There, indeed, in the heavens beyond my window, straddling the dark, star for star the same as those in the book, stood the Giant, shaking his wondrous fires upon the air. Even Mrs Bowater was moved by my enthusiasm. She came to the table, compared at my direction chart with sky, and was compelled rather grudgingly to admit that her husband"s book was at least true to the facts. Stooping low, I read out a brief pa.s.sage. She listened. And it seemed a look of girlhood came into the shadowy face uplifted towards the window. So the stars came into my life, and faithful friends they have remained to this day.
Mrs Bowater"s little house being towards the crest of the hill, with sunrise a little to the left across the meadows, my window commanded about three-fifths of the southern and eastern skies. By day I would kneel down and study for hours the charts, and thus be prepared for the dark. Night after night, when the weather was fair, or the windy clouds made mock of man"s celestial patternings, I would sit in the glow of the firelight and summon these magic shiners each by name--Bellatrix, huge Betelgeuse, Aldebaran, and the rest. I would look at one, and, while so doing, watch another. This not only isolated the smaller stars, but gradually I became aware that they were one and all furtively signalling to _me_! About a fortnight later my old Lyndsey friend, the Dogstar, topped the horizon fringe of woodland. I heard myself shout at him across the world. His sudden molten bursts of crimson betwixt his emeralds and sapphires filled me with an almost ridiculous delight.
By the middle of December I had mastered all the greater stars in my region, and with my spygla.s.s a few even of the Gammas and Deltas. But much of the zenith and all the north was closed to me, and--such is human greed--I began to pine beyond measure for a sight of Deneb, Vega, and the Chair. This desire grew unendurable, and led me into a piece of genuine foolhardiness. I determined to await the first clear still night and then to sally out and make my way, by hook or crook, up to my beech-roots, from which I should be able to command a fair stretch of the northern heavens. A quiet spell favoured me.
I waited until Mrs Bowater had gone to her bedroom, then m.u.f.fled myself up in my thickest clothes and stole out into the porch. At my first attempt, one glance into the stooping dark was enough. At the second, a furtive sighing breath of wind, as I breasted the hill, suddenly flapped my mantle and called in my ear. I turned tail and fled. But never faint heart won fair constellation. At the third I pressed on.
The road was deserted. No earthly light showed anywhere except from a lamp-post this side of the curve of the hill. I frisked along, listening and peering, and br.i.m.m.i.n.g over with painful delight. The dark waned; and my eyes grew accustomed to the thin starlight. I gained the woods unharmed. Rich was my reward. There and then I begged the glimmering Polestar to be true to Mr Bowater. Fear, indeed, if in a friendly humour, is enlivening company. Instead of my parasol I had brought out a curved foreign knife (in a sheath at least five inches long) which I had discovered on my parlour what-not.
The whisperings of s.p.a.ce, the calls of indetectable birds in the wastes of the sky, the sudden appearance of menacing or sinister shapes which vanished or melted themselves into mere stocks or stones as I drew near--my heart gave many an anguished jump. But quiet, and the magnificence of night, vanquished all folly at last. It seemed to me that a Being whom one may call Silence was brooding in solitude where living and human visitants are rare, and that in his company a harmless spirit may be at peace. Oblivious of my ungainly knife, yet keeping a firm arm on it, self seemed to be the whole scene there, and my body being so small I was perhaps less a disturber than were most intruders of that solemn repose.
Why I kept these night-walks secret, I cannot say. It was not apprehension of Mrs Bowater. She would have questioned my discretion, but would not, I think, have attempted to dissuade me from them against my will. No. It may be that every true astronomer is a miser at heart, and keeps some Lambda or Mu or lost nebula his eternal friend, named with his name, but unrecorded on any chart. For my part I h.o.a.rded the complete north for a while.
A fright I got one night, however, kept me indoors for the better part of a week. In my going out the little house door had been carelessly left unlatched. Algol and the red planet Mars had been my quarry among the floating woolpack clouds. The wind was lightly blowing from the north-west after the calm. I drew down my veil and set off briskly and lightheartedly for home.
The sight of the dark-looking hole in the door quickly sobered me down.
All was quiet, however, but on entering my room, there was a strangeness in the air, and that not due to my landlady"s forlorn trumpetings from above. Through the floating vaporous light I trod across to my staircase and was soon in bed. Hardly had my eyes closed when there broke out of the gloom around me a dismal, appalling cry. I soon realized that the creeping horror this caused in me was as nothing compared with that of the poor beast, lured, no doubt, into the house by Henry, at finding itself beneath a strange roof.
"Puss, puss," I pleaded shakenly; and again broke out that heart-sick cry.
Knife in hand, I descended my staircase and edging as far as possible from the baleful globes greenly burning beneath a mahogany chair, I threw open both doors and besought my unwelcome visitor to take his departure. The night wind came fluttering; there was the blur of a scuttering, shapeless form, and in the flash of an eye I was sprawling on the floor. A good deal shaken, with a nasty scratch on my thigh, but otherwise unharmed, I waved my hand after the fugitive and returned to bed.
The blood soon ceased to flow. Not daring to send my blood-stained nightgown to the wash, I concealed it behind my dresses in the wardrobe, and the next fine morning carried it off with me and buried it as deeply as I could in a deserted rabbit-burrow in the woods. Such is an evil conscience that, first, I had the fancy that during my digging a twig had inexplicably snapped in the undergrowth; and next, for "burnt offering," I made Mrs Bowater the present of an oval handgla.s.s set in garnets (one of my grandfather"s gifts). This she took down to a local jeweller"s to be mounted with a pin, and wore it on Sundays in place of her usual cameo depicting the Three Graces disporting themselves under a Palm-tree beside a Fountain.
Meanwhile I had heard a little more about the "f.a.n.n.y" whom Mrs Bowater had mentioned. My landlady was indeed a slow confider. f.a.n.n.y, I gathered, had a post as mistress at a school some forty miles away. She taught the little boys "English." The fleeting Miss Perry returned to mind, and with a faint dismay I heard that f.a.n.n.y would soon be returning home for the Christmas holidays. Mrs Bowater"s allusions to her were the more formidable for being veiled. I dreaded the invasion. Would she not come "between us"?
Then by chance I found hidden in my star-book the photograph of an infant in arms and of a pensive, ringleted woman, who, in spite of this morsel in her lap, seemed in her gaze out of nowhere to be vaguely afraid. On the back was scrawled in pencil: "F.: six weeks"--and an extremely cross six weeks "F." looked. For some inexplicable reason I pushed back this lady"s photograph into the book, and said nothing about it. The suspicion had entered my mind that f.a.n.n.y was only a daughter by marriage. I sank into a kind of twilight reflection at this. It seemed, in an odd fashion, to make Mrs Bowater more admirable, her husband more formidable, and the unknown f.a.n.n.y more mysterious and enigmatical. At the first opportunity I crept my way to the subject and asked my landlady if she could show me a portrait of her daughter.
The photograph she produced from upstairs had in fading almost become a caricature. It had both blackened and greyed. It depicted herself many years younger but hardly less grim in appearance in full flounced skirts, f.a.n.n.y as a child of about five or six standing at her knee, and Mr Bowater leaning with singular amenity behind her richly-carved chair, the fingers of his left hand resting disposedly on her right shoulder. I looked anxiously at the child. It was certainly crosspatch "F.", and a far from prepossessing little creature with that fixed, level gaze. Mr Bowater, on the other hand, had not yet adopted the wild and rigid stare which dominated the small parlour.
Mrs Bowater surveyed the group with a lackadaisical detachment.
"Fractious!--you can see the tears on her cheeks for all what the young man could do with his woolly lamb and grimaces. It was the heyday."
_What_ was the heyday, I wondered. "Was Mr Bowater--attached to her?"
seemed a less intrusive question.
"Doted," she replied, polishing the gla.s.s with her ap.r.o.n. "But not to much purpose--with an eye for every petticoat."
This seemed a difficult conversation to maintain. "Don"t you think, Mrs Bowater," I returned zealously, "there is just the faintest tinge of _Mr_ Bowater in the _chin_? I don"t," I added candidly, "see the faintest glimpse of _you_."
Mrs Bowater merely tightened her lips.
"And is she like that now?" I asked presently.
Mrs Bowater re-wrapped frame and photograph in their piece of newspaper.
"It"s _looks_, miss, that are my constant anxiety: and you may be thankful for being as you might say preserved from the world. What"s more, the father will out, I suppose, from now till Day of Judgment."
How strangely her sentiments at times resembled my G.o.dmother"s, and yet how different they were in effect. My thoughts after this often drifted to Mrs Bowater"s early married life. And so peculiar are the workings of the mind that her husband"s star-chart, his sleek appearance as a young father, the mysterious reference to the petticoats, awoke in me an almost romantic interest in him. To such a degree that it gradually became my custom to cast his portrait a satirical little bow of greeting when I emerged from my bedroom in the morning, and even to kiss my hand to his invisible stare when I retired for the night. To all of which advances he made no reply.
My next bout of star-gazing presaged disaster. I say star-gazing, for it is true that I stole out after honest folk are abed only when the heavens were swept and garnished. But, as a matter of fact, my real tryst was with another Self. Had my lot been different, I might have sought that self in Terra del Fuego or Malay, or in a fine marriage.
Mine was a smaller world. Bo-peep I would play with shadow and dew-bead.
And if Ulysses, as my father had read me, stopped his ears against the Sirens, I contrariwise unsealed mine to the ethereal airs of that bare wintry solitude.
The spectral rattle of the parched beechleaves on the saplings, the faintest whisper in the skeleton bracken set me peeping, peering, tippeting; and the Invisibles, if they heeded me, merely smiled on me from their grave, all-seeing eyes. As for the first crystal sparking of frost, I remember in my folly I sat down (bunched up, fortunately, in honest lamb"s-wool) and remained, minute by minute, unstirring, unwinking, watching as if in my own mind the exquisite small fires kindle and flit from point to point of lichen and bark, until--out of this engrossment--little but a burning icicle was left to trudge along home.
It was December 23rd. I remember that date, and even now hardly understand the meaning or intention of what it brought me. Love for the frosty, star-roofed woods, that was easy. And yet what if--though easy--it is not enough? I had lingered on, talking in my childish fashion--a habit never to leave me--to every sudden lovely morsel in turn, when, to my dismay, I heard St Peter"s clock toll midnight. Was it my fancy that at the stroke, and as peacefully as a mother when she is alone with her sleeping children, the giant tree sighed, and the whole night stilled as if at the opening of a door? I don"t know, for I would sometimes pretend to be afraid merely to enjoy the pretending. And even my small Bowater astronomy had taught me that as the earth has her poles and equator, so these are in relation to the ecliptic and the equinoctial. So too, then, each one of us--even a mammet like myself--must live in a world of the imagination which is in everlasting relation to its heavens. But I must keep my feet.
I waved adieu to the woods and unseen Wanderslore. As if out of the duskiness a kind of reflex of me waved back; and I was soon hastening along down the hill, the only thing stirring in the cold, white, luminous dust. Instinctively, in drawing near, I raised my eyes to the upper windows of Mrs Bowater"s crouching house. To my utter confusion.
For one of them was wide open, and seated there, as if in wait for me, was a m.u.f.fled figure--and that not my landlady"s--looking out. All my fine boldness and excitement died in me. I may have had no apprehension of telling Mrs Bowater of my pilgrimages, but, not having told her, I had a lively distaste of being "found out."
Stiff as a post, I gazed up through the shadowed air at the vague, motionless figure--to all appearance completely unaware of my presence.
But there is a commerce between minds as well as between eyes. I was perfectly certain that I was being _thought_ about, up there.
For a while my mind faltered. The old childish desire gathered in me--to fly, to be gone, to pa.s.s myself away. There was a door in the woods.
Better sense, and perhaps a creeping curiosity, prevailed, however. With a bold front, and as if my stay in the street had been of my own choosing, I entered the gate, ascended my "Bateses," and so into the house. Then I listened. Faintly at last sounded a stealthy footfall overhead; the window was furtively closed. Doubt vanished. In preparation for the night"s expedition I had lain down in the early evening for a nap. Evidently while I had been asleep, f.a.n.n.y had come home. The English mistress had caught her mother"s lodger playing truant!
Chapter Eleven
If it was the child of wrath in me that hungered at times after the night, woods, and solitude to such a degree that my very breast seemed empty within me; it was now the child of grace that prevailed. With girlish exaggeration I began torturing myself in my bed with remorse at the deceit I had been practising. Now Conscience told me that I must make a full confession the first thing in the morning; and now that it would be more decent to let f.a.n.n.y "tell on me." At length thought tangled with dream, and a grisly night was mine.
What was that? It was day; Mrs Bowater was herself softly calling me beyond my curtains, and her eye peeped in. Always before I had been up and dressed when she brought in my breakfast. Through a violent headache I surveyed the stooping face. Something in my appearance convinced her that I was ill, and she insisted on my staying in bed.
"But, Mrs Bowater...." I expostulated.
"No, no, miss; it was in a _b.u.t.t_ they drowned the s.e.xton. Here you stay; and its being Christmas Eve, you must rest and keep quiet. What with those old books and all, you have been burning the candle at both ends."
Early in the afternoon on finding that her patient was little better, my landlady went off to the chemist"s to get me some physic; I could bear inactivity no longer, and rose and dressed. The fire was low, the room sluggish, when in the dusk, as I sat dismally brooding in my chair, the door opened, and a stranger came in with my tea. She was dressed in black, and was carrying a light. With that raised in one hand, and my tea-tray held between finger and thumb of the other, she looked at me with face a little sidelong. Her hair was dark above her clear pale skin, and drawn, without a fringe, smoothly over her brows. Her eyes were almost unnaturally light in colour. I looked at her in astonishment; she was new in my world. She put the tray on my table, poked the fire into a blaze, blew out her candle at a single puff from her pursed lips, and seating herself on the hearthrug, clasped her hands round her knees.
"Mother told me you were in bed, _ill_," she said, "I hope you are better."
I a.s.sured her in a voice scarcely above a whisper that I was quite well again.
She nestled her chin down and broke into a little laugh: "My! how you startled me!"
"Then it _was_ you," I managed to say.
"Oh, yes; it was me, it was me." The words were uttered as if to herself. She stooped her cheek over her knees again, and smiled round at me. "I"m not _telling_," she added softly.
Her tone, her expression, filled me with confusion. "But please do not suppose," I began angrily, "that I am not my own mistress here. I have my own key----"
"Oh, yes, your own mistress," she interrupted suavely, "but you see that"s just what I"m _not_. And the key! why, it"s just envy that"s gnawing at the roots. I"ve never, never in my life seen anything so queer." She suddenly raised her strange eyes on me. "What were you doing out there?"
A lie perched on my lip; but the wide, light eyes searched me through.