"But indeed, indeed," he began, "is it wise in this severe weather----?"
"Oh, it isn"t the weather I mind," was the serene retort, "it"s the croaking like a frog in public."
""A frog!"" cried Mr Crimble beguilingly, "oh, no!"
But all his protestations and cajoleries were unavailing. Even to a long, silent glance so private in appearance that it seemed more courteous to turn away from it, f.a.n.n.y made no discernible response. His shoulders humped. He caught up his soft hat, made his adieu--a little formal, and hasty--and hurried off through the door to the printer.
When his m.u.f.fled footsteps had pa.s.sed away, I looked at f.a.n.n.y.
"Oh, yes," she agreed, shrugging her shoulders, "it was a lie. I said it like a lie, so that it shouldn"t deceive him. I detest all that wheedling. To come here two days running, after.... And why, may I ask, if it is beneath your dignity to dance to the parish, is it not beneath mine to sing? Let the silly sheep amuse _themselves_ with their bleating. I have done with it all."
She rose, folded her gloves into a ball and her veil over her hat, and once more faced her reflection in her mother"s looking-gla.s.s. I had not the courage to tell her that the expression she wore on other occasions suited her best.
"But surely," I argued uneasily, "things are different. If I were to dance, stuck up there on a platform, you know very well it would not be the dancing that would amuse them, but--just me. Would you care for that if you were--well, what I am?"
"Ah, you don"t know," a low voice replied bitterly, "you don"t know. The sn.o.bs they are! I have soaked in it for years, like a pig in brine.
Boxed up here in your pretty little doll"s house, you suppose that all that matters is what you think of other people. But to be perfectly frank, you are out of the running, my dear. _I_ have to get my own living, and all that matters is not what I think of other people but what other people think of me. Do you suppose I don"t know what _he_, in his heart, thinks of me--and all the rest of them? Well, I say, wait!"
And she left me to my doll"s house--a more helpless slave than ever.
Not only one "star" the fewer, then, dazzled St Peter"s parish that New Year"s Eve, but f.a.n.n.y and I never again shared an hour"s practical astronomy. Still, she would often sit and talk to me, and the chain of my devotion grew heavy. Perhaps she, on her side, merely basked in the flattery of my imagination. It was for her a new variety of a familiar experience. Perhaps a curious and condescending fondness for me for a while sprang up in her--as far as that was possible, for, apart from her instinctive heartlessness, she never really accustomed herself to my physical shortcomings. I believe they attracted yet repelled her. To my lonely spirit she was a dream that remained a dream in spite of its intensifying resemblance to a nightmare.
I realize now that she was desperately capricious, of a cat-like cruelty by nature, and so evasive and elusive that frequently I could not distinguish her soft, furry pads from her claws. But whatever her mood, or her treatment of me, or her lapses into a kind of commonness to which I deliberately shut my eyes, her beauty remained. Whomsoever we love becomes unique in that love, and I suppose we are responsible for what we give as well as for what we accept. The very memory of her beauty, when I was alone, haunted me as intensely as if she were present. Yet in her actual company, it made her in a sense unreal. So, often, it was only the ghost of her with whom I sat and talked. How sharply it would have incensed her to know it. When she came to me in my sleep, she was both paradise and seraph, and never fiddle entranced a Paganini as did her liquid lapsing voice my small fastidious ear. Yet, however much she loved to watch herself in looking-gla.s.s or in her mind, and to observe her effects on others, she was not vain.
But the constant, unbanishable thought of anything wearies the mind and weakens the body. In my infatuation, I, too, was scarcely more than a ghost--a very childish ghost perhaps. I think if I could call him for witness, my small pasha in the train from Lyndsey would bear me out in this. As for what is called pa.s.sion, the only burning of it I ever felt was for an outcast with whom I never shared so much as glance or word.
Alas, f.a.n.n.y, I suppose, was merely a brazen image.
Long before the dark day of her departure--a day which stood in my thoughts like a barrier at the world"s end--I had very foolishly poured out most of my memories for her profit and amus.e.m.e.nt, though so immobile was she when seated in a chair beside my table, or standing foot on fender at the chimney-piece, that it was difficult at times to decide whether she was listening to me or not. What is more important, she told me in return in her curious tortuous and contradictory fashion, a good deal about herself, and of her childhood, which--because of the endless violent roarings of her nautical father, and the taciturn discipline of poor Mrs Bowater--filled me with compa.s.sion and heaped fuel on my love.
And not least of these bonds was the secret which, in spite of endless temptation, I managed to withhold from her in a last instinctive loyalty to Mrs Bowater--the discovery that her own mother was long since dead and gone.
She possessed more brains than she cared to exhibit to visitors like Dr Phelps and Mr Crimble. Even to this day I cannot believe that Mr Crimble even so much as guessed how clever she was. It was just part of herself, like the bloom on a plum. Hers was not one of those gesticulating minds.
Her efforts only intensified her f.a.n.n.yishness. Oh dear, how simple things are if only you leave them unexplained. Her very knowledge, too (which for the most part she kept to herself) was to me like finding chain armour when one is in search of a beating heart. She could shed it all, and her cleverness too, as easily as a swan water-drops. What could she not shed, and yet remain f.a.n.n.y? And with all her confidences, she was extremely reticent. A lift of the light shoulders, or of the flat arched eyebrows, a sarcasm, a far-away smile, at the same time illuminated and obscured her talk. These are feminine gifts, and yet past my mastery. Perhaps for this reason I admired them the more in f.a.n.n.y--just as, in reading my childhood"s beloved volume, _The Observing Eye_, I had admired the crab"s cuira.s.s and the scorpion"s h.o.r.n.y rings--because, being, after all, myself a woman, I faintly understood their purpose.
Thus, when f.a.n.n.y told me of the school she taught in; and of the smooth-haired drawing-master who attended it with his skill, on Mondays, Wednesdays, and Fridays; and of the vivacious and saturnine "Monsieur c.r.a.paud," who, poked up in a room under the gables, lived in the house; or of that other parish curate who was a nephew of the head-mistress"s, the implacable Miss Stebbings, and who, apparently, preached Sunday after Sunday, with peculiar pertinacity, on such texts as "G.o.d is love"--when f.a.n.n.y recounted to me these afflictions, graces, and mockeries of her daily routine as "literature" mistress, I could as easily bestow on her the vivifying particulars she left out, as a painter can send his portraits to be framed.
Once and again--just as I have seen a blackbird drop plumb from the upper boughs of a tree on a worm disporting itself in the dewy mould--once I did ask a question which produced in her one of those curious reactions which made her, rather than immaterial, an exceedingly vigilant image of her very self. "What will you do, f.a.n.n.y, when you _can"t_ mock at him?"
"Him?" she inquired in a breath.
"_The_ him!" I said.
"What him?" she replied.
"Well," I said, stumbling along down what was a rather black and unfamiliar alley to me, "my father was not, I suppose, particularly wise in anything, but my mother loved him very much."
"And _my_ father," she retorted, in words so carefully p.r.o.nounced that I knew they must be dangerous, "my father was a first mate in the mercantile marine when he married your landlady."
"Well," I repeated, "what would you do, if--if _you_ fell in love?"
f.a.n.n.y sat quite still, all the light at the window gently beating on her face, with its half-closed eyes. Her foot stirred, and with an almost imperceptible movement of her shoulder, she replied, "I shall go blind."
I looked at her, dumbfounded. All the days of her company were shrivelled up in that small sentence. "Oh, f.a.n.n.y," I whispered hopelessly, "then you know?"
""Know"?" echoed the smooth lips.
"Why, I mean," I expostulated, rushing for shelter fully as rapidly as my old friend the lobster must have done when it was time to change his sh.e.l.l, "I mean that"s what that absurd little Frenchman is--"Monsieur c.r.a.paud.""
"Oh, no," said f.a.n.n.y calmly, "_he_ is not blind, he only has his eyes shut. Mine," she added, as if the whole light of the wintry sky she faced were the mirror of her prediction, "mine will be wide open."
How did I know that for once the serene, theatrical creature was being mortally serious?
Chapter Fifteen
I grew a little weary of the beautiful snow in the days that followed my first talk with Mr Crimble, and fretted at the close air of the house.
The last day of the year the wind was still in the north. It perplexed me that the pride which from my seed had sprung up in f.a.n.n.y, and had prevented her from taking part in the parish concert, yet allowed her to attend it. She set off thickly veiled. Not even Mr Crimble"s spectacles were likely to pierce her disguise. I had written a little letter the afternoon before and had myself handed it to Mrs Bowater with a large fork of mistletoe from my Christmas bunch. It was an invitation to herself and f.a.n.n.y to sit with me and "see in" the New Year. She smiled at me over it--still her tranquil, though neglected self--and I was half-satisfied.
Her best black dress was donned for the occasion. She had purchased a bottle of ginger wine, which she brought in with some gla.s.ses and placed in the middle of the red and black tablecloth. Its white-lettered, dark-green label "haunts me still." The hours drew on. f.a.n.n.y returned from the concert--entering the room like a cloud of beauty. She beguiled the dwindling minutes of the year with mocking echoes of it.
In a rich falsetto she repeated Mr Crimble"s "few words" of sympathetic apology for her absence: ""I must ask your indulgence, ladies and gentlemen, for a lamentable hiatus in our programme."" She gave us Miss Willett"s and Mr Bangor"s spirited rendering of "Oh, that we two"; and of the recitation which rather easily, it appeared, Mrs Bullace had been prevailed upon to give as an encore after her "Abt Vogler": "The Lady"s "Yes,"" by Elizabeth Barrett Browning. And what a glance of light and fire she cast me when she came to stanza six of the poem:--
"Lead her from the festive boards, Point her to the starry skies!..."
And she imitated Lady Pollacke"s niece"s--Miss Oran"s--"cello obligato to "The Lost Chord," with a plangency that stirred even the soul of Henry as he lay curled up in my landlady"s lap. The black head split like a pomegranate as he yawned his disgust.
At this Mrs Bowater turned her bony face on me, her hands on her knees, and with a lift of her eyes disclosed the fact that she was amused, and that she hoped her amus.e.m.e.nt would remain a confidence between us. She got up and put the cat out: and on her return had regained her solemnity.
"I suppose," she said stiffly, staring into the sparkling fire that was our only illumination, "I suppose, poor creatures, they did their best: and it isn"t so many years ago, f.a.n.n.y, since you were as put-about to be allowed to sing at one of the church concerts as a bird is to hop out of its cage."
"Yes," said f.a.n.n.y, "but in this world birds merely hop out of one cage into another; though I suppose the larger are the more comfortable."
This retort set Mrs Bowater"s countenance in an impa.s.sive mask--so impa.s.sive that every fitfully-lit photograph in the room seemed to have imitated her stare. "And, mother," added f.a.n.n.y seductively, "who _taught_ me to sing?"
"The Lord knows," cried Mrs Bowater, with conviction, "_I_ never did."
"Yes," muttered f.a.n.n.y in a low voice, for my information, "but does He care?" I hastily asked Mrs Bowater if she was glad of to-morrow"s New Year. As if in reply the kitchen clock, always ten minutes fast, began to chime twelve, half-choking at every stroke. And once more the soul of poor Mr Hubbins sorrowfully took shape in a gaze at me out of vacancy.
"To them going downhill, miss," my landlady was replying to my question, "it is not the milestones are the pleasantest company--nor that the journey"s then of much account until it is over. By which I don"t mean to suggest there need be _gloom_. But to you and f.a.n.n.y here--well, I expect the little that"s the present for you is mostly wasted on the future." With that, she rose, and poured out the syrupy brown wine from the green bottle, reserving a remarkably little gla.s.s which she had rummaged out of her years" h.o.a.rdings for me.
f.a.n.n.y herself, with musing head--her mockings over--was sitting drawn-up on a stool by the fire. I doubt if she was thinking. Whether or not, to my enchanted eyes some phantom within her seemed content merely to be her beauty. And in rest, there was a grace in her body--the smooth shoulder, the poised head that, because, perhaps, it was so transitory, seemed to resemble the never-changing--that mimicry of the unknown which may be seen in a flower, in a green hill, even in an animal. It is as though, I do think, what we love most in this life must of necessity share two worlds.
Faintly out of the frosty air was wafted the knelling of midnight. I rose, stepped back from the firelight, drew the curtain, and stole a look into s.p.a.ce. Away on the right flashed Sirius, and to east of him came gliding flat-headed Hydra with Alphard, the Red Bird, in his coil.
So, for a moment in our history, I and the terrestrial globe were alone together. It seemed indeed that an intenser silence drew over reality as the earth faced yet one more fleeting revolution round her invisible lord and master. But no moon was risen yet.