My nights were pestered with dreams and my days with their vanishing spectres; and I had no Pollie to tell me what they forecast. I suppose one must be more miserable and hunted in mind even than I was, _never_ to be a little sentimental when alone. I would lean over the cold mouth of the well, just able to discern in the cold mirror of water, far beneath, the face I was almost astonished to find reflected there.
"Shall I come too?" I would morbidly whisper, and dart away.
Still, just as with a weed in winter, life was beginning to renew the sap within me; and Monk"s House was not only drowsy with age but gentle with whispers. Once at least in every twenty-four hours I would make a pilgrimage to its wrought-iron gates beside the square white lodge, to gloat out between the metal floriations at the dusty country lane beyond--with its swallows and wagtails and dragon-flies beneath the heat-parched tranquil elms. A slim, stilted greyhound on one such visit stalked out from the lodge. Quite unaware of his company, I turned about suddenly and stared clean down his arched throat--white teeth and lolling tongue. It was as if I had glanced into the jaws of destiny. He turned his head, whiningly yawned, and stalked back into the shade.
A day or two afterwards I made the acquaintance of the lodge-keeper"s daughter, a child named Rose, about five years of age, with a mop of copper-coloured curls bound up with a pale blue bow. At first glimpse of me she had hopped back as if on springs into the house. A moment after, her white-ap.r.o.ned mother appeared in the porch, and with a pleasant nod at me bade the child smile at the pretty little lady.
Finger in mouth, Rose wriggled and stared. In a few days she grew accustomed to my small figure. And though I would sometimes discover her saucer-blue eyes fixed on me with a peculiar intensity, we almost came to be friends. She was not a very bright little girl; yet I found myself wooing her with all the arts I knew--in a scarcely conscious attempt, I suppose, to creep back by this small lane into the world"s and my own esteem.
I made her wristlets of little flowers, hacked her out c.o.c.kle boats from the acorns, told her half-forgotten stories, and once had to trespa.s.s into the kitchen at the back of the lodge to tell her mother that she was fallen asleep. Was it mere fancy that read in the scared face she twisted round on the pretty little lady from over her saucepan, "Avaunt, Evil Eye!"? I had become abominably self-conscious.
Chapter Forty-Five
One such afternoon Rose and I were sitting quietly together in the sunshine on the green gra.s.s bank when a smart, short step sounded in the lane, and who should come springily pacing out of the country through the gates but Adam Waggett--red hands, black boots, and Londonish billyc.o.c.k hat all complete. Adam must have been born in a fit of astonishment; and when he dies, so he will enter Paradise. He halted abruptly, a ring of shifting sunshine through the leaves playing on his purple face, and, after one long glance of theatrical astonishment, he burst into his familiar guffaw.
This time the roar of him in the open air was nothing but a pleasure, and the mere sound and sight of him set Rose off laughing, too. Her pink mouth was as cl.u.s.tered about with milk-teeth as a fragment of honeycomb is with cells.
"Well, there I never, miss," he said at last, with a slow, friendly wink at the child, "Where shall us three meet again, I wonder." He flicked the dust off his black b.u.t.ton boots with his pocket-handkerchief, mopped his high, bald forehead, and then positively exploded into fragments of information--like my father"s fireworks on Guy Fawkes" Day.
He talked of young Mr Percy"s "goings-on," of the august Mr Marvell, of life at No. 2. "That Miss Bowater, now, she"s a bit of all right, she"s toffee, she is." But, his hat! there _had_ been a row. And the captain, too. Not that there was anything in that; "just a bit of silly jealousy; _like_ the women!" He could make a better guess than that. He didn"t know what "the old lady" would do without that Miss Bowater--the old lady whose carriage would in a few days be rolling in between these very gates. And then--he began whistling a Highland Reel.
The country air had evidently got into his head. Hand over hand he was swarming up the ladder of success. His "_joie de vivre_" gleamed at every pore. And I?--I just sat there, pa.s.sively drinking in this kitchen-talk, without attempting to stop him. After all, he was out of my past; we were children of Israel in a strange land; and that hot face, with its violent pantomime, and hair-plastered temples, was as good as a play.
He was once more settling his hat on his head and opening his mouth in preparation for a last bray of farewell, when suddenly in the sunny afternoon hush a peculiar, melancholy, whining cry rose over the treetops, and slowly stilled away. As if shot from a bow, Rose"s greyhound leapt out of the lodge and was gone. With head twisted over his shoulder, Adam stood listening. Somewhere--where? when?--that sound had stirred the shadows of my imagination. The day seemed to gather itself about me, as if in a plot.
In the silence that followed I heard the dust-m.u.f.fled grinding of heavy wheels approaching, and the low, refreshing talk of homely, Kentish, country voices. Adam stepped to the gate. I clutched Rose"s soft, cool fingers. And spongily, ponderously, there, beyond the bars, debouched into view a huge-shouldered, mole-coloured elephant, its trunk sagging towards the dust, its small, lash-fringed eye gleaming in the sun, its bald, stumpy, tufted tail stiff and still behind it.
On and on, one after another, in the elm-shaded beams of the first of evening, the outlandish animals, the wheeled dens, the gaudy, piled-up vans of pasteboard scenery, the horses and ponies and riff-raff of a travelling circus wound into, and out of, view before my eyes. It was as if the lane itself were moving, and all the rest of the world, with Rose and myself clutched hand in hand on our green bank, had remained stark still. Probably the staring child supposed that this was one of my fairy-tales come true. My own mind was humming with a thought far more fantastic. Ever and again a swarthy face had glanced in on our quiet garden. The lion had glared into Africa beyond my head. But I was partly screened from view by Rose, and it was a woman, and she all but the last of the dusty, bedraggled company, that alone caught a full, clear sight of me.
One flash of eye to eye--we knew each other. She was the bird-eyed, ear-ringed gipsy of my railway journey with Pollie from Lyndsey to Beechwood. Even more hawklike, bonier, striding along now like a man in the dust and heat in her dingy coloured petticoats and great boots, with one steel-grey dart of remembrance, she swallowed me up, like flame a moth. Her mouth relaxed into a foxy smile while her gaze tightened on me. She turned herself about and shrilled out a strange word or two to some one who had gone before. A sudden alarm leapt up in me. In an instant I had whisked into hiding, and found myself, half-suffocated with excitement, peeping out of a bush in watch for what was to happen next.
So swift had been my disappearance she seemed doubtful of her own senses. A cage of leopards, with a fair-skinned, gold-haired girl in white stockings lolling asleep on the chained-up tail-board, trundled by; and then my gipsy was joined by a thick-set, scowling man. His face was bold and square, and far more lowering than that of the famous pugilist, Mr Sayers--to whose coloured portrait I had become almost romantically attached in the library at No. 2. This dangerous-looking individual filled me with a tremulous excitement and admiration. If, as in a dream, my past seemed to have been waiting for that solitary elephant; then my future was all of a simmer with _him_.
He drew his thick hand out of his stomach-pocket and scratched his cheek. The afternoon hung so quiet that I heard the rasp of his finger nail against his sprouting beard. He turned to mutter a sullen word or two at the woman beside him. Then, more civilly, and with a jerk of his squat thumb in my direction, he addressed himself to Adam. Adam listened, his red ears erect on either side of his hat. But his only answer was so violent a wag of his head that it seemed in danger of toppling off his body. Softly I laughed to myself. The woman yelped at him. The man bade her ferociously "shut her gob." Adam clanged-to the gates. They moved on. Beast, cage, and men were vanished like a daydream. A fitful breeze rustled the dry elm-leaves. The swifts coursed on in the shade.
When the last faint murmur had died away, I came out from behind my bush. "A country circus," I remarked unconcernedly. "What did the man want, Adam?"
"That hairy cat frowned at Rosie," whispered the child, turning from me to catch at Adam"s coat-tails. "Not _eat_ Rosie?"
Adam bent himself double, and with an almost motherly tenderness stroked her bright red hair. He straightened himself up, spat modestly in the dust, and, with face still mottled by our recent experience, expressed the opinion that the man was "one of them low blackguards--excusing plain English, miss--who"d steal your chickens out of the very saucepan." As for the woman--words failed him.
I waited until his small, round eye had rolled back in my direction.
"Yes, Adam," I said, "but what did he _say_? You mean she told him about _me_?"
"Well, miss, to speak equal-like, that was about the size of it. The old liar said she had seen you before, that you were--well, there you are!--a gold mine, a--a blessed gold mine. Her very words nearabout." At that, in an insuppressible gush of happiness I laughed out with him, like a flageolet in a concourse of ba.s.soons.
"But he didn"t see me, Adam. I took good care of that."
"That"s just," said Adam, with a tug at his black cravat, "what"s going to give the pair of them a mighty unpleasant afternoon."
I dismissed him, smiled at the whimpering greyhound, smiled at Rose, whose shyness at me had unaccountably whelmed over her again, and followed in Adam"s wake towards the house. But not to enter it. "A blessed"--oh, most blessed "_Gold Mine_!" The word so sang in me that the whole garden--espaliered wall, and bird, and flower--leapt into life and beauty before my eyes. Then my prayer (_what_ prayer?) had been answered. I squared my shoulders, shuddered--a Lazarus come to life.
Away I went, and seating myself in a sunny corner, a few paces from a hive of bees, plucked a nectarine, and surrendered myself to the intoxication of an idea. Not "Your Master is dead," but "Your mistress is come to life again!" I whispered to the bees. And if I had been wearing a scarlet garter I would have tied it round their skep.
Money! Money!--a few even of my handfuls of that, and I was free. I would teach "them" a lesson. I would redeem myself. Ah, if only I had had a fraction of f.a.n.n.y"s courage, should I so long have remained wilting and festering at No. 2? The sweet, sharp juices of the clumsy fruit quenched my thirst. To and fro swept the bees along their airy highway. A spiked tree of late-blooming bugloss streamed its blue and purple into my eyes. A year ago, the very thought of exhibiting myself for filthy (or any kind of) lucre would have filled me with unspeakable shame. But what else had I been doing those long, dragging months? What had Miss M. hired herself out to be but a pot of caviare to the gourmets? Puffed up with conceit and complacency, I had been merely feeding on the world"s contempt sauced up as flattery. Nonsensical child.
"Ah, I can make honey, too," I nodded at the bees; whereupon a wasp pounced out of nowhere upon my oozy fruit, and I thrust it away into the weeds. But how refreshing a draught is the thought of action, how comforting the first returning trickle of self-esteem. My body sank into motionlessness. The shadows lengthened. The August sun slid down the sky.
Dusk was abroad in the colder garden, and the last bee home, when, with plans resolved on, I stretched my stiffened limbs and made my way into the house. Excellent augury--so easy had been my daily habits that no one had noticed my absence. Supper was awaiting me. I was ravenous. Up and down I stumped, gnawing my biscuit and sipping my sweet country milk. I had suddenly realized what the world meant to f.a.n.n.y--an oyster for her sword. Somewhere I have read that every man of genius hides a woman in his breast. Well, perhaps in mine a _man_ was now stirring--the man that had occupied my Aunt Kitilda"s skirts. It was high time.
A moon just past its quarter was sinking in the heavens and silvering the jessamine at my window. My bosom swelled with longing at the breath of the slow night airs. Monk"s House--I, too, had my ghosts and would face them down, would vanquish fate with the very weapons it had forged for my discomfiture. In that sheltered half-light I stood myself before a down-tilted looking-gla.s.s. If I had been malshapen, limbless, contorted, I would have drowned myself in mud rather than feed man"s hunger for the monstrous and obscene. No, I was a beautiful thing, even if G.o.d had been idly at play when He had shaped me, and had then flung away the mould; even if to Mrs Monnerie I was nothing much better than a disreputable marionette. So I boasted myself. Percy"s Chartreuse had been mere whey compared with the fleeting glimpse of a tame circus elephant.
I tossed out on to the floor the old Lyndsey finery which some homesick impulse had persuaded me to bring away in my trunk. Seated there with busy needle under the window, sewing in every gewgaw and sc.r.a.p of tinsel and finery I could lay hands on, I prepared for the morrow. How happy I was. Bats in the dewy dusk-light cast faint, flitting shadows on the cas.e.m.e.nts. A large dark moth hawked to and fro above my head. It seemed I could spend eternity in this gentle ardent busyness. To think that G.o.d had given me what might have been so dreadful a thing as solitude, but which in reality, while my thoughts and fingers were thus placidly occupied, could be so sweet. When at length I leaned out on the cold sill, my work done, wrists and shoulders aching with fatigue, Croomham clock struck two. The moon was set. But there, as if in my own happy mind, away to the East shone Orion. Why, Sirius, then, must be in hiding under that quiet shoulder of the downs. A dwindling meteor silvered across s.p.a.ce; I breathed a wish, shivered, and drew in.
And there came that night a curious dream. I dreamt that I was a great soldier, and had won an enormous unparalleled battle. Glaring light streamed obliquely across a flat plain, humped and hummocked with the bodies of the dead lying in disorder. I was standing in arrogant reverie alone, a few paces distant--though leagues away in being--from a group of other officers, who were looking at me. And I suffered the streaming light to fall upon me, as I gazed into my joy and triumph with a kind of severe nonchalance. But though my face under my three-cornered hat can have expressed only calmness and resolution, I knew in my heart that my thoughts were merely a thin wisp of smoke above the crater of a suppressed volcano. Lest I should be detected in this weakness, I turned out of the glare, and without premeditation, began to step lightly and abstractedly from huddling mound to mound. And, as these heaps of the dead increased in size in the gloom after the white western light was gone, so I diminished, until I was but a kind of infinitesimal will-o"-the-wisp gliding from peak to peak of an infernal mausoleum of which every eye, though dead, was watching me. But there was _one_ Eye....
And that is all of the dream that I could remember. For then I awoke, looking into the dark. A pencil ray of moonlight was creeping across my bed. Peace unutterable. Over my drowsy eyes once more the clouds descended, and once more I fell asleep.
Chapter Forty-Six
Next day, after a long lying-in-wait, I intercepted Adam Waggett and beckoned him into the shrubbery. First I questioned him. A bill of the circus, he told me, had already been left at the lodge. Its tents and booths and Aunt Sallies were even now being pitched in a meadow three or four miles distant and this side the neighbouring town. So far, so good.
I told him my plan. He could do nothing but look at me like a fish, with his little black eyes, as I sat on a tree stump and marshalled my instructions.
But my first crucial battle had been fought with Adam Waggett in the garden at Lyndsey. He had neither the courage nor even the cowardice to gainsay me. After a tedious siege of his sluggish wits, greed for the reward I promised him, the a.s.surance that if we were discovered the guilt should rest on me, and maybe some soupcon of old sake"s sake won him over. The branches of the trees swayed and creaked above us in the sunshine; and at last, looking down on me with a wry face, Adam promised to do my bidding.
Six had but just struck that evening when there came the rap of his knuckles on my bedroom door. He found me impatiently striding up and down in a scintillating bodice and skirts of scarlet, lemon, and silver--as gay and gaudy an object as the waxen Russian Princess I had seen in one of Mrs Monnerie"s cabinets. My flaxen hair was plaited German-wise, and tied in two thumping pigtails with a green ribbon; I stood and looked at him. He fumblingly folded his hands in front of him as he stood and looked back at me. I was quivering like a flame in a lamp. And never have I been so much flattered as by the silly, stupefied stare on his face.
How I was to be carried to the circus had been one of our most difficult problems. This cunning creature had routed out from some lumber-room in the old house a capacious old cage--now rusty, but stout and solidly made--that must once have housed the aged Chakka.
"There, miss," he whispered triumphantly; "that"s the ticket, and right to a hinch."
I confess I winced at his "ticket." But Adam had cushioned and padded it for me, and had hooded it over with a stout piece of sacking, leaving the ring free. Apart from our furtive preparations, evening quiet pervaded the house. The maids were out sweethearting, he explained. Mrs French had retired as usual to her own sitting-room; Fortune seemed to be smiling upon me.
"Then, Adam," I whispered, "the time has come. Jerk me as little as possible; and if questions are asked, you are taking the cage to be mended, you understand? And when we get there, see no one but the man or the woman who spoke to you at the gates."
"Well, miss, it"s a rum go," said Adam, eyeing me with a grotesque grimace of anxiety.
I looked up at him from the floor of the cage. "The rummer the go is, Adam, the quicker we ought to be about it."
He lowered the wiry dome over my head; I bunched in my skirts; and with the twist of a few hooks I was secure. The faint squeak of his boots told me that he had stolen to the door to listen.
"All serene," he whispered hoa.r.s.ely through the sacking. I felt myself lifted up and up. We were on our way. Then, like flies, a cloud of misgivings settled upon my mind. As best I could I drove them away, and to give myself confidence began to count. A shrill false whistling broke the silence. Adam was approaching the lodge; a mocking screech of its gates, and we were through. After that, apart from the occasional beat of hoofs or shoes, a country "good-night," or a husky cough of encouragement from Adam, I heard nothing more. The gloom deepened. The heat was oppressive; I became a little seasick, and pressing my mouth to a small slit between the bars, sucked in what fresh air I could.