greenish at that moment, shot an angry glance at me from under their lids. "Who is he?"

"A friend, a friend," I replied, "and, poor man, as they say, in love. Calm yourself, Mr Jealousy; not with me. I am three sizes too small. With Miss Bowater. But there," I went on, in dismay that mere vanity should have let this cat out of its bag, "that's not my secret. We mustn't talk of that either. What I really want to tell you is that we haven't much time. I am going away. Let's talk of Me. Oh, Mr Anon, shall I ever be born again, and belong to my own world?"

It seemed a kind of mournful serenity came over his face. "You say you are going away"; he whispered, pointing with his finger, "and yet you expect me to talk about _that_."

We were come to the brink of a clear rain-puddle, perhaps three or four feet wide, in the moss-greened, stony path, and "_that_" was the image of myself which lay on its surface against the far blue of the sky--the under-scarlet of my cape, my face, fair hair, eyes. I trembled a little. His own reflection troubled me more than he did himself.

"Come," I said, laying a hand on his sleeve, "the time's so short, and indeed I _must_ see your house, you know: you have seen mine. Ah, but you should see Lyndsey and Chizzel Hill, and the stream in my father's garden. I often hear _that_ at night, Mr Anon. I would like to have died a child, however long I must live."

But now the cloud had completely swallowed up the sun; a cold gust of wind swept hooting down on us, and I clung to his arm. We pushed on, emerged at last from the rusty gates, its eagles green and scaling, and came to the farm. But not in time. A cloud of hail had swirled down; beating on our heads and shoulders. It all but swept me up into the air. Catching hands, we breasted and edged on up the rough, miry lane towards a thatched barn, open on one side and roofing a red and blue wagon. Under this we scrambled, and tingling all over with the buffetings of the wind and the pelting of hailstones, I sat laughing and secure, watching, over my sodden skirts and shoes, the sweeping, pattering drifts paling the green.

Around us in the short straw and dust stalked the farmer's fowls, cackling, with red-eyed glances askew at our intrusion. Ducks were quacking. Doves flew in with whir of wing. I thought I should boil over with delight. And presently a sheep-dog, ears down and tail between its legs, slid round the beam of the barn door. Half in, half out, it stood bristling, eyes fixed, head thrust out. My companion drew himself up and with a large stone in his hand, edged, stooping and stealthily--and very much, I must confess, like the picture of a Fuegian I have seen in a book--between the gaudy wheels of the wagon, and faced the low-growling beast. I watched him, enthralled. For a moment or two he and the sheep-dog confronted each other without stirring. Then with one sharp bark, the animal flung back its head, and with whitened eye, turned and disappeared.

"Oh, _bravissimo_!" said I, mocking up at Mr Anon from under my hood. "He was cowed, poor thing. _I_ would have made friends with him."

We sate on in the sweet, dusty scent of the stormy air. The hail turned to rain. The wind rose higher. I began to be uneasy. So heavily streamed the water out of the clouds that walking back by the way we had come would be utterly impossible for me. What's to be done now?--I thought to myself. Yet the liquid song of the rain, the gurgling sighs and trumpetings of the wind entranced me; and I turned softly to glance at my stranger. He sat, chin on large-boned hands, his lank hair plastered on his hollow temples by the rain, his eyes glassy in profile.

"I am glad of this," he muttered dreamily, as if in response to my scrutiny. "We are here."

A scatter of green leaf-sheaths from a hawthorn over against the barn was borne in by the wind.

"I am glad too," I answered, "because when you are at peace, so I can be; for that marvellous land you tell me of is very far away. Why, who----?" But he broke in so earnestly that I was compelled to listen, confiding in me some queer wisdom he had dug up out of his books--of how I might approach nearer and nearer to the brink between life and reality, and see all things as they are, in truth, in their very selves. All things visible are only a veil, he said. A veil that withdraws itself when the mind is empty of all thoughts and desires, and the heart at one with itself. That is divine happiness, he said. And he told me, too, out of his far-fetched learning, a secret about myself.

It was cold in the barn now. The fowls huddled close. Rain and wind ever and again drowned the low, alluring, far-away voice wandering on as if out of a trance. Dreams, maybe; yet I have learned since that one half of his tale is true; that at need even an afflicted spirit, winged for an instant with serenity, may leave the body and, perhaps, if lost in the enchantments beyond, never turn back. But I swore to keep his words secret between us. I had no will to say otherwise, and assured him of my trust in him.

"My very dear," he said, softly touching my hand, but I could make no answer.

He scrambled to his feet and peered down on me. "It is not my peace. All the days you are away...." He gulped forlornly and turned away his head. "But that is what I mean. Just nothing, all this"--he made a gesture with his hands as if giving himself up a captive to authority--"nothing but a sop to a dog."

Then stooping, he drew my cape around me, banked the loose hay at my feet and shoulders, smiled into my face, and bidding me wait in patience a while, but not sleep, was gone.

The warmth and odour stole over my senses. I was neither hungry nor thirsty, but drugged with fatigue. With a fixed smile on my face (a smile betokening, as I believe now, little but feminine vanity and satisfaction after feeding on that strange heart), my thoughts went wandering. The sounds of skies and earth drowsed my senses, and I nodded off into a nap. The grinding of wheels awoke me. From a welter of dreams I gazed out through the opening of the barn at a little battered cart and a shaggy pony. And behold, on the chopped straw and hay beside me, lay stretched out, nose on paw, our enemy, the sheep-dog. He thumped a friendly tail at me, while he growled at my deliverer.

Thoughtful Mr Anon. He had not only fetched the pony-cart, but had brought me a bottle of hot milk and a few raisins. They warmed and revived me. A little light-witted after my sleep in the hay, I clambered up with his help into the cart and tucked myself in as snugly as I could with my draggled petticoats and muddy shoes. So with myself screened well out of sight of prying eyes, we drove off.