The showman, leering avariciously at me out of his shifty eyes, led us on towards the huge ballooning tent, its pennon fluttering darkly against the stars. I believe if in that spirituous moment he had muttered, "Fly with me, fairest!" all cares forgotten, I"d have been gone. He held his peace.
The bra.s.s band within wrenched and blared into the tune of "The Girl I Left behind Me." Chafing, pawing, snorting, my steed, with its rider, paused in the entry. Then with a last smirk of encouragement from the gipsy woman, the rein was loosed, I bowed my head, and the next moment, as if in a floating vat of light, I found myself cantering wellnigh soundlessly round the ring, its circ.u.mference thronged tier above tier in the smoke-laden air with ghost-white rings of faces.
I smiled fixedly, tossing my fingers. A piebald clown came wambling in to meet me, struck his hand on his foolish heart, and fell flat in the tan. Love at first sight. Over his prostrate body we ambled, the ill-tempered little beast naggling at its bit, and doing his utmost to unseat me. The music ceased. The cloud of witnesses loured. Come Night, come Nero, I didn"t care! Edging the furious little creature into the centre of the ring, I mastered him, wheeled him, in a series of obeisances--North, South, East, West. A hurricane--such as even Mr Bowater can never have outridden--a hurricane of applause burst bounds and all but swept me out of the saddle. "Good-bye, Sweetheart, Good-bye!" sang cornet and trombone. With a toss, I swept my plaits starwards, brandished my whip at the faces, and galloped out into the night.
My _debut_ was over. I confess it--the very memory of it carries me away even now. And even now I would maintain that it was at least a little more successful than that other less professional _debut_ which poor Mr Crimble and Lady Pollacke had left unacclaimed in Beechwood High Street.
Chapter Forty-Seven
My showman, his hard face sleek with sweat, insisted on counting out three huge platelike crown pieces into my lap--for a douceur. I brushed them off on to the ground. "Only to clinch the bargain," he said. His teeth grinned at me as if he would gladly have swallowed me whole.
"Pick up the money," said I coldly, determined once and for all to keep him in his place. "It"s early days yet." But when my back was turned, covetous Adam took charge of it.
While we trudged along homeward--for in the deserted night the cage was unnecessary, until I was too tired to go further--I listened to the coins clanking softly together in Adam"s pocket It was an intoxicating lullaby. But such are the revulsions of success, for hours and hours that night I lay sleepless. Once I got up and put my hand in where the crowns were, to a.s.sure myself I was awake. But the dream which visited me--between the watches of remorse--I shall keep to myself.
With next day"s sun, the Signorina had become the talk of the country-side, and Adam"s vacant face must have stood him in good stead.
She had been such "a draw," he told me, that the showman had decided to stay two more nights on the same pitch: which was fortunate for us both.
Especially as on the third afternoon heavy rain fell, converting the green field into a mora.s.s. With evening the clouds lifted, and a fulling moon glazed the puddles, and dimmed the glow-worm lamps. Impulse is a capricious master. I did my best, for even when intuition fails my s.e.x, there"s obstinacy to fall back upon; but all that I had formerly achieved with ease had to be forced out of me that night with endless effort. The Oracle was unwilling. When a genteel yet foxy looking man, with whiskers and a high stiff collar under his chin, sneakishly invited me to tell his fortune, and I replied that "Prudent chickens roost high," the thrust was a little too deft. My audience was amused, but n.o.body laughed.
He seemed to be well known, and the green look he cast me proved that the truth is not always palatable or discreet. Unseduced by the lumps of sugar which I had pilfered for him, my peevish mount jibbed and bucked and all but flung the Princess of Andalusia into the sodden ring. He succeeded in giving a painful wrench to her wrist, which doubled the applause.
A strange thing happened to me, too, that night. When for the second or third time the crowd was flocking in to view me, my eyes chanced to fall on a figure standing in the clouded light a little apart. He was dressed in a high-peaked hat and a long and seemingly brown ca.s.sock-like garment, with b.u.t.toned tunic and silver-buckled leather belt. Spurs were on his boots, a light whip in his hand. Aloof, his head a little bowed down, his face in profile, he stood there, framed in the opening, dusky, level-featured, deep-eyed--a Stranger.
What in me rushed as if on wings into his silent company? A pa.s.sionate longing beyond words burned in me. I seemed to be carried away into a boundless wilderness--stunted trees, salt in the air, a low, enormous stretch of night sky, s.p.a.ce; and this man, master of soul and solitude.
He never heeded me; raised not an eyelid to glance into my tent. If he had, what then? I was a nothing. When next, after the press of people, I looked, he was gone; I saw him no more. Yet the girlish remembrance remains, consoling this superannuated heart like a goblet of flowers in that secret chamber of the mind we call the imagination.
The fall from that giddy moment into this practical world was abrupt.
Sulky, tired with the rain and the c.u.mbersome cage and the showman"s insults, on our arrival at Monk"s House Adam was completely unnerved when he found our usual entry locked and bolted.
He gibbered at me like a mountebank in the windy moonlight, his conical head blotting out half the cloud-wracked sky. These gallivantings were as much as his place was worth. He would wring the showman"s neck. He had a nail in his shoe. He had been respectable all his life; and what was I going to do about it? A nice kettle of fish. Oh, yes, he had had "a lick or two of the old lady"s tongue" already, and he didn"t want another. What"s more, there was the mealy-mouthed Marvell to reckon with.
Once free of the cage, I faced him and desired to know whether he would be happier if I wrote at once to Mrs Monnerie and absolved him there and then. "Look at yourself in your own mind," I bade him. "What a sight is a coward!" And I fixed him with none too friendly an eye under the moon.
His clumsiness in opening a window disturbed Mrs French. She came to the head of the staircase and leaned over, while we crouched in a recess beneath. But while the beams of the candle she carried were too feeble to pierce the well of darkness between us, by twisting round my head I could see every movement and changing expression of the shape above me--the frilled, red-flannel dressing-gown, the shawl over her head, and her inflamed peering face surmounted with a "front" of hair in pins. She was talking to herself in peculiar guttural mutterings. But soon, either because she was too sleepy or too indolent to search further, she withdrew again; and Adam and I were free to creep up the glooming shallow staircase into safety.
Last but not least, when I came to undress, I found that my grandfather"s little watch was gone. In a fever I tumbled my clothes over again and again. Then I sat down and in memory went over the events of the evening, and came at last to the thief. There was no doubt of him--a small-headed, puny man, who almost with tears in his eyes had besought me to give him one of my b.u.t.tons to take home to his crippled little daughter. He had pressed close: my thoughts had been far away. I confess this loss unnerved me--a haggard face looked out of my gla.s.s. I scrambled into bed, and sought refuge as quickly as possible from these heart-burnings.
After such depressing experiences Adam"s resolution was at an even lower ebb next morning. We met together under the sunny whispering pine-trees.
I wheedled, argued, adjured him in vain. Almost at my wits" end at last, I solemnly warned him that if we failed the showman the following evening, he would a.s.suredly have the law against us. "A pretty pair we shall look, Adam, standing up there in the dock--with the black cap and the wigs and the policemen and everything. And not a penny for our pains."
He squinted at me in unfeigned alarm at this; the lump in his throat went up and down; and though possibly I had painted the picture in rather sombre colours, this settled the matter. I hope it taught Adam to fight shy ever afterwards of adventuresses. It certainly taught _this_ adventuress that the mind may be "subdued to what it works in, like the dyer"s hand." I cast a look of hatred after the weak, silly man as he disappeared between the trees.
The circus, so the showman had warned me, was moving on that day to another market town, Whippington--six miles or so from its present pitch, though not more than four miles further away from Croomham. This would mean a long and wearisome trudge for us the next evening, as I found on consulting an immense map of Kent. Yet my heart sighed with delight at the discovery that, as the dove flies, we should be a full five miles nearer to Beechwood. If this little church on the map was St Peter"s, and this faint shading the woody contour of the Hill, why, then, that square dot was Wanderslore. I sprawled over the outspread county with sublime content. My very "last appearance" was at hand; liberty but a few hollow hours away.
It is true I had promised my showman to think over his invitation to me to "sign on" as a permanent member of his troupe of clowns, acrobats, wild beasts, and monstrosities. He had engaged in return to pay me in full, "with a bit over," at the close of the last performance. But I had merely laughed and nodded. Not that I was in any true sense ashamed of what I had done. Not _ashamed_.
But you cannot swallow your pride and your niceness without any discomfort. I was conscious of a hardening of the skin, of a grimness stealing over my mouth, and of a tendency to stare at the world rather more boldly than modesty should. At least, so it seemed. In reality it may have been that Life was merely sc.r.a.ping off the "cream." Quite a wholesome experience.
On the practical side, all was well. Two pounds to Adam, which I had promised to make three if he earned it, would leave me with thirteen or twelve pounds odd, apart from my clumsy "douceur." I thirsted for my wages. With that sum--two five-pound notes and say, four half-sovereigns--sewn up, if possible, in my petticoat, I should once more be my own mistress; and I asked no more for the moment. The future must take care of itself. On one thing I was utterly resolved--never, never to return to Monk"s House, or to No. 2--to that old squalid luxury, dissembling and humiliation.
No: my Monnerie days were over; even though it had taken a full pound of their servile honey to secrete this ounce of rebellious wax.
How oddly chance events knit themselves together. That very morning I had received a belated and re-addressed letter which smote like sunbeams on my hopes and plans. It was from Mrs Bowater:--
"DEAR MISS M.,--I send this line to say that I am still in the land of the living. I have buried my poor husband but have hopes some day of bringing him home. England is England when all"s said and done, and I can"t say I much approve of foreign parts. It"s a fine town and not what you might call foreign to look at the buildings, but moist and flat and the streets like a draughtboard. And the thought of the cattle upsets me. Everything topsy-turvy too with Spring coming along and breaking out and we here on the brink of September. It has been an afflicting time though considering all things he made a peaceful end, with a smile on his face as you would hardly consider possible.
"The next fortnight will see me on board the steamer again, which I can scarcely support the thought of, though, please G.o.d, I shall see it through. I have spent many days alone here and the strangeness of it all and the foreign faces bring up memories which are happier forgotten. But I"m often thinking what fine things you must be doing in that fine place. Not as I think riches will buy everything in this world--and a mercy too--or that I"m not anxious at times you don"t come to harm with that delicate frame and all.
Wrap up warm, miss, be watchful of your victuals and keep early hours. Such being so, I"m still hoping when I come home, if I"m spared, you may be of a mind to come to Beechwood Hill again and maybe settle down.
"I may say that I had my suspicions for some time that that young Mr Anon was consumptive in the lungs. But from what I gathered he isn"t, only suffering from a stomach cough--bad cooking and exposing himself in all weathers. I will say nothing nearer. I shall be easier off as money goes, but you and me needn"t think of that. f.a.n.n.y doesn"t write much and which I didn"t much expect. She is of an age now which must reap as it has sown, though even allowing for the accident of birth, as they say, a mother"s a mother till the end of the chapter. I must now close. May the Lord bless you, miss, wherever you may be.
Yours truly,
"E. BOWATER (MRS)."
Surely this letter was a good omen. It cheered me, and yet it was disquieting, too. That afternoon I spent in the garden, wandering irresolutely up and down under the blue sky, and fretting at the impenetrable wall of time that separated me from the longed-for hour of freedom. On a sunny stone near a foresty bed of asparagus I sat down at last, tired, and a little dispirited. I was angry with myself for the last night"s failure, and for a kind of weakness that had come over me.
Yet how different a creature was here to-day from that of only a week ago. From the darkened soil the stalks sprang up, stiffened and green with rain. A snail reared up her horns beneath my stone. An azure b.u.t.terfly alighted on my knee, slowly fanning its turquoise wings, patterned with a delicate narrow black band on the one side, and spots of black and orange like a Paisley shawl beneath. Between silver-k.n.o.bbed antennae its furry perplexed face and shining eyes looked out at me, sharing my warmth. I watched it idly. How long we had been strangers.
And surely the closer one looked at anything that was not of man"s making.... My thoughts drifted away. I began day-dreaming again.
And it seemed that life was a thing that had neither any plan nor any purpose; that I was sunk, as if in a bog, in ignorance of why or where or who I truly was. The days melted on, to be lost or remembered, the Spring into Summer, and then Winter and death. What was the meaning of it all--this enormous ocean of time and s.p.a.ce in which I was lost? Never else than a stranger. That couldn"t be true of the men and women who really keep the world"s "pot boiling." All _I_ could pray for was to sit like this for a while, undisturbed and at peace with my own heart.
Peace--did I so much as know the meaning of the word? How dingy a patchwork I had made of everything. And how customary were becoming these little pa.s.sing fits of repining and remorse. The one sole thing that comforted me--apart from my blue b.u.t.terfly--was an echo in my head of those clapping hands, whoops and catcalls--and the white staring faces in the glare. And a few months ago this would have seemed an incredible degradation.
There stole into memory that last evening at Wanderslore. What would he think of me now? I had done worse than forget him, had learned in one single instant that for ever and ever, however dearly I liked and valued him and delighted in his company, I could not be "in love" with him. I hid my face in my hands. Yet a curious quiet wish for his company sprang up in me. How stiff-necked and affected I had been. Love was nothing but cheating. Let me but confess, explain, ask forgiveness, unburden myself.
Those hollow temples, that jutting jaw, the way he stooped on his hands and coughed. My great-aunt, Kitilda, had died in her youth of consumption. A sudden dread, like a skeleton out of the sky, stood up in my mind. There was no time to delay. To-morrow night, Adam or no Adam, I would set off to find him: all would be well.
As if in response to my thought, a shadow stole over the stones beside me. I looked up and--aghast--saw f.a.n.n.y.
Chapter Forty-Eight
Her head was turned away from me, a striped parasol leaned over her shoulder. With a faintly defiant tilt of her beautiful head, as if exclaiming, "See, Strangeness, I come!" she stepped firmly on over the turf. A breath of some delicate indoor perfume was wafted across to my nostrils. I clung to my stone, watching her.
Simply because it seemed a meanness to play the spy on her in her solitude, I called her name. But her start of surprise was mere feigning. The silk of her parasol encircled her shoulders like an immense nimbus. Her eyes dwelt on me, as if gathering up the strands of an unpleasing memory.
"Ah, Midgetina," she called softly, "it is you, is it, on your little stone? Are you better?" The very voice seemed conscious of its own cadences. "What a delicious old garden. The contrast!"
The contrast. With a cold gathering apprehension at my heart I glanced around me. Why was it that of all people only f.a.n.n.y could so shrink me up like this into my body? And there floated back to remembrance the vast, dazzling room, the flower-clotted table, and, in that hideous vertigo, a face frenzied with disgust and rage, a hand flung out to cast me off. But I entered her trap none the less.