Still the slow train bumped on, loath to drag itself away from the happy harvest fields. Darkness was near when we ourselves alighted at our destination, mounted into a four-wheeled cab, and once more were in motion in the rain-laid dust. On and on rolled Pollie and I and our luggage together, in such ease and concealment after the hard wooden seats and garish light that our journey began to seem—as indeed I wished for the moment it might prove—interminable. One after another the high street lamps approached, flung their radiance into our musty velvet cabin, and went gliding by. Ever and again the luminous square of a window beyond the outspread branches of a tree would float on. Then suddenly our narrow solitude was invaded by the bright continuous flare flung into it from a row of shops.
Never before had I been out after nightfall. I gazed enthralled at the splendours of fruit and cakes, silks and sweetmeats packed high behind the glass fronts. Wasn't I myself the heiress of £110 a year? Indeed I was drinking in Romance, and never traveller surveyed golden Moscow or the steeps of Tibet with keener relish than I the liquid amber, ruby, and emerald that summoned its customers to a wayside chemist's shop. Twenty—what a child I was! I smile now at these recollections with an indulgence not unmixed with envy. It is Moscow survives, not the artless traveller.
After climbing a long hill—the wayside houses steadily thinning out as we ascended—the cab came to a standstill. The immense, shapeless old man who had so miraculously found our way for us, and who on this mild August evening was muffled up to his eyes in a thick ulster, climbed down backwards from his box and opened the door. At the same moment, as if by clockwork, opened another door—that of the last house on the hill. I was peering out of the cab, then, at my home;and framed in that lighted oblong stood Mrs Bowater. All utterly different from what I had foreseen: this much smaller house, this much taller landlady, and—dear me, how fondly I had trusted that she would not for the first time set eyes on her lodger beingcarriedinto her house. I had in fancy pictured myself bowing a composed and impressive greeting to her from her own hearthrug. But it was not to be.
Pollie lifted me out, settled me on her arm, and my feet did not touchterra firmaagain until she had ascended the five stone steps and we were within the passage.
"Lor, miss; then here we are," she sighed breathlessly, then returned to the cabman to pay him his fare. Even dwarfed a little perhaps by my mourning, there I stood, breathed upon by the warm air of the house, in the midst of a prickly doormat, on the edge of the shiny patterned oilcloth that glossed away into the obscurity from under the gaslight in front of me; and there stood my future landlady. For the first time, with head thrown back, I scanned a countenance that was soon to become so familiar and so endeared. Mrs Bowater's was a stiff and angular figure. She, too, was in black, with a long, springside boot. The bony hands hung down in their peculiar fashion from her elbows. A large cameo brooch adorned the flat chest. A scanty velvet patch of cap failed to conceal the thin hair sleekly parted in the middle over the high narrow temples. The long dark face with its black, set eyes, was almost without expression, except that of a placid severity. She gazed down at me, as I up at her, steadily, silently.
"So this is the young lady," she mused at last, as if addressing a hidden and distant listener. "I hope you are not over-fatigued by your journey, miss. Please to step in."
To my ear, Mrs Bowater's was what I should describe as a low, roaring voice, like falling water out of a black cloven rock in a hill-side; but what a balm was its sound in my ear, and how solacing this dignified address to jaded nerves still smarting a little after my victory on the London, Chatham, and Dover Railway. Making my way around a grandfather's clock that ticked hollowly beside the door, I followed her into a room on the left of the passage, from either wall of which apair of enormous antlers threatened each other under the discoloured ceiling. For a moment the glare within and the vista of furniture legs confused my eyes. But Mrs Bowater came to my rescue.
"Food was never mentioned," she remarked reflectively, "being as I see nothing to be considered except as food so-called. But you will find everything clean and comfortable; and I am sure, miss, what with your sad bereavements and all, as I have heard from Mr Pellew, I hope it will be a home to you. There being nothing else as I suppose that we may expect."
My mind ran about in a hasty attempt to explore these sentiments. They soothed away many misgivings, though it was clear that Mrs Bowater's lodger was even less in dimensions than Mrs Bowater had supposed.Clean: after so many months of Mrs Sheppey's habits, it was this word that sang in my head. Wood, glass, metal flattered the light of gas and coal, and for the first time I heard my own voice float up into my new "apartment": "It looksverycomfortable, thank you, Mrs Bowater; and I am quite sure I shall be happy in my new abode." There was nothing intentionally affected in this formal little speech.
"Which being so," replied Mrs Bowater, "there seems to be trouble with the cabman, and the day's drawing in, perhaps you will take a seat by the fire."
A stool nicely to my height stood by the steel fender, the flames played in the chimney; and for a moment I was left alone. "Thank God," said I, and took off my hat, and pushed back my hair.... Alone. Only for a moment, though. Its mistress gone, as fine a black cat as ever I have seen appeared in the doorway and stood, green-eyed, regarding me. To judge from its countenance, this must have been a remarkable experience.
I cried seductively, "Puss."
But with a blink of one eye and a shake of its forepaw, as if inadvertently it had trodden in water, it turned itself about again and disappeared. In spite of all my cajoleries, Henry and I were never to be friends.
Whatever Pollie's trouble with the cabman may have been, Mrs Bowater made short work of it. Pollie was shown to the room in which she was to sleep that night. I took off my bodice and bathed face, hands, and arms to the elbow in the shallowbowl Mrs Bowater had provided for me. And soon, wonderfully refreshed and talkative, Pollie and I were seated over the last meal we were to share together for many a long day.
There were snippets of bread and butter for me, a little omelette, two sizes too large, a sugared cherry or two sprinkled with "hundreds and thousands," and a gay little bumper of milk gilded with the enwreathed letters, "A Present from Dover." Alack-a-day for that omelette! I must have kept a whole family of bantams steadily engaged for weeks together. But I was often at my wits' end to dispose of their produce. Fortunately Mrs Bowater kept merry fires burning in the evening—"Ladies of some sizes can't warm the air as much as most," as she put it. So at some little risk to myself among the steel fire-irons, the boiled became the roast. At last I made a clean breast of my horror of eggs, and since by that time my landlady and I were the best of friends, no harm came of it. She merely bestowed on me a grim smile of unadulterated amusement, and the bantams patronized some less fastidious stomach.
My landlady was a heavy thinker, and not a copious—though a leisurely—talker. Minutes would pass, while with dish or duster in hand she pondered a speech; then perhaps her long thin lips would only shut a little tighter, or a slow, convulsive rub of her lean forefinger along the side of her nose would indicate the upshot. But I soon learned to interpret these mute signs. She was a woman who disapproved of most things, for excellent, if nebulous, reasons; and her silences were due not to the fact that she had nothing to say, but too much.
Pollie and I talked long and earnestly that first evening at Beechwood. She promised to write to me, to send me all the gossip of the village, and to come and see me when she could. The next morning, after a sorrowful breakfast, we parted. Standing on the table in the parlour window, with eyes a little wilder than usual, I watched her pass out of sight. A last wave of her handkerchief, and the plump-cheeked, fair-skinned face was gone. The strangeness and solitude of my situation flooded over me.
For a few days, strive as she might, Mrs Bowater's lodger moped. It was not merely that she had become more helpless, but of far less importance. This may, in part, be accounted for by the fact that, having been accustomed at Lyndsey tolive at the top of a high house and to look down on the world, when I found myself foot to foot with it, so to speak, on Beechwood Hill, it alarmingly intensified thesenseof my small stature. Use and habit however. The relative merits of myself and of the passing scene gradually readjusted themselves with a proper respect for the former. Soon, too, as if from heaven, the packing-case containing my furniture arrived. Mrs Bowater shared a whole morning over its unpacking, ever and again standing in engrossed consideration of some of my minute treasures, and, quite unaware of it, heaving a great sigh. But how to arrange them there in a room already over-occupied?
A carpenter of the name of Bates was called in, so distant a relative of Mrs Bowater's apparently that she never by nod, word, or look acknowledged the bond. Mr Bates held my landlady in almost speechless respect. "A woman in a thousand," he repeatedly assured me, when we were grown a little accustomed to one another; "a woman intenthousand. And if things hadn't been what they was, you may understand, they might have turned out different. Ah, miss, there's one looking down on us could tell a tale." I looked up past his oblong head at the ceiling, but only a few flies were angling round the chandelier.
Mrs Bowater's compliments were less indirect. "ThatBates," she would say, surveying his day's handiwork after he was gone, "is all thumbs."
He was certainly rather snail-like in his movements, and spent most of his time slowly rubbing his hands on the stiff apron that encased him. But I minded his thumbs far less than his gluepot.
Many years have passed, yet at the very whisper of his name, that inexpressible odour clouds up into my nose. It now occurs to me for the first time that he never sent in his bill. Either his memory failed him, or he carpentered for love. Level with the wide table in the window recess, strewn over with my small Persian mats, whereon I sat, sewed, read, and took my meals, Mr Bates constructed a broad shelf, curtained off on three sides from the rest of the room. On this wooden stage stood my four-poster, wardrobe, and other belongings. It was my bedchamber. From table to floor he made a staircase, so that I could easily descend and roam the room at large. The latter would have been more commodious if I could have persuaded Mrs Bowater to empty it a little. If I hadkept onlooking at the things in it I am sure I should have gone mad. Even tactwas unavailing. If only there had been the merest tinge of a Cromwell in my character, the baubles that would have been removed!
There were two simpering plaster figures—a Shepherd and Shepherdess—nearly half my height on the chimney-piece, whom I particularly detested; also an enlarged photograph in a discoloured frame on the wall—that of a thick-necked, formidable man, with a bush of whisker on either cheek, and a high, quarrelsome stare. He made me feel intensely self-conscious. It was like a wolf looking all day into a sheep-fold. So when I had my meals, I invariably turned my back on his portrait.
I went early to bed. But now that the autumnal dusks were shortening, an hour or two of artificial light was necessary. The flare of the gas dazzled and stupefied me, and gave me a kind of hunted feeling; so Mrs Bowater procured for me a couple of fine little glass candlesticks. In bed I sometimes burned a wax-light in a saucer, a companionable thing for night-thoughts in a strange place. Often enough I sat through the evening with no other illumination than that of the smouldering coals, so that I could see out of the window. It was an endless source of amusement to withdraw the muslin curtains, gaze out over the darkened fields beyond the roadway, and let my day-dreams wander at will.
At nine o'clock Mrs Bowater would bring me my supper—some fragments of rusk, or of bread, and milk. My food was her constant anxiety. The difficulty, as she explained, was to supply me withlittleenough to eat—at least of cooked food: "It dries up in the winking of an eye." So her cat, Henry, fared more sumptuously than ever, though the jealous creature continued to reject all my advances, and as far as possible ignored my existence. "Simple victuals, by all means, miss," Mrs Bowater would admit. "But if it don't enjoy, the inside languishes; and you are not yet of an age that can fall back on skin and bone."
The question of food presently introduced that of money. She insisted on reducing her charges to twenty shillings a week. "There's the lodging, and there's the board, the last being as you might say all but unmentionable; and honesty the best policy though I have never tried the reverse." So, in spite of all my protestations, it was agreed. And I thus found myselfmistress of a round fifty-eight pounds a year over and above what I paid to Mrs Bowater. Messrs Harris, Harris, and Harris were punctual as quarter-day: and so was I. I "at once" paid over to my landlady £13 and whatever other sum was needful. The "charity" my godmother had recommended began, and, alas, remained at home. I stowed the rest under lock and key in one of my grandfather's boxes which I kept under my bed. This was an imprudent habit, perhaps. Mrs Bowater advocated the Penny Bank. But the thought of my money being so handy andpalpablereassured me. I would count it over in my mind, as if it were a means to salvation; and became, in consequence, near and parsimonious.
Occasionally when she had "business" to transact, Mrs Bowater would be off to London. There she would purchase for me any little trifle required for the replenishment of my wardrobe. Needing so little, I could afford the finest materials; my sovereign was worth at least sixty shillings. Rather than "fine," Mrs Bowater preferred things "good"; and for this "goodness," I must confess, she sometimes made rather alarming sacrifices of appearance. Still, I was already possessed of a serviceable stock of clothes, and by aid of one of my dear mother's last presents to me, a shiny Swiss miniature workbox with an inlaid picture of the Lake of Geneva on the lid, I soon became a passable needlewoman.
I love bright, pure colours, and, my sweeping and dusting and bedmaking over, and my external mourning for my father at an end, a remarkably festive figure would confront me in my cheval glass of an afternoon. The hours I spent in dressing my hair and matching this bit of colour with that. I would talk to myself in the glass, too, for company's sake, and make believe I was a dozen different characters. I was young. I pined for life and companionship, and having only my own—for Mrs Bowater was rather a faithful feature of the landscape than a fellow being—I made as much, and as many, of myself as possible.
Another question that deeply engaged my landlady was my health. She mistrusted open windows, but strongly recommended "air." What insidious maladies she spied around me! Indeed that September was unusually hot. I sat on my table in thewindow like a cricket in an oven, sorely missing my high open balcony, the garden, and the stream. Once and again Mrs Bowater would take me for a little walk after sunset. Discretion to her was much the better part of valour; nor had I quite recovered from my experiences in the train. But such walks—though solitary enough at that hour of the day—were straggly and irksome. Pollie's arm had been a kind of second nature to me; but Mrs Bowater, I think, had almost as fastidious a disinclination to carrying me as I have to being carried. I languished for liberty. Being a light sleeper, I would often awake at daybreak and the first call of the birds. Then the hill—which led to Tyddlesdon End and Love (or Loose) Lane—was deserted. Thought of the beyond haunted me like a passion. At a convenient moment I intimated to Mrs Bowater how secure was the street at this early hour, how fresh the meadows, and how thirsty for independent outings her lodger. "Besides, Mrs Bowater, I am not a child, and who could see me?"
After anxious and arduous discussion, Mr Bates was once more consulted. He wrapped himself in a veritable blanket of reflection, and all but became unconscious before he proposed a most ingenious device. With Mrs Bowater's consent, she being her own landlady and amused at the idea, he cut out of one of the lower panels of her parlour door a round-headed opening just of an easy size to suit me. In this aperture he hung a delicious little door that precisely fitted it. So also with the door into the street—to which he added a Brahmah lock. By cementing a small square stone into the corner of each of the steps down from the porch, he easedthatlittle difficulty. May Heaven bless Mr Bates! With his key round my neck, stoop once, stoop twice, a scamper down his steps, and I was free—as completely mistress of my goings-out and of my comings-in as every self-respecting person should be.
"That's what my father would have called a good job, Mr Bates," said I cordially.
He looked yearningly at me, as if about to impart a profound secret; but thought better of it. "Well, miss, what I say is, a job's ajob; and if itisa job, it's a job that should be made a jobof."
As I dot the i's and cross the t's of this manuscript, I often think—a little ruefully—of Mr Bates.
As soon as daybreak was piercing into my region of the sky, and before Mrs Bowater or the rest of the world was stirring, I would rise, make my candlelit toilet, and hasten out into the forsaken sweet of the morning. If it broke wet or windy, I could turn over and go to sleep again. A few hundred yards up the hill, the road turned off, as I have said, towards Tyddlesdon End and Loose Lane—very stony and steep. On the left, and before the fork, a wicket gate led into the woods and the park of empty "Wanderslore." To the verge of these deserted woods made a comfortable walk for me.
If, as might happen, any other wayfarer was early abroad, I could conceal myself in the tussocks of grass and bushes that bordered the path. In my thick veil, with my stout green parasol and inconspicuous shawl, I made a queer and surprising figure no doubt. Indeed, from what I have heard, the ill fame of Wanderslore acquired a still more piquant flavour in the town by reports that elf-folk had been descried on its outskirts. But if I sometimes skipped and capered in these early outings, it was for exercise as well as suppressed high spirits. To be prepared, too, for the want of such facilities in the future, I had the foresight to accustom myself to Mrs Bowater's steep steps as well as to my cemented-in "Bateses," as I called them. My only difficulty was to decide whether to practice on them when I was fresh at the outset of my walk, or fatigued at the end of it. Naturally people grow "peculiar" when much alone: self plays with self, and the mimicry fades.
These little expeditions, of course, had their spice of danger, and it made them the more agreeable. A strange dog might give me a fright. There was an old vixen which once or twice exchanged glances with me at a distance. But with my parasol I was a match for most of the creatures which humanity has left unslaughtered. My sudden appearance might startle or perplex them. But if few were curious, fewer far were unfriendly. Boys I feared most. A hulking booby once stoned me through the grass, but fortunately he was both a coward and a poor marksman. Until winter came, I doubt if a single sunshine morning was wasted. Many a rainy one, too, found mesplashing along, though then I must be a careful walker to avoid a sousing.
The birds renewed their autumn song, the last flowers were blossoming. Concealed by scattered tufts of bracken where an enormous beech forked its roots and cast a golden light from its withering leaves, I would spend many a solitary hour. Above the eastern tree-tops my Kent stretched into the distance beneath the early skies. Far to my left and a little behind me rose the chimneys of gloomy Wanderslore. Breathing in the gentle air, the dreamer within would stray at will. There I kept the anniversary of my mother's birthday; twined a wreath for her of ivy-flowers and winter green; and hid it secretly in a forsaken blackbird's nest in the woods.
Still I longed for my old home again. Mrs Bowater's was a stuffy and meagre little house, and when meals were in preparation, none too sweet to the nose. Especially low I felt, when a scrawling letter was now and then delivered by the postman from Pollie. Her spelling and grammar intensified my homesickness. Miss Fenne, too, had not forgotten me. I pored over her spidery epistles till my head ached. Why, if I had been so rash and undutiful, was she so uneasy? Even the texts she chose had a parched look. The thought of her spectacling my minute handwriting and examining the proof that I was still a child of wrath, gave my pride a silly qualm. So Mrs Bowater came to my rescue, and between us we concocted replies to her which, I am afraid, were not more intelligible for a tendency on my landlady's part to express my sentiments in the third person.
This little service set her thinking of Sunday and church. She was not, she told me, "what you might call a religious woman," having been compelled "to keep her head up in the world, and all not being gold that glitters." She was none the less a regular attendant at St Peter's—a church a mile or so away in the valley, whose five bells of a Sabbath evening never failed to recall my thoughts to Lyndsey and to dip me into the waters of melancholy. I loved their mellow clanging in the lap of the wind, yet it was rather doleful to be left alone with my candles, and only Henry sullenly squatting in the passage awaiting his mistress's return.
"Not that you need making anybetter, miss," Mrs Bowater assured me. "Even a buttercup—or a retriever dog, for that matter—being no fuller than it can hold of what it is, in a manner of speaking. But there's the next world to be accounted for, and hopes of reunion on another shore, where, so I understand, mere size, body or station, will not be noticeable in the sight of the Lamb.Notthat I hold with the notion that only the good so-called will be there."
This speech, I must confess, made me exceedingly uncomfortable.
"Wherever I go, Mrs Bowater," I replied hastily, "I shall not be happy unless you are there."
"D. V.," said Mrs Bowater, grimly, "I will."
Still, I remained unconverted to St Peter's. Why, I hardly know: perhaps it was her reference to its pew rents, or her description of the vicar's daughters (who were now nursing their father at Tunbridge Wells), or maybe even it was a stare from her husband which I happened at that precise moment to intercept from the wall. Possibly if I myself had taken a "sitting," this aura of formality would have faded away. Mrs Bowater was a little reassured, however, to hear that my father and mother, in spite of Miss Fenne, had seldom taken me to church. They had concluded that my absence was best both for me and for the congregation. And I told her of our little evening services in the drawing-room, with Mrs Ballard, the parlourmaid, Pollie, and the Boy on the sofa, just as it happened to be their respective "Sundays in."
This set her mind at rest. Turn and turn about, on one Sunday evening she went to St Peter's and brought back with her the text and crucial fragments of Mr Crimble's sermon, and on the next we read the lessons together and sang a hymn. Once, indeed, I embarked upon a solo, "As pants the hart," one of my mother's favourite airs. But I got a little shaky at "O for the wings," and there was no rambling, rumbling chorus from my father. But Sunday was not my favourite day on Beechwood Hill. Mrs Bowater looked a little formal with stiff white "frilling" round her neck. She reminded me of a leg of mutton. To judge from the gloom and absentmindedness into which they sometimes plunged her, quotations from Mr Crimble could bedouble-edged. My real joy was to hear her views on the fashions and manners of her fellow-worshippers.
Well, so the months went by. Winter came with its mists and rains and frosts, and a fire in the polished grate was no longer an evening luxury but a daily need. As often as possible I went out walking. When the weather was too inclement, I danced for an hour or so, for joy and exercise, and went swimming on a chair. I would entertain myself also in watching through the muslin curtains the few passers-by; sorting out their gaits, and noses, and clothes, and acquaintances, and guessing their characters, occupations, and circumstances. Certain little looks and movements led me to suppose that, even though I was perfectly concealed, the more sensitive among them were vaguely uneasy under this secret scrutiny. In such cases (though very reluctantly) I always drew my eyes away: first because I did not like the thought of encroaching on their privacy, and next, because I was afraid their uneasiness might prevent them coming again. But this microscopic examination of mankind must cease with dusk, and the candle-hours passed rather heavily at times. The few books I had brought away from Lyndsey were mine now nearly by heart. So my eye would often wander up to a small bookcase that hung out of reach on the other side of the chimney-piece.
One supper-time I ventured to ask Mrs Bowater if she would hand me down a tall, thin, dark-green volume, whose appearance had particularly taken my fancy. A simple enough request, but surprisingly received. She stiffened all over and eyed the bookcase with a singular intensity. "The books there," she said, "are what they call the dead past burying its dead."
Spoon in hand, I paused, looking now at Mrs Bowater and now at the coveted book. "MrBowater," she added from deep down in herself, "followed the sea." This was, in fact, Mr Bowater's début in our conversation, and her remark, uttered in so hollow yet poignant a tone, produced a romantic expectancy in my mind.
"Is——" I managed to whisper at last: "I hope Mr Bowater isn'tdead?"
Mrs Bowater's eyes were like lead in her long, dark-skinned face. She opened her mouth, her gaze travelled slowly until, as I realized, it had fixed itself on the large yellowing photograph behind my back.
"Dead, no"; she echoed sepulchrally. "Worse than."
By which I understood that, far from being dead, Mr Bowater was still actively alive. And yet, apparently, not much the happier for that. Instantaneously I caught sight of a rocky, storm-strewn shore, such as I had seen in myRobinson Crusoe, andthereMr Bowater, still "following the sea."
"Never, never," continued Mrs Bowater in her Bible voice, "never to darken these doors again!" I stole an anxious glance over my shoulder. There was such a brassy boldness in the responsive stare that I was compelled to shut my eyes.
But Mrs Bowater had caught my expression. "He was, as some would say," she explained with gloomy pride, "a handsome man.Dohandsome he did never. But there, miss, things being as they must be, and you in the green of your youth—thoughhearing the worst may be a wholesome physic if taken with care, as I have told Fanny many a time...." She paused to breathe. "What I was saying is, there can be no harm in your looking at the book if that's all there's to it." With that she withdrew the dry-looking volume from the shelf and laid it on the table beside my chair.
I got down, opened it in the middle (as my father had taught me, in order to spare the binding), opened it on a page inky black as night all over, but starred with a design as familiar to me as the lines on the palm of my hand.
"But oh! Mrs Bowater!" I cried, all in a breath, running across, dragging back the curtain, and pointing out into the night; "look, look, it's there! It's Orion!"
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 passage. 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 tome! 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 spyglass 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 muffled 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 brimming 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 space, 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 mydiscretion, 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 hoarded 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 handglass set in garnets (one of mygrandfather'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 "Fanny" whom Mrs Bowater had mentioned. My landlady was indeed a slow confider. Fanny, 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 Fanny 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 Fanny 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 Fanny 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, Fanny 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 allwhat the young man could do with his woolly lamb and grimaces. It was the heyday."
Whatwas the heyday, I wondered. "Was Mr Bowater—attached to her?" seemed a less intrusive question.
"Doted," she replied, polishing the glass with her apron. "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 ofMrBowater in thechin? I don't," I added candidly, "see the faintest glimpse ofyou."
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'slooks, 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 godmother'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 muffled 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 aswell as between eyes. I was perfectly certain that I was beingthoughtabout, up there.
For a while my mind faltered. The old childish desire gathered in me—to fly, to be gone, to pass 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, Fanny had come home. The English mistress had caught her mother's lodger playing truant!
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 Fanny "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 abuttthey drowned the sexton. 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. Sheput 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 assured 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 itwasyou," 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 nottelling," 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'mnot. 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. "I went," said I, "to be in the woods—to see the stars"; then added in a rather pompous voice, "only the southern and eastern constellations are visible fromthispoky little window."
There was no change in the expression of the two eyes that drank me in. "Isee; and you want them all. That's odd, now," she went on reflectively, stabbing again at the fire; "they have never attracted me very much—angels' tin-tacks, as they say in the Sunday Schools. Fanny Bowater was looking for the moon."
She turned once more, opened her lips, showing the firm row of teeth beneath them, and sang in a low voice the first words, I suppose, of some old madrigal: "'She enchants me.' And ifIhad my little key, and my little secret door.... But never mind. 'Tell-tale Tit, her tongue shall be slit.' It's safe with me. I'm no sneak. But you might like to know, Miss M., that my mother thinks the very world of you. And so do I, for that matter; though perhaps for different reasons."
The calm, insolent words infuriated me, and yet her very accents, with a curious sweet rasp in them, like that in a skylark's song when he slides his last twenty feet from the clouds, were an enchantment. Ever and always there seemed to be two Fannies; one visible, her face; the other audible, her voice. But the enchantment was merely fuel for the flames.
"Will you please remember," I broke out peremptorily, "that neither myself nor what I choose to do is any affair of yours. Mrs Bowater is an excellent landlady; you can tell her precisely what you please; and—and" (I seemed to be choking) "I am accustomed to take my meals alone."
The sidelong face grew hard and solemn in the firelight, then slowly turned, and once more the eyes surveyed me under lifted brows—like the eyes of an angel, empty of mockery or astonishment or of any meaning but that of their beauty. "There you are," she said. "One talks like one human being to another, and I should have thought you'd be grateful for that; and this is the result. Facts are facts; and I'm not sorry for them, good or bad. If you wish to see the last of me, here it is. I don't thrust myself on people—there's no need. But still; I'm not telling."
She rose, and with one light foot on my fender, surveyed herself for a moment with infinite composure in the large looking-glass that spanned the chimney-piece.
And I?—I was exceedingly tired. My head was burning like a coal; my thoughts in confusion. Suddenly I lost control of myself and broke into an angry, ridiculous sobbing. I simply sat there, my face hidden in my dry, hot hands, miserable and defeated. And strange Fanny Bowater, what did she do?
"Heavens!" she muttered scornfully, "I gave up snivelling when I was a baby." Then voice, manner, even attitude suddenly changed—"And there's mother!"
When Mrs Bowater knocked at my door, though still in my day-clothes, I was in bed again, and my tea lay untasted on a chair beside it.
"Dear, dear," she said, leaning anxiously over me, "your poor cheeks are red as a firebrand, miss. Those chemists daren't put a nose outside their soaps and tooth powders. It must be Dr Phelps to-morrow if you are no better. And as plump a little Christmas pudding boiling for you in the pot as ever youcould see! Tell me, now; there's nopainanywhere—throat, limbs, or elsewhere?"
I shook my head. She sprinkled a drop or two of eau de Cologne on my sheet and pillow, gently bathed my temples and hands, kindled a night-light, and left me once more to my own reflections.
They were none too comfortable. One thing only was in my mind—Fanny Bowater, her face, her voice, every glance and intonation, smile, and gesture. That few minutes' talk seemed now as remote and incredible as a nightmare. The stars, the woods, my solitary delights in learning and thinking were all suddenly become empty and meaningless. She despised me: and I hated her with a passion I cannot describe.
Yet in the midst of my hatred I longed for her company again, distracting myself with the sharp and clever speeches I might have made to her, and picturing her confounded by my contempt and indifference. But should I ever see her alone again? At every sound and movement in the house, which before had so little concerned me, I lay listening, with held breath. I might have been a mummy in a Pyramid hearkening after the fluttering pinions of its spirit come back to bring it life. But no tidings came of the stranger.
When my door opened again, it was only to admit Mrs Bowater with my supper—a bowl of infant's gruel, not the customary old lady's rusk and milk. I laughed angrily within to think that her daughter must have witnessed its preparation. Even at twenty, then, I had not grown used to being of so little consequence in other people's eyes. Yet, after all, who ever quite succeeds in being that? My real rage was not that Fanny had taken me as a midget, but assucha midget. Yet can I honestly say that I haveevertaken her as mere Fanny, and not assucha Fanny?
The truth is she had wounded my vanity, and vanity may be a more fractious nursling even than a wounded heart. Tired and fretful, I had hardly realized the flattering candour of her advances. Even her promises not to "tell" of my night-wanderings, implied that she trusted in my honour not to tell of her promise. I thought and thought of her. She remained an enigma. Cold and hard—no one had ever spoken to me like that before. Yet her voice—it was as if it had run aboutin my blood, and made my eyes shine. A mere human sound to set me sobbing! More dangerous yet, I began to think of what Miss Bowater must be thinking of me, until, exhausted, I fell asleep, to dream that I was a child again and shut up in one of Mrs Ballard's glass jars, and that a hairy woman who was a kind of mixture of Mrs Bowater and Miss Fenne, was tapping with a thimbled finger on its side to increase my terror.
Next morning, thank Heaven, admitted me to my right mind again. I got out of bed and peered through the window. It was Christmas Day. A thin scatter of snow was powdering down out of the grey sky. The fields were calm and frozen. I felt, as I might say, the hunger in my face, looking out. There was something astonishingly new in my life. Everything familiar had become a little strange.
Over night, too, some one—and with mingled feelings I guessed who—must have stolen into my room while I lay asleep. Laid out on a bedside chair was a crimson padded dressing-jacket, threaded with gold, a delicate piece of needlework that would have gladdened my grandfather. Rolled up on the floor beside it was a thick woollen mat, lozenged in green and scarlet, and just of a size to spread beside my bed. These gifts multiplied my self-reproaches and made me acutely homesick.
What should I do? Beneath these thoughts was a quiet fizz of expectation and delight, like water under a boat. Pride and common sense fought out their battle in my mind. It was pride that lost the day. When Mrs Bowater brought in my breakfast, she found her invalid sitting up in Fanny's handsome jacket, and the mat laid over the bedrail for my constant contemplation. Nor had I forgotten Mrs Bowater. By a little ruse I had found out the name and address of a chemist in the town, and on the tray beside my breakfast was the fine bottle of lavender water which I had myself ordered him to send by the Christmas Eve post.
"Well there, miss, you did take me in that time," she assured me. "And more like a Valentine than a Christmas present; and its being the only scent so-called that I've any nose for."
Clearly this was no occasion for the confessional, even if I had had a mind to it. But I made at least half a vow never to go star-gazing again without her knowledge. My looks pleased her better, too, though not so much better as to persuadeher to countermand Dr Phelps. Her yellowish long hand with its worn wedding-ring was smoothing my counterpane. I clutched at it, and, shame-stricken, smiled up into her face.
"You have made me very happy," I said. At this small remark, the heavy eyelids trembled, but she made no reply.
"Did," I managed to inquire at last, "did she have any breakfast before she went for the doctor?"
"A cup of tea," said Mrs Bowater shortly. A curious happiness took possession of me.
"She is very young to be teaching; not much older than I am."
"The danger was to keep her back," was the obscure reply. "We don't always see eye to eye."
For an instant the dark, cavernous face above me was mated by that other of birdlike lightness and beauty. "Isn't it funny?" I observed, "I had made quite, quite a different picture of her."
"Looks are looks, and brains are brains; and between them you must tread very wary."
About eleven o'clock a solemn-looking young man of about thirty, with a large pair of reddish leather gloves in his hand, entered the room. For a moment he did not see my bed, then, remarking circumspectly in a cheerful, hollow voice, "So this is our patient," he bade me good-morning, and took a seat beside my bed. A deep blush mounted up into the fair, smooth-downed cheeks as he returned my scrutiny and asked me to exhibit my tongue. I put it out, and he blushed even deeper.
"And the pulse, please," he murmured, rising. I drew back the crimson sleeve of Fanny's jacket, and with extreme nicety he placed the tip of a square, icy forefinger on my wrist. Once more his fair-lashed eyelids began to blink. He extracted a fine gold watch from his waistcoat pocket, compared beat with beat, frowned, and turned to Mrs Bowater.
"You are not, I assume, aware of the—the young lady'snormalpulse?"
"There being no cause before to consider it, I am not," Mrs Bowater returned.
"Anypain?" said Dr Phelps.
"Headache," replied Mrs Bowater on my behalf, "and shoots in the limbs."
At that Dr Phelps took a metal case out of his waistcoat,glanced at it, glanced at me, and put it back again. He leaned over so close to catch the whisper of my breathing that there seemed a danger of my losing myself in the labyrinth of his downy ear.
"H'm, a little fever," he said musingly. "Have we any reason to suppose that we can have taken a chill?"
The head on the pillow stirred gently to and fro, and I think its cheek was dyed with an even sprightlier red than had coloured his. After one or two further questions, and a low colloquy with Mrs Bowater in the passage, Dr Phelps withdrew, and his carriage rolled away.
"A painstaking young man," Mrs Bowater summed him up in the doorway, "but not the kind I should choose to die under. You are to keep quiet and warm, miss; have plenty of light nourishment; and physic to follow. Which, except for the last-mentioned, and that mainly water, one don't have to ride in a carriage to know for one's self."
But "peace and goodwill": I liked Dr Phelps, and felt so much better for his skill that before his wheels had rolled out of hearing I had leapt out of bed, dragged out the trunk that lay beneath it, and fetched out from it a treasured ivory box. On removal of the lid, this ingenious work disclosed an Oriental Temple, with a spreading tree, a pool, a long-legged bird, and a mountain. And all these exquisitely tinted in their natural colours. It had come from China, and had belonged to my mother's brother, Andrew, who was an officer in the Navy and had died at sea. This I wrapped up in a square of silk and tied with a green thread. During the whole of his visit my head had been so hotly in chase of this one stratagem that it is a marvel Dr Phelps had not deciphered it in my pulse.
When Mrs Bowater brought in my Christmas dinner—little but bread sauce and a sprig of holly!—I dipped in the spoon, and, as innocently as I knew how, inquired if her daughter would like to see some really fine sewing.
The black eyes stood fast, then the ghost of a smile vanished over her features; "I'll be bound she would, miss. I'll give her your message." Alone again, I turned over on my pillow and laughed until tears all but came into my eyes.
All that afternoon I waited on, the coals of fire that I had prepared for my enemy's head the night before now ashes ofpenitence on my own. A dense smell of cooking pervaded the house; and it was not until the evening that Fanny Bowater appeared.
She was dressed in a white muslin gown with a wreath of pale green leaves in her hair. "I am going to a party," she said, "so I can't waste much time."
"Mrs Bowater thought you would like to see somereallybeautiful needlework," I replied suavely.
"Well," she said, "where is it?"
"Won't you come a little closer?"
That figure, as nearly like the silver slip of the new moon as ever I have seen, seemed to float in my direction. I held my breath and looked up into the light, dwelling eyes. "It is this," I whispered, drawing my two hands down the bosom of her crimson dressing-jacket. "It is only, Thank you, I wanted to say."
In a flash her lips broke into a low clear laughter. "Why,that'snothing. Really and truly I hate that kind of work; but mother often wrote of you; there was nothing better to do; and the smallness of the thing amused me."
I nodded humbly. "Yes, yes," I muttered, "Midget is as Midget wears. I know that. And—and here, Miss Bowater, is a little Christmas present from me."
Voraciously I watched her smooth face as she untied the thread. "A little ivory box!" she exclaimed, pushing back the lid, "and a Buddhist temple, how very pretty. Thank you."
"Yes, Miss Bowater, and, do you see, in the corner there? a moon. 'She enchants' you."
"So it is," she laughed, closing the box. "I was supposing," she went on solemnly, "that I had been put in the corner in positively everlasting disgrace."
"Please don't say that," I entreated. "Wemaybe friends, mayn't we? I am better now."
Her eyes wandered over my bed, my wardrobe, and all my possessions. "But yes," she said, "of course"; and laughed again.
"And you believe me?"
"Believe you?"
"That it was the stars? I thought Mrs Bowater might be anxious if she knew. It was quite, quite safe, really; and I'mgoingto tell her."
"Oh, dear," she replied in a cold, small voice, "so you are still worrying about that. I—I envied you." With a glance over her shoulder, she leaned closer. "Next time you go," she breathed out to me, "we'll go together."
My heart gave a furious leap; my lips closed tight. "I could tell you the names of some of the stars now," I said, in a last wrestle with conscience.
"No, no," said Fanny Bowater, "it isn't the stars I'm after. The first fine night we'll go to the woods. You shall wait for me till everything is quiet. It will be good practise inpracticalastronomy." She watched my face, and began silently laughing as if she were reading my thoughts. "That's a bargain, then. What is life, Miss M., but experience? And what is experience, but knowing thyself? And what's knowing thyself but the very apex of wisdom? Anyhow it's a good deal more interesting than the Prince of Denmark."
"Yes", I agreed. "And there's still all but a full moon."
"Aha!" said she. "Butwhata world with only one! Jupiter has scores, hasn't he? Just think ofhisLove Lanes!" She rose to her feet with a sigh of boredom, and smoothed out her skirts with her long, narrow hands. I stared at her beauty in amazement.
"I hate these parties here," she said. "They are not worth while."
"You look lov—you look all right."
"H'm; but what's that when there's no one to see."
"But you see yourself. Youlivein it."
The reflected face in the glass, which, craning forward, I could just distinguish, knitted its placid brows. "Why, if that were enough, we should all be hermits. I rather think, you know, that God made man almost solely in the hope of his two-legged appreciation. But perhaps you disapprove of incense?"
"Why should I, Miss Bowater? My Aunt Kitilda was a Catholic: and so was my mother's family right back."
"That'sright," said Miss Bowater. She kissed her hand to looking-glass and four-poster, flung me a last fervid smile, and was gone. And the little box I had given her lay on the table, beside my bed.
I was aroused much later by the sound of voices drawingnearer. Instinctively I sat up, my senses fastened on the sound like a vampire. The voices seemed to be in argument, then the footsteps ceased and clear on the night air came the words:—
"But you made me promisenotto write. Oh, Fanny, and you have broken your own!"
"Then you must confess," was the cautious reply, "that I am consistent. As for the promises, you are quite, quite welcome to the pieces."
"You mean that?" was the muffled retort.
"That," cried the other softly, "depends entirely on what you mean by 'mean.' Please look happy! You'd soon grow old and uglier if there was only that scrap of moon to light your face."
"Oh, Fanny. Will you never be serious?"—the misery in the words seemed to creep about in my own mind for shelter. They were answered by a sparkling gush of laughter, followed by a crisp, emphatic knock at the door. Fanny had returned from her party, and the eavesdropper buried her face in her pillow. So she enjoyed hurting people. And yet....