Mrs Bowater was still kneeling by the fire, just as f.a.n.n.y used to kneel.
And, like f.a.n.n.y, when one most expected an answer, she remained silent; though, unlike f.a.n.n.y, 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 n.o.body but you."
The magnanimous creature stroked my vinegar-sodden hair with the tips of her h.o.r.n.y fingers. "Why there, miss. I meant no harm. Isn"t all the gentry and n.o.bility just gaping to s.n.a.t.c.h 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 f.a.n.n.y"s coming home proved vain.
Naturally, from f.a.n.n.y 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 f.a.n.n.y"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 G.o.dmother 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 f.a.n.n.y 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 gra.s.s, 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-gra.s.s 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 c.u.mbersome 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, l.u.s.trous, 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?
What fantastic creatures they were!--with their vast mansions, pyramids, palaces, scores of sizes too large either for carca.s.s 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.