Was there suspicion in the face of Mrs Bowater that evening? Our usual familiar talk dwindled to a few words this supper-time. The old conflict was raging in my mind--hatred of my deceit, horror at betraying an accomplice, and longing for the solemn quiet and solitude of the dark. I crushed my doubtings down and cast a dismal, hostile look at the long face, so yellow of skin and sombre in expression. When would she be gone and leave me in peace? The packed little parlour hung stagnant in the candlelight. It seemed impossible that Mrs Bowater could not hear the thoughts in my mind. Apparently not. She tidied up my few belongings, which, contrary to my usual neat habits, I had left scattered over the table. She bade me good-night; but paused in the doorway to look back at me. But what intimacy she had meant to share with me was put aside.
"Good-night, miss," she repeated; "and I"m sure, G.o.d bless you." It was the dark, quiet look that whelmed over me. I gazed mutely, without response, and the silence was broken by a clear voice like that of a cautious mocking-bird out of a wood.
It called softly on two honeyed notes, "Mo--ther!"
The house draped itself in quiet. Until ten had struck, and footsteps had ascended to the rooms overhead, I kept close in my bedchamber. Then I hastily put on my outdoor clothes, shivering not with cold, but with expectation, and sat down by the fire, prepared for the least sound that would prove that f.a.n.n.y had not forgotten our a.s.signation. But I waited in vain. The cold gathered. The vaporous light of the waning moon brightened in the room. The cinders fainted to a darker glow. I heard the kitchen clock with its cracked, cantankerous stroke beat out eleven.
Its solemn mate outside, who had seemingly lost his voice, ticked on.
Hope died out in me, leaving an almost physical nausea, a profound hatred of myself and even of being alive. "Well," a cold voice said in my ear, "that"s how we are treated; that comes of those eyes we cannot forget. Cheated, cheated again, my friend."
In those young days disappointment set my heart aching with a bitterness less easy to bear than it is now. No doubt I was steeped in sentimentality and folly. It was the vehemence of this new feeling that almost terrified me. But my mind was my world; it is my only excuse. I could not get out of _that_ by merely turning a tiny key in a Brahma lock. Nor could I betake myself to bed. How sleep in such an inward storm of reproaches, humiliation, and despised love?
I drew down my veil, wrapped my shawl closer round my shoulders, descended my staircase, and presently stood in the porch in confrontation of the night. Low on the horizon, at evens with me across s.p.a.ce, and burning with a limpid fire, hung my chosen--Sirius. The sudden sight of him pouring his brilliance into my eyes brought a revulsion of feeling. He was "cutting me dead." I brazened him down. I trod with exquisite caution down the steps, daring but one fleeting glance, as I turned, at f.a.n.n.y"s window. It was blinded, empty. Toiling on heavily up the hill, I sourly comforted myself with the vow that she should realize how little I cared, that her room had been sweeter than her company. Never more would I put trust in "any child of man."
Gradually, however, the quiet night received me into its peace (just as, poor soul, did the Moor Desdemona), and its influence stole into my darkened mind. The smooth, columnar boughs of the beeches lifted themselves archingly into the sky. Soon I was climbing over the moss-bound roots of my customary observatory. But this night the stars were left for a while unsignalled and unadmired. The crisped, frost-lined leaves scattered between the snake-like roots sparkled faintly. Years seemed to have pa.s.sed away, dwindled in Time"s hour-gla.s.s, since my previous visit. That Miss M. had ghosted herself away for ever. In my reverie the vision of f.a.n.n.y re-arose into my imagination--that secret still fountain--of herself. Asleep now.... I could no more free myself from her sorcery than I could disclaim the two hands that lay in my lap. She was indeed more closely mine than they--and nearer in actuality than I had imagined.
A faint stir in the woods suddenly caught my attention. The sound neared. I pressed my hand to my breast, torn now between two incentives, two desires--to fly, to stay. And on the path by which I had come, appeared, some yards distant, in the faint trickling light, the dark figure of my dreams.
She was dressed in a black cloak, its peaked old-fashioned hood drawn over her head. The moonbeams struck its folds as she moved. Her face was bowed down a little, her hand from within clutching her cloak together.
And I realized instinctively and with joy that the silence and solitude of the woods alarmed her. It was I who was calm and self-contained. She paused and looked around her--stood listening with lips divided that yet could not persuade themselves to call me by name. For my part, I softly gathered myself closer together and continued to gloat. And suddenly out of the far-away of the woods a nightbird loosed its cry: "A-hoo....
Ahoo-oo-oo-hooh!"
There is a hunter in us all. I laughed inwardly as I watched. A few months more and I was to watch a lion-tamer ... but let me keep to one thing at a time. I needled myself in, and, almost hooting the sound through my mouth, as if in echo of the bird, I heard myself call stealthily across the air, "f.a.n.n.y!--f.a.n.n.y Bowater!"
The cloaked figure recoiled, with lifted head, like the picture of a fawn I have seen, and gazed in my direction. Seeing nothing of me amidst the leaves and shadows, she was about to flee, when I called again:--
"It is I, f.a.n.n.y. Here: here!"
Instantly she woke to herself, came near, and looked down on me. No movement welcomed her. "I was tired of waiting," I yawned. "There is nothing to be frightened about."
Many of her fellow creatures, I fancy, have in their day wearied of waiting for f.a.n.n.y Bowater, but few have had the courage or sagacity to tell her so. She had not recovered her equanimity fully enough to refrain from excuses.
"Surely you did not expect me while mother was moving? I am not accustomed, Miss M., to midnight wanderings."
"I gave up expecting you, and was glad to be alone."
The barb fell short. She looked stilly around her. The solemn beeches were like mute giants overarching with their starry, sky-hung boughs the dark, slim figure. What consciousness had they, I wonder, of those odd humans at their roots?
"Alone! Here!" she returned. "But no wonder. It"s what you are all about."
A peculiar elation sprang up in me at this none too intelligible remark.
"I wonder, though," she added, "you are not frozen like--like a pebble, sitting there."
"But I am," I said, laughing softly. "It doesn"t matter in me, because I"m so easy to thaw. You ought to know that. Oh, Miss Bowater, think if this were summer time and the dew and the first burning heat! Are you wrapped up? And shall we sit here, just--just for one dance of the Sisters: thou lost dove, Merope?"
For there on high--and I had murmured the last words all but inaudibly to myself--there played the spangling Pleiads, clear above her head in the twig-swept sky.
"What sisters?" she inquired, merely humouring me, perhaps.
"The Six, f.a.n.n.y, look! You cannot see their Seventh--yet she is all that _that_ is about." South to north I swept my hand across the powdery firmament. "And I myself trudge along down Watling Street; that"s the Milky Way. I don"t think, f.a.n.n.y, I shall ever, ever be weaned. Please, may I call you that?"
She frowned up a moment into the emptiness, hesitated, then--just like a white peac.o.c.k I had once seen when a child from my G.o.dmother"s ancient carriage as we rolled by an old low house with terraces smooth as velvet beneath its cedars--she disposed her black draperies upon the ground at a little distance, disclosing, in so doing, beneath their folds the moon-blanched flounces of her party gown. I gazed spellbound. I looked at the white and black, and thought of what there was within their folds, and of the heart within that, and of the spirit of man. Such was my foolish fashion, following idly like a b.u.t.terfly the scents of the air, flitting on from thought to thought, and so missing the full richness of the one blossom on which I might have hovered.
"Tell me some more," broke suddenly the curious voice into the midst of this reverie.
"Well, there," I cried, "is fickle Algol; the Demon. And over there where the Crab crawls, is the little Beehive between the Roses."
"Praesepe," drawled f.a.n.n.y.
"Yes," said I, unabashed, "the Beehive. And crane back your neck, f.a.n.n.y--there"s little Jack-by-the-Middle-Horse; and far down, oh, far down, Berenice"s Hair, which would have been f.a.n.n.y Bowater"s Hair, if you had been she."
Even as I looked, a remote film of mist blotted out the infinitesimal cl.u.s.ter. "And see, beyond the Chair," I went on, laughing, and yet exalted with my theme, "that dim in the Girdle is the Great Nebula--s-sh! And on, on, that chirruping Invisible, _that_, f.a.n.n.y, is the Midget. Perhaps you cannot even dream of her: but she watches."
"Never even heard of her," said f.a.n.n.y good-humouredly, withdrawing the angle of her chin from the Ecliptic.
"Say not so, Horatia," I mocked, "there are more things...."
"Oh, yes, I know all about that. And these cold, monotonous old things really please you? Personally, I"d give the whole meaningless scramble of them for another moon."
"But your old glutton has gobbled up half of them already."
"Then my old glutton can gobble up what"s left. Who taught you about them? And why," she scanned me closely, "why did you pick out the faintest; do you see them the best?"
"I picked out the faintest because they were meant especially for me so that I could give them to you. My father taught me a little about them; and _your_ father the rest."
"_My_ father," echoed f.a.n.n.y, her face suddenly intent.
"His book. Do you miss him? Mine is dead."
"Oh, yes, I miss him," was the serene retort, "and so, I fancy, does mother."
"Oh, f.a.n.n.y, I am sorry. She told me--something like that."
"You need not be. I suppose G.o.d chooses one"s parents quite deliberately. Praise Him from Whom all blessings flow!" She smoothed out her black cloak over her ankles, raised her face again into the dwindling moonlight, and gently smiled at me. "I am glad I came, Midgetina, though it"s suicidally cold. "_Pardi! on sent Dieu bien a son aise ici._" We are going to be great friends, aren"t we?" Her eyes swept over me. "Would you like that?"
"Friends," indeed! and as if she had offered me a lump of sugar.
I gravely nodded. "But I must come to you. You can"t come to me. No one has; except, perhaps, my mother--a little."
"Oh, yes," she replied cautiously, piercing her eyes at me, "that _is_ a riddle. You must tell me about your childhood. Not that I love children, or my own childhood either. I had enough of that to last me a lifetime.
I shan"t pa.s.s it on; though I promise you, Midgetina, if I ever _do_ have a baby, I will anoint its little backbone with the grease of moles, bats, and dormice, and make it like you. Was your mother----" she began again, after a pause of reflection. "Are _you_ sorry, I mean, you aren"t--you aren"t----?"
Her look supplied the missing words. "Sorry that I am a midget, f.a.n.n.y?
People think I must be. But why? It is all I am, all I ever was. I am myself, inside; like everybody else; and yet, you know, not quite like everybody else. I sometimes think"--I laughed at the memory--"I was asking Dr Phelps about that. Besides, would _you_ be--alone?"
"Not when I was alone, perhaps. Still, it must be rather odd, Miss Needle-in-a-Haystack. As for being alone"--once again our owl, if owl it was, much nearer now, screeched its screech in the wintry woods--"I hate it!"