"I remain, your affectionate G.o.dmother,
"EMMA E. FENNE.
"PS.--I reopen this letter to explain that your _financial_ affairs are in the hands of Messrs Harris, Harris, and Harris, respectable solicitors of Gray"s Inn. They will remit you on every quarter day--Christmas Day, Lady Day, June 25th and September 29th--the sum of 28 10s. 0d. Of this you will pay 19 10s. _at once_ to Mrs Bowater, who, I have no doubt, will advise you on the expenditure of what remains on wearing apparel, self-improvement, missions, charity, and so on. It _grieves_ me that from the wreckage of your father"s affairs you must not antic.i.p.ate a further straw of a.s.sistance. All his money and property will be swallowed up in the dreadful storm that has broken over what we can only _trust_ is a tranquil resting place. R. I. P.--E. E. F."
So sprawling and straggling was my G.o.dmother"s penmanship that I spelled her letter out at last with a minifying gla.s.s, though rather for forlorn amus.e.m.e.nt"s sake than by necessity. Not that this diminishment of her handwriting in any sense lessened the effect upon me of the sentiments it conveyed. They at once daunted me and gave me courage. For a little I hesitated, then at last I thought _out_ in my heart that G.o.d might be kinder to me than Miss Fenne wished. Indeed I was so invigorated by the antic.i.p.ation of the "wicked world," that I all but called her a crocodile to her phantasmal face. Couldn"t I--didn"t I--myself "mean well" too? What pictures and prospects of the future, of my journey, of Mrs Bowater and the "network" pursued each other through my brain. And what a darkness oppressed me when a voice kept repeating over in my mind--_Harris and Harris and Harris_, as if it were a refrain to one of my grandfather"s _chansons_. _Messrs Harris and Harris and Harris_--I _saw_ all three of them (dark men with whiskers), but trusted profoundly they would never come to see _me_.
Nor from that day to this, through all my giddying "ups" and sobering "downs" have I ever for a moment regretted my decision--though I might have conveyed it with a little better grace. My body, perhaps also my soul, would have been safer in the seclusion of my G.o.dmother"s house.
But my spirit? I think it would have beaten itself to death there like a wasp on a window-pane. Whereas--well, here I am.
Chapter Six
Those last few days of August dragged on--days of a burning, windless heat. Yet, as days, I enjoyed them. On some upper branch of my family tree must have flourished the salamander. Indeed I think I should have been a denizen of Venus rather than of this colder, darker planet. I sat on my balcony, basking in the hot sunshine, my thoughts darting hither and thither like flies under a ceiling--those strange, winged creatures that ever seem to be attempting to trace out in their flittings the starry "Square of Pegasus." In spite of my troubles and forebodings, and fleeting panics, my inward mind was calm. I carefully packed away my few little valuables. The very notion of food gave me nausea, but that I determined to conquer, since of course to become, at either extreme, a slave to one"s stomach, is a folly.
The noise and tramplings of the men in the rooms beneath never ceased, until Night brought quiet. The Sale lasted for two days. A stale and clouded air ascended even into my locked bedroom from the human beings (with their dust and tobacco and perfumes and natural presences) collected together in the heat of the great dining-room. A hum, a murmur, the scuffling of feet toiling downstairs with some heavy and c.u.mbrous burden, the cries of the auctioneer, the coa.r.s.e voices and laughter, the tinkle of gla.s.s--the stretching hours seemed endless; and every minute of them knelled the fate of some beloved and familiar object. I was glad my father couldn"t hear the bidding, and sorry that perhaps he did not know that the most valuable of his curios--_how_ valuable I was to learn later--was safely hidden away in an upper room.
So pa.s.sed my birthday--the twentieth--nor tapped me on the shoulder with, "Ah, but, my dear, just you wait till I come again!"
None the less I thought a good deal about birthdays that afternoon, and wondered how it was that we human beings can bear even to go on living between two such mysteries as the beginning and the end of life. Where was my mother now? Where was I but two-and-twenty years ago? What was all this "Past," this "History," of which I had heard so much and knew so little? Just a story? Better brains than mine have puzzled over these questions, and perhaps if I had studied the philosophers I should know the answers. In the evenings, wrapped up in a shawl, Pollie carried me downstairs, and we took a sober whispering walk in the hush and perfumes of the deserted garden. Loud rang the tongues of the water over the stones. The moths were fluttering to their trysts, and from some dark little coign the cricket strummed me a solo. Standing up there in the starry night the great house looked down on me like an elder brother, mute but compa.s.sionate.
By the second day after the conclusion of the Sale, the removers" vans and carts should have gutted the rooms and be gone. It had, therefore, been arranged that Pollie should as usual share my bedroom the last night, and that next day we should set off on our journey. After luncheon--the flavour of its sliced nectarine (or is it of one that came later?) is on my tongue at this moment--all the rest of the house being now hollow and vacant, Pollie put on her hat, thrust the large door key into her pocket, and went off to visit her mother in the village and to fetch a clean nightdress. She promised to return before dark. Her shoes clattered down the stone stairs, the outer door boomed like a gun. I spread out my hands in the air, and as if my four-poster could bear witness, cried softly, "I am alone." Marvel of marvels, even as I sit here to-day gazing at my inkpot, there in its original corner stands that same old four-poster. Pollie is living down in the village with her husband and her two babies; and once more: I am alone. Is there anything in life so fascinating, so astonishing, as these queer, common little repet.i.tions? Perhaps on the Last Day--but I antic.i.p.ate.
I read a little; wrote on the flyleaf of my diminutive Johnson, "September 1st, Lyndsey for the last time.--M."; arranged my morrow"s clothes on a chair, then sat down in my balcony to do nothing, to be nothing, merely to dream. But nature decreed otherwise. Soon after six by my grandfather"s clock--it struck the hour out of its case, as if out of a sepulchre--a storm, which all the afternoon had been steadily piling its leaden vapours into s.p.a.ce, began to break. Chizzel Hill with its prehistoric barrow was sunk to a green mound beneath those lowering cloudy heights, pooling so placid and lovely a blue between them. The very air seemed to thicken, and every tree stood up as if carved out of metal. Of a sudden a great wind, with heavy plashing drops of rain, swept roaring round the house, thick with dust and green leaves torn from the dishevelled summer trees. There was a hush. The darkness intensified, and then a vast sheet of lightning seemed to picture all Kent in my eyes, and the air was full of water.
One glance into the obscure vacancy of the room behind me persuaded me to remain where I was, though the rain drove me further and further into the corner of my balcony. Cold, and a little scared by the glare and din, yet not unhappy, I cowered close up against the gla.s.s, and, shading my eyes as best I could from the flames of the lightning, I watched the storm. How long I sat there I cannot say. The clamour lulled and benumbed my brain into a kind of trance. My only company was a blackbird which had flown or been blown into my refuge, and with draggled feathers stared black-eyed out of the greenery at me. It was gathering towards dark when the rain and lightning began to abate, and the sullen thunder drew away into the distance, echoing hollowly along the furthest horizons. At last, with teeth chattering, and stiff to my bones, I made my way into the room again, and the benighted blackbird went squawking to his nest.
Slipping off my gown and shoes, and huddling myself in the blankets and counterpane of my bed, I sat there pondering what next was to be done.
It would soon be night; and Pollie seemed unlikely to appear until all this turmoil was over. I was not only alone, but forsaken and infinitely solitary, a mere sentient living speck in the quiet sea of light that washed ever and again into the gloomiest recesses of the room. And that familiar room itself seemed now almost as cold and inhospitable as a neglected church. I could hear the dark, vacant house beneath echoing and murmuring at every prolonged reverberation of thunder, and sighing through all its crannies and keyholes. My bedhangings softly shook in the air. Gone beyond recovery were my father and mother: and I now realized how irrevocably. I was no longer a child; and the responsibilities of life were now wholly on my own shoulders.
Yet I was not utterly forlorn. The great scene comforted me, and now and then I prayed, almost without thinking and without words, just as a little tune will keep recurring in the mind. And now, darkness being spread over the garden, in the east the moon was rising. Moreover, a curious sight met my eyes; for as the storm settled, heavy rain in travelling showers was still occasionally skirting the house; and when, between the heaped-up ma.s.ses of cloud, the distant lightning gleamed a faint vaporous lilac, I saw motionless in the air, and as if suspended in their falling between earth and sky, the mult.i.tudinous gla.s.s-clear, pear-shaped drops of water. At sight of these jewels thus crystalling the dark air I was filled with such a rapture that I actually clapped my hands. And presently the moon herself appeared, as if to be my companion. Serene, remote, she glided at last from cover of an enormous bluff of cloud into the faint-starred vault of s.p.a.ce, seemed to pause for an instant in contemplation of the dark scene, then went musing on her way. Beneath her silver all seemed at peace, and it was then that I fell asleep.
And while I slept, I dreamed a dream. My dreams often commit me to a quiet and radiant life, as if of a reality less strange to me than that of waking. Others are a mere uneasiness and folly. In the old days I would sometimes tell my dreams to Mrs Ballard; and she would look them up in a frowsy book she kept in the dresser drawer, a brown, grease-stained volume ent.i.tled _Napoleon"s Book of Fate_. Then she would promise me a prince for a husband, or that I would be a great traveller across the sea, or that I must beware of a red-haired woman, and nonsense of that kind. But this particular dream remains more vividly in my memory than any.
Well, I dreamed that I was walking in a strange garden--an orchard. And, as it seemed, I was either of the common human size, or this was a world wherein of human beings I was myself of the usual stature. The night was still, like the darkest picture, yet there must have been light there, since I could see as I walked. The gra.s.ses were coa.r.s.e and deep, but they did not enc.u.mber my feet, and presently I found myself standing beneath a tree whose branches in their towering sombre heaviness seemed to be made of iron. Dangling here and there amid the pendulous leaves hung enormous fruits--pears stagnant and heavy as shaped lumps of lead or of stone. Why the sight of these fruits in the obscure luminosity of the air around them laid such a spell upon me, I cannot say. I stood there in the dew-cold gra.s.s, gazing up and up into those monstrous branches as if enchanted, and then of a sudden the ground under my feet seemed faintly to tremble as if at a m.u.f.fled blow. One of the fruits in my dream, now come to ripeness, had fallen stone-like from above. Then again--thud! Realization of the dreadful danger in which I stood swept over me. I turned to escape, and awoke, shivering and in a suffocating heat, to discover in the moonlight that now flooded my room where in actuality I was.
Yet still, as it seemed, the dying rumour of the sound persisted, and surely, I thought, it must be poor, careless Pollie, her key forgotten, come back in the darkness after the storm, and hammering with the great knocker on the door below. Hardly a minute had pa.s.sed indeed before the whole house resounded again with her thumping. One seldom finds Courage keeping tryst on the outskirts of sleep, and there was a vehemence in the knocking as if Pollie was in an extremity of fear at finding herself under the vacant house alone in the night. The thought of going to her rescue set my teeth chattering. I threw back the bedclothes and gazed at the moon, and the longer I sat there the more clearly I realized that I must somehow descend the stairs, convey to her that I was safe, and, if possible, let her in.
Three steep stone flights separated us, stairs which I had very rarely ascended or descended except in her arms. I thrust my foot out; all was still; I must go at once. But what of light? The moon was on this side of the house. It might be pitch dark on the lower landings and in the hall. On the stool by her bedside stood Pollie"s copper candlestick, with an inch or two of candle in it and a box of matches. It was a thick-set tallow candle and none too convenient for me to grasp. With this alight in my hand, the stick being too c.u.mbersome, I set out on my errand. The air was cool; the moon shone l.u.s.tily. Just waked from sleep my mind was curiously exalted. I sallied out into the empty corridor. A pace or two beyond the threshold my heart seemed to swell up in my body, for it seemed that at the head of the staircase lay stretched the still form of my mother as I had found her in the cold midnight hours long ago. It was but a play of light, a trick of fantasy. I recovered my breath and went on.
To leap from stair to stair was far too formidable a means of progression. I should certainly have dashed out my brains. So I must sit, and jump sitting, manipulating my candle as best I could. In this sidling, undignified fashion, my eyes fixed only on the stair beneath me, I mastered the first flight, and paused to rest. What a medley of furtive sounds ascended to my ear from the desolate rooms below: the heavy plash of raindrop from the eaves, scurry and squeak of mouse, rustle of straw, a stirring--light as the settling of dust, crack of timber, an infinitely faint whisper; and from without, the whistle of bat, the stony murmur of the garden stream, the hunting screech of some predatory night-fowl over the soaked and tranquil harvest fields. And who, Who?--that shape?... I turned sharply, and the melted tallow of the guttering candle welled over and smartly burned the hand that held it.
The pain gave me confidence. But better than that, a voice from below suddenly broke out, not Pollie"s but Adam Waggett"s, hollaing in the porch. Adam--the wren-slaughterer--prove me a coward? No, indeed. All misgiving gone, I girded my dressing-gown tighter around me, and continued the descent.
It was a jolting and arduous business, and as I paused on the next landing, I now looked into the moon-bathed vacancy of my father"s bedroom. Dismantled, littered with paper and the fragments of wood and gla.s.s of a picture my mother had given him, a great hole in the plaster, a broken chair straddling in the midst--a hideous spectacle it was. An immense moth with greenly glowing eyes, lured out of its roosting place, came fluttering round my candle, fanning my cheek with its plumy wings.
I shaded the flame and smiled up at the creature which, not being of a kind that is bent on self-slaughter, presently wafted away. The lower I descended the filthier grew my journey. My stub of candle was fast wasting; and what use should I be to Pollie"s messenger? When indeed in the muck and refuse left by the Sale, I reached the door, it was too late. He was now beating with his fists at the rear of the house; and I must needs climb down the last flight of the back wooden staircase used by the servants. When at last the great stagnant kitchen came into view, it was my whole inward self that cried out in me. Its stone flags were swarming with c.o.c.kroaches.
These sh.e.l.led, nocturnal, sour-smelling creatures are among the few insects that fill me with horror. By comparison the devil"s coachman may be worse-tempered, but he is a gentleman. The very thought of one of them rearing itself against my slippered foot filled me with disgust; and the males were winged. They went scurrying away into hiding, infants seemingly to their mothers, whisper, whisper--I felt sick at the sight.
There came a noise at the window. Peering from round my candle flame I perceived Adam"s dusky face, with its long nose, staring in at me through the gla.s.s. At sight of the plight I was in, he burst into a prolonged guffaw of laughter. This enraged me beyond measure. I stamped my foot, and at last he sobered down enough to yell through the gla.s.s that Pollie"s mother had sent him to see that I was safe and had forgotten to give him the house-key. Pollie herself would be with me next morning.
I waved my candle at him in token that I understood. At this the melted grease once more trickled over and ran scalding up my arm. The candle fell to the floor, went out; the pale moonshine spread through the air.
I could see Adam"s conical head outlined against the soft light of the sky; though he could no longer see me. Horror of the c.o.c.kroaches returned on me. Instantly I turned tail, leaving the lump of tallow for their spoil.
How, in that dark, high house, I managed to remount those stairs, I cannot conceive. Youth and persistency, I suppose. I doubt if I could do it now. Utterly exhausted and bedraggled I regained my bedroom at last without further misadventure. I sponged the smoke and grime from face and hands in my washbowl, hung my dressing-gown where the morning air might refresh it, and was soon in a dead sleep, from which I think even the Angel Gabriel would have failed to arouse me.
Chapter Seven
When I awoke, the morning sky was gay with sunshine, there was a lisping and gurgling of starlings on the roof, the roar of the little river in flood after the rains shook the air at my window, and there sat Pollie, in her outdoor clothes, the rest of the packing done and she awaiting breakfast. Unstirringly from my pillow I scrutinized the plump, red-cheeked face with its pale-blue prominent eyes dreaming out of the window; and sorrow welled up in me at the thought of the past and of how near drew our separation. She heard me move, and kneeling and stooping low over my bed, with her work-roughened finger she stroked the hand that lay on my coverlet. A pretty sight I must have looked--after my night"s experiences. We whispered a little together. She was now a sedater young woman, but still my Pollie of the apples and novelettes.
And whether or not it is because early custom is second nature, she is still the only person whom my skin does not a little creep against when necessity calls for a beast of burden.
Her desertion of me the night before had been caused by the untimely death of one of her father"s three Alderney cows--a mild, horned creature, which I had myself often seen in the meadows cropping among the b.u.t.tercups, and whose rich-breathed nose I had once had the courage to ask to stroke with my hand. This ill-fated beast at first threat of the storm, had taken shelter with her companions under an oak. Scarcely had the lightnings begun to play when she was struck down by a "thunderbolt." It was a tragedy after Pollie"s heart. She had (she said) fainted dead off at news of it--and we bemoaned the event in concert. In return I told her my dream of the garden. Nothing would then content her but she must fetch from under her mattress _Napoleon"s Book of Fate_, a legacy from Mrs Ballard.
"But, Pollie," I demurred; "a dream is only a dream."
"Honest, miss," she replied, thumbing over the pages, "there"s some of "em means what happens and comes true, and they"ll tell secrets too if they be searched about. More"n a month before Mrs Ballard fell out with master she dreamed that one of the speckled hens had laid an egg in the kitchen dresser. There it was clucking among the crockery. And to dream of eggs, the book says, is to be certain sure of getting the place you are after, and which she wrote off to a friend in London and is there now!"
What more was there to say? So presently Pollie succeeded in turning to "Pears" in the grease-grimed book, and spelled out slowly:--
"PEARS.--To dream of pears is in-di-ca-tive of great wealth (which means riches, miss); and that you will rise to a much higher spear than the one you at present occupy. To a woman they denote that she will marry a person far above her in rank (lords and suchlike, miss, if you please), and that she will live in great state. To persons in trade they denote success and future prosperity and eleviation. They also indi- indicate constancy in love and happiness in the marriage state."
Her red cheeks grew redder with this exertion of scholarship, and I burst out laughing. "Ah, miss," she cried in confusion, "laugh you may, and that"s what Sarah said to the Angel. But mark my words if something of it don"t hap out like what the book says."
"Then, Pollie," said I, "there"s nothing for it but to open a butcher"s shop. For live in great state I can"t and won"t, not if the Prince of Wales himself was to ask me in marriage."
"Lor, miss," retorted Pollie in shocked accents, "and him a married man with grown-up sons and all." But she forgave me my mockery. As for the Dream Book, doubtless young Bonaparte must often have dreamed of Pears in Corsica; and no less indubitably have I lived in "great state"--though without much eleviation.
But the day was hasting on. My toilet must be made, and the preparations for our journey completed. Now that the dawn of my new fortunes was risen, expectancy filled my mind, and the rain-freshened skies and leaves of the morning renewed my spirits. Our train--the first in my experience--was timed to leave our country railway station at 3.3 p.m.
By one o"clock, all the personal luggage that I was to take with me had been sewn up in a square of canvas, and corded. The rest of my belongings--my four-poster, etc.--were to be stowed in a large packing-case and sent after me. First impressions endure. No great store of sagacity was needed to tell me that. So I had chosen my clothes carefully, determined to show my landlady that I meant to have my own way and not be trifled with. My dear Mrs Bowater!--she would be amused to hear that.
Pollie bustled downstairs. I stood in the midst of the sunlit, dismantled room, light and shadow at play upon ceiling and walls, the sun-pierced air a silvery haze of dust. A host of memories and thoughts, like a procession in a dream, traversed my mind. A strangeness, too--as if even this novel experience of farewell was a vague recollection beyond defined recall. Pollie returned with the new hat in the paper bag in which she had brought it from home: and I was her looking-gla.s.s when she had put it on. Then from top to bas.e.m.e.nt she carried me through every room in the house, and there on the kitchen floor, mute witness of the past, lay the beetle-gnawn remnant of my candle-stub. We wandered through the garden, glinting green in the cool flocking sunbeams after the rain; and already vaunting its escape from Man. Pollie was returning to Lyndsey--I not! My heart was too full to let me linger by the water.
I gazed at the stones and the wild flowers in a sorrowful hunger of farewell. Trifles, soon to be dying, how lovely they were. The thought of it swallowed me up. What was the future but an emptiness? Would that I might vanish away and be but a portion of the sweetness of the morning. Even Pollie"s imperturbable face wore the appearance of make-believe; for an instant I surprised the whole image of me reflected in her round blue eye.
The Waggetts" wagonette was at the door, but not--and I was thankful--not _my_ Adam, but the old Adam, his father. My luggage was pushed under the seat. I was set up, to be screened as far as possible from the wind, beside Pollie and behind Mr Waggett--no stranger to me with his neat, dark whiskers, for in the old days, at dinner parties, he would wait at table. I see him now--as gentlemanlike as a Devil"s Coachhorse--entering the kitchen with his little black bag. Only once I swiftly turned my head over my shoulder toward the house. Then we were outside the iron gates, and b.u.mping along through the puddles between the bowery hedges towards the station.
I thought of my father and mother lying side by side, beyond the sullen drift of nettles, under the churchyard wall. Miss Fenne had taken me there many weeks before in her faded barouche with the gaunt white mare.
Not a word had I breathed to her of my anguish at sight of the churchyard. The whole afternoon was a nightmare. She regaled the journey with sentiments on death and the grave. Throughout it, I was in danger of slipping out of her sight; for the b.u.t.tons on the sage-green leather seat were not only a discomfort but had failed to aid me to sit upright; and nothing would have induced me to catch at the tr.i.m.m.i.n.gs of her dolman to save myself from actually falling off into the pit of her carriage. There sat her ancient coachman; clutter-clutter plodded the hoofs; what a monstrous, monstrous world--and she cackling on and on--like a hen over its egg.
But now the novelty of this present experience, the flowery cottages, Mr Waggett"s square, sorrel nag, the ballooning northwesterly clouds, the aromatic rusty hedgerows, the rooks in the cornfields--all these sights and sounds called joy into my mind, and far too soon the bright-painted railway station at the hill-bottom hove into sight, and our drive was over. I was lifted down into Pollie"s arms again. Then followed a foolish chaffering over the tickets, which Mr Waggett had volunteered to purchase for us at the rounded window. The looming face beyond had caught sight of me, and the last words I heard bawled through for any to hear were: "Lor, Mr Waggett, I"d make it a _quarter_ for "ee if it was within regulations. But "tain"t so, the young lady"s full natural size in the eye of the law, and I couldn"t give in to "ee not even if "twas a honeymooning you was after." No doubt it was wholesome to learn as quickly as possible how easy a b.u.t.t I was to be for the jests of the good-humoured. On that occasion it was a bitter pill. I felt even Pollie choke down a laugh into her bosom. My cheek whitened, but I said nothing.
An enormous din at the moment shattered around me, ten thousand times harsher to my nerves than any mere witticism could be. My first "steam-monster" was entering the station. All but stunned by its clatter, I barely had the presence of mind to thank Mr Waggett for the little straw basket of three greengages, and the nosegay of cherry-pie which he had thrust into my arms. My canvas-wrapped package was pushed in under the seat, the door was slammed to, the guard waved his green flag, Mr Waggett touched his hat: and our journey was begun.