Flesh and spirit, f.a.n.n.y must have been very tired. Her voice fluttered on like a ragged flag.
"But listen, listen!" I entreated her. "I haven"t blamed you for that, f.a.n.n.y. I swear it. I mean, you can"t help _not_ loving. I know that. But perhaps if only we had---- It"s a dreadful thing to think of him sitting there alone--the vestry--and then looking up "with a smile." Oh, f.a.n.n.y, with a smile! I dare hardly go into his mind--and the verger looking in.
I think of him all day."
"And I all night," came the reply, barked out in the gloom. "Wasn"t the man a Christian, then?"
"f.a.n.n.y," I covered my eyes. "Don"t say that. We shall both of us just suffocate in the bog if you won"t even let yourself listen to what you are saying."
"Well," she said doggedly, "be sure you shall suffocate last, Miss Midge. There"s ample perch-room for you on f.a.n.n.y"s shoulder." I felt, rather than saw, the glance almost of hatred that she cast at me from under her brows.
"Mock as you like at me," was my miserable answer, "I have kept my word to you--all but: and it was I who helped--Oh yes, I know that."
"Ah! "all but,"" her agile tongue caught up the words. "And what else, may I ask?"
I took a deep breath, with almost sightless eyes fixed on the beautiful, mysterious glades stretching beneath us. "He came again. Why, it was not very many days ago. And we talked and talked, and I grew tired, yes, and angry at last. I told him you were only making use of me. You were. I said that all we could do was just to go on loving you--and keep away. I know, f.a.n.n.y, I cannot be of any account; I don"t understand very much.
But that is true."
She leaned nearer, as if incredulous, her face as tranquil in its absorption as the planet that hung in the russet-black sky in a rift of the leaves.
"Candid, and candid," she scoffed brokenly, and all in a gasp.
The voice trailed off. Her mouth relaxed. And suddenly my old love for her seemed to gush back into my heart. A burning, inarticulate pity rose up in me.
"Listen, Midgetina," she went on. "That was honest. And I can be honest, too. I don"t care _what_ you said. If you had called me the vilest word they can set their tongue to, I"d still have forgiven you. But would you have me give in? Go under? Have you ever _seen_ Mother Grundy? I tell you, he haunts me--the blackness, the deadness. That outhouse! Do you suppose I can"t see inside that? He sits by my bed. I eat his shadow with my food. At every corner in the street his black felt hat bobs and disappears. If even he hadn"t been so solemn, so insignificant!..." Her low, torturing laugh shook under the beechen hollow.
"And I say this"--she went on slowly, as if I sat at a distance, "if he"s not very careful I shall go the same way. I can"t bear that--_that_ kind of spying on me. Don"t you suppose you can sin _after_ death? If only he had given me away--betrayed me! We should at least have been square. But that," she jerked back her head. "That"s only one thing. I had not meant to humble myself like this. You seem not to care what humiliations I have to endure. You sit there, oh, how absurd for me, watching and watching me, null and void and meaningless. Yet you are human: you feel. You said you loved me--oh, yes. But touch me, come here"--she laid her hand almost fondly on her breast--"and be humanly generous, no. That"s no more your nature than--than a changeling"s.
Contamination, perhaps!"
Her eyes fretted round her, as if she had lost her sense of direction.
"And now there"s this tongueless, staring ghost." She shuddered, hiding her face in her hands. "The misery of it all."
"f.a.n.n.y, f.a.n.n.y," I besought her. "You know I love you." But the words sounded cold and distant, and some deadly disinclination held me where I was, though I longed to comfort her. "And at times, I confess it, I have hated you too. You haven"t always been very kind to me. I was trying to cure myself. You were curing me. But still I go on--a little."
"It"s useless, useless," she replied, dropping her hands into her lap and gazing vacantly on the ground. "I can"t care; I can"t even cry. And all you say is only pity. I don"t want that. Would you still pity me, I wonder, if you knew that even though I had come to take this wretched money from you, I meant to taunt you, to accuse you of lying to me?"
"Taunt," "lying." My cheek grew hot. I drew back my head with a jerk and stared at her. "I don"t understand you."
"There. What did I say! She doesn"t understand me," she cried with a sob, as if calling on the angels to bear witness to her amazement.
"Well, then, let f.a.n.n.y tell you, Miss M., whoever and whatever you may be, that she, yes, even she, can understand that unearthliness, too. Oh, these last days! I have had my fill of them. Take all: give nothing.
There"s no other means of grace in a world like this."
"But you said "taunt" me," I insisted, with eyes fixed on the box that lay between the blunt-headed fronds of the springing bracken. "What did you mean by that? I did my best. Your mother was ill. She fainted, f.a.n.n.y, when the newspaper came. I couldn"t come back a single hour earlier. So I wrote to--to a friend, sending him my keys, and asking him to find the money for you. I know my letter reached him. Perhaps," I hesitated, in dread of what might be hanging over our heads, "perhaps the box is empty."
But I need not have wasted myself. The puzzle was not quite inexplicable. For the moment f.a.n.n.y"s miseries seemed to have vanished.
Animation came into her face and voice and movements as she told me how, the night before, thinking that her mother and I might have returned from Lyme Regis, she had come tapping. And suddenly as she stood in the garden, her face close to the gla.s.s, an utterly strange one had thrust itself into view, and the figure of "a ghastly gloating little dwarfish creature" had appeared in the porch.
At first she had supposed--but only for an instant--that it was myself.
"Of course, mother had mentioned him in her letters, but"--and f.a.n.n.y opened her eyes at me--"I never guessed he was, well, like _that_."
Then in her folly, and without giving him the least opportunity to explain his presence there, she had begun railing at him, and had accused him of forcing his way in to rob the house: "And he stood there, hunched up, looking at me--out of my own house." The very picture of f.a.n.n.y helplessly standing there at her own door, and of these two facing each other like that in the porch--this ridiculous end to my fine stratagem, filled me with a miserable amus.e.m.e.nt. I leaned back my head where I sat, shrilly and dismally laughing and laughing, until tears sprang p.r.i.c.klingly into my eyes. If any listener had been abroad in the woods that night, he would, I think, have hastened his departure.
But f.a.n.n.y seemed to be shocked at my levity. She peered anxiously into the clear night-glooms around us.
"And what!" I said, still striving to regain command over myself. "What happened then? Oh, f.a.n.n.y, not a policeman?"
But her memory of what had followed was confused, or perhaps she had no wish to be too exact. All that I could win from her for certain was that after an angry and bitter talk between herself and Mr Anon, he had simply slammed my door behind him and dared her to do her worst.
"That was pretty brave of him," I remarked.
"Oh," said f.a.n.n.y amiably, "I am not blaming your friend, Midgetina. He seemed to be perfectly _competent_."
Yet even now I remained unsatisfied. If f.a.n.n.y had come secretly to Beechwood, as she had suggested, and had spent the night with a friend, solely to hear the last tidings of Mr Crimble, what was this other trouble, so desperate that she had lost both her wits and her temper at finding Mr Anon there? Supposing the house had been empty? My curiosity overcame me, and the none too ingenuous question slipped from my tongue: "Did you want some of the money for mourning, then, f.a.n.n.y?"
Her dark, pale face, above the black, enveloping cloak, met my look with astonishment.
"Mourning!" she cried, "why, that would be the very---- No, not mourning, Midgetina. I owe a little to a friend--and not money only," she added with peculiar intensity. "Of course, if you have any doubts about lending it----"
"Give, not lend," said I.
"Yes, but how are we to get at it? I can"t lug _that_ thing about, and you say _he_ has the key. Shall we _smash_ it open?"
The question came so hurriedly that I had no time to consider what, besides money--and of course friendship--could be owed to a friend, and especially to a friend that made her clench her teeth on the word.
"Yes, smash it open," I nodded. "It"s only a box."
"But such a pretty little box!"
With knees drawn up, and shivering now after my outburst of merriment, I watched her labours. My beloved chest might keep out moth and rust, it was no match for f.a.n.n.y. She wound up a large stone in her silk scarf. A few heavy and m.u.f.fled blows, the lock surrendered, and the starlight dripped in like milk from heaven upon my h.o.a.rd.
"Why, Midgetina," whispered f.a.n.n.y, delicately counting the notes over between her long, white fingers, "you are richer than I supposed--a female Croesus. Wasn"t it a great risk? I mean," she continued, receiving no answer, "no wonder he was so cautious. And how much may I take?"
It seemed as if an empty s.p.a.ce, not of yards but of miles, had suddenly separated us. "All you want," said I.
"But I didn"t--I _didn"t_ taunt you, now, did I?" she smiled at me, with head inclined to her slim shoulder, as if in mimicry of my ivory Hypnos.
"There was nothing to taunt me about. Mayn"t _I_ have a friend?"
"Why," she retorted lightly, mechanically re-counting the bits of paper, "friend indeed! What about all those Pollackes and Monneries mother"s so full of? You will soon be flitting to quite another sphere. It"s the _old_ friends that then will be left mourning. You won"t sit moon-gazing then, my dear."
"No, f.a.n.n.y," I said stubbornly, "I"ve had enough of that, just for the present."
"Sst!" she whispered swiftly, raising her head and clasping the notes to her breast beneath her cloak, "what was that?"
We listened. I heard nothing--nothing but sigh of new-born leaf, or falling of dead twig cast off from the parent tree. It was early yet for the nightingale.
"Only the wind," said she.