Lyme Regis
XXIX
Out of a cab from a livery stable Mrs. Bowater and I alighted at our London terminus next morning, to find positively awaiting us beside the wooden platform a first-class railway carriage—a palatial apartment. Swept and garnished, padded and varnished—a miracle of wealth! At this very moment I seem to be looking up in awe at the orange-rimmed (I think it was orange) label stuck on the glass whose inscription I afterwards spelled out backwards from within: “Mrs. Bywater and Party.” As soon as we and our luggage were safely settled, an extremely polite and fatherly guard locked the door on us. At this Mrs. Bowater was a little troubled by the thought of how we should fare in the event of an accident. But he reassured her.
“Never fear, ma’am: accidents are strictly forbidden on this line. Besides which,” he added, with a solemn, turtle-like stare, “if I turn the key on the young lady, none of them young a-ogling Don Jooans can force their way in. Strict orders, ma’am.”
To make assurance doubly sure, Mrs. Bowater pulled down the blinds at every stopping-place. We admired the scenery. We read the warning against pickpockets, and I translated it out of the French. After examining the enormous hotels depicted in the advertisements, we agreed there was nothing like home comforts. Mrs. Bowater continued to lose and find in turn our tickets, her purse, her spectacle-case, her cambric pocket-handkerchief, not to mention a mysterious little screw of paper, containing lozenges I think. She scrutinized our luxury with grim determination. And we giggled like two schoolgirls as we peeped together through the crevices of the blinded windows at the rich, furry passengers who ever and again hurried along, casting angry glances at our shrouded windows.
It being so early in the year—but how mild and sweet a day—there were few occupants of the coach at Axminster. As I had once made a (frequently broken) vow to do at once what scared me, I asked to be perched up on the box beside the lean, brick-faced driver. Thus giddily exalted above his three cantering roan horses, we bowled merrily along. With his whip he pointed out to me every “object of interest” as it went floating by—church and inn, farm and mansion.
“Them’s peewits,” he would bawl. “And that’s the selfsame cottage where lived the little old ’ooman what lived in a shoe.” He stooped over me, reins in fist, with his seamed red face and fiery little eye, as if I were a small child home for the holidays. Evening sunlight on the hilltops and shadowy in the valleys. And presently the three stepping horses—vapour jetting from their nostrils, their sides panting like bellows—dragged the coach up a hill steeper than ever. “And that there,” said the driver, as we surmounted the crest—and as if for emphasis he gave a prodigious tug at an iron bar beside him, “that there’s the Sea.”
The Sea. Flat, bow-shaped, hazed, remote, and of a blue stilling my eyes as with a dream—I verily believe the saltest tears I ever shed in my life smarted on my lids as the spirit in me fled away, to be alone with that far loveliness. A desire almost beyond endurance devoured me. “Yes,” cried hidden self to self, “I can never, never love him; but he shall take me away—away—away. Oh, how I have wasted my days, sick for home.”
But small opportunity was given me for these sentimental reflections. Nearly at the foot of even another hill, and one so precipitous that during its rattling descent I had to cling like a spider to the driver’s strap, we came to a standstill; and in face of a gaping knot of strangers I was lifted down—with a “There! Miss Nantuckety,” from the driver—from my perch to the pavement.
The lodgings Mrs. Monnerie had taken for us proved to be the sea rooms in a small, white, bow-windowed house on the front, commanding the fishing-boats, the harbour, and the stone Cobb. I tasted my lips, snuffed softly with my nose, stole a look over the Bay, and glanced at Mrs. Bowater. Was she, too, half-demented with this peculiar and ravishing experience? I began to shiver; but not with cold, with delight. Face creased up in a smile (the wind had stiffened the skin), cheeks tingling, and ravenously hungry, I watched the ceremonious civilities that were passing between landlady and landlady: Mrs. Bowater angular and spare; Mrs. Petrie round, dumpy, smooth, and a little bald. My friend Mrs. Monnerie was evidently a lady whose lightest word was Sesame. Every delicacy and luxury that Lyme out of its natural resources can have squandered on King George III was ours without the asking.
Mrs. Bowater, it is true, at our sea-fish breakfast next morning, referred in the first place to the smell of drains; next to fleas; and last to greasy cooking. But who should have the privilege of calling the Kettle black unless the Pot? Moreover, we were “first-class” visitors, and had to complain of something. I say “we”; but since, in the first place, all the human houses that I have ever entered have been less sweet to the nose than mere country out-of-doors; since next (as I discovered when I was a child) there must be some ichor or acid in my body unpleasing to man’s parasites; and since, last, I cannot bear cooked animals; these little inconveniences, even if they had not existed solely in Mrs. Bowater’s fancy, would not have troubled me.
The days melted away. We would sally out early, while yet many of Lyme’s kitchen chimneys were smokeless, and would return with the shadows of evening. How Mrs. Bowater managed to sustain so large a frame for so many hours together on a few hard biscuits and a bottle of cold tea, I cannot discover. Her mood, like our weather that April, was almost always “set fair,” and her temper never above a comfortable sixty degrees. We hired a goat-chaise, and with my flaxen hair down my back under a sunbonnet, I drove Reuben up and down the Esplanade—both of us passable ten-year-olds to a careless observer. My cheeks and hands were scorched by the sun; Mrs. Bowater added more and more lilac and white to her outdoor attire; and Mrs. Petrie lent her a striped, and once handsome parasol with a stork’s head for handle, which had been left behind by a visitor—otherwise unendeared.
On warm mornings we would choose some secluded spot on the beach, or on the fragrant, green-turfed cliffs, or in the Uplyme meadows. Though I could never persuade Mrs. Bowater to join me, I sometimes dabbled in the sun in some ice-cold, shallow, seaweedy pool between the rocks. Then, while she read the newspaper, or crocheted, I also, over book or needle, indulged in endless reverie. For hours together, with eyes fixed on the glass-green, tumbling water, I would listen to its enormous, far, phantom bells and voices, happier than words can tell. And I would lie at full length, basking in the heat, for it was a hot May, almost wishing that the huge furnace of the sun would melt me away into a little bit of glass: and what colour would that have been, I wonder? If a small heart can fall in love with the whole world, that heart was mine. But the very intensity of this greed and delight—and the tiniest shell or pebble on the beach seemed to be all but exploding with it—was a severe test of my strength.
One late twilight, I remember, as we idled homeward, the planet Venus floating like a luminous water-drop in the primrose of the western sky, we passed by a low white-walled house beneath trees. And from an open window came into the quiet the music of a fiddle. What secret decoy was in that air I cannot say. I stopped dead, looking about me as if for refuge, and drinking in the while the gliding, lamenting sounds.
Curiously perturbed, I caught at Mrs. Bowater’s skirt. Sky and darkening headland seemed to be spinning around me—melting out into a dream. “Oh, Mrs. Bowater,” I whispered, as if I were drowning, “it is strange for us to be here.”
She dropped herself on the grass beside me, brushing with her dress the scent of wild thyme into the dewy air, and caught my hands in hers. Her long face close to mine, she gently shook me; “Now, now; now, now!” she called. “Come back, my pretty one. See! It’s me, me, Mrs. Bowater. … The love she’s been to me!”
I smiled, groped with my hand, opened my eyes in the dimness to answer her. But a black cloud came over them; and the next thing I recall is waking to find myself being carried along in her arms, cold and half lifeless; and she actually breaking ever and again into a shambling run, as she searched my face in what seemed, even to my scarcely conscious brain, an extravagant anxiety.
Four days afterwards—and I completely restored—we found on the breakfast table of our quiet sea-room an unusually bountiful post: a broad, impressive-looking letter and a newspaper for Mrs. Bowater, and a parcel, from Fanny, for me. Time and distance had divided me from the past more than I had supposed. The very sight of her handwriting gave me a qualm. “Fanny! Oh, my Heavens,” cried a voice in me, “what’s wrong now?”
But removing the brown paper I found only a book, and it being near to my size as books go, I opened it with profound relief. My joy was premature. The book Fanny had sent me was by Bishop Jeremy Taylor, Holy Living and Dying: With Prayers Containing the Whole Duty of a Christian. I read over and over this title with a creeping misgiving and dismay, and almost in the same instant, detected, lightly fastened between its flyleaves, and above its inscription—“To Midgetina: In Memoriam”—an inch or two of paper, pencilled over in Fanny’s minutest characters.
A slow, furtive glance discovered Mrs. Bowater far too deeply absorbed to have noticed my small movements. She was sitting bolt upright, her forehead drawn crooked in an unusual frown. An open letter lay beside her plate. She was staring into, rather than at, her newspaper. With infinite stealth I slipped Fanny’s scrap of paper under the tablecloth, folded it small, and pushed it into my skirt pocket. “A present from Fanny,” I cried in a clear voice at last.
But Mrs. Bowater, with drooping, pallid face, and gaze now fixed deep on a glass-case containing three stuffed, aquatic birds, had not heard me. I waited, watching her. She folded the newspaper and removed her spectacles. “On our return,” she began inconsequently, “the honourable Mrs. Monnerie has invited you to stay in her London house—not for a week or two; for good. That’s all as it should be, I suppose, seeing that pay’s pay and mine is no other call on you.”
The automatic voice ceased with a gasp. Her thoughts appeared to be astray. She pushed her knotted fingers up her cheeks almost to her eyes.
“It’s said,” she added with long, straight mouth, “that that unfortunate young man, Mr. Crimble—is ill.” She gave a glance at me without appearing to see me, and left the room.
What was amiss? Oh, this world! I sat trembling in empty dread, listening to her heavy, muffled footfall in the room above. The newspaper, with a scrawling cross on its margin, lay beside Mrs. Monnerie’s large, rough-edged envelope. I could bear the suspense no longer. On hands and knees I craned soundlessly forward over the white tablecloth, across the rank dish of coagulating bacon fat, and stole one or two of the last few lines of grey-black print at the foot of the column: “The reverend gentleman leaves a widowed mother. He was an only son, and was in his twenty-ninth year.”
“Leaves”; “was”—the dingy letters blurred my sight. Footsteps were approaching. I huddled back to my carpet stool on the chair. Mrs. Petrie had come to clear away the breakfast things. Stonily I listened while she cheerfully informed me that the glass was still rising, that she didn’t recollect such weather not for the month for ten years or more. “You must be what I’ve heard called an ’alcyon, miss.” She nodded her congratulations at me, and squinnied at the untasted bacon.
“I am going for a breath of air, Mrs. Petrie,” came Mrs. Bowater’s voice through the crack of the door. “Will you kindly be ready for your walk, miss, in half an hour?”
Left once more to myself, I heard the “alarm” clock on the mantelpiece ticking as if every beat were being forced out of its works, and might be its last. An early fly or two—my strange, familiar friends—darted soundlessly beneath the ceiling. The sea was shimmering like an immense looking-glass. More pungent than I had ever remembered it, the refreshing smell of seaweed eddied in at the open window.
With dry mouth and a heart that jerked my body with its beatings, I unfolded Fanny’s scrap of paper:—
“Wise M.—I have thrown the stone. And now I am fey for my own poor head. Could you—and—will you absolutely secretly send me any money you can spare? £15 if possible. I’m in a hole—full fathom five—but mean to get out of it. I ask you, rather than mother, because I remember you said once you were putting money by out of that young lady’s independence of yours. Notes would be best: if not, a Post Office Order to this address, somehow. I must trust to luck, and to your wonderful enterprise, if you would be truly a dear. It’s only until my next salary. If you can’t—or won’t—help me, damnation is over my head: but I bequeathe you a kiss all honey and roses none the less, and am, pro tem., your desperate F.
“P.S.—Be sure not to give M. this address: and in a week or two we shall all be laughing and weeping together over the prodigal daughter.”
Fanny, then, had not heard our morning news. I read her scribble again and again for the least inkling of it, my thoughts in disorder. That sprawling cross on the newspaper; this gibbering and dancing as of a skeleton before my eyes; and “the stone,” “the stone.” What did it mean? The word echoed on in my head as if it had been shouted in a vault. I was deadly frightened and sick, stood up as if to escape, and found only my own distorted face in Mrs. Petrie’s flower-and-butterfly-painted chimney glass.
“You, you!” my eyes cried out on me. And a furious storm—remorse, grief, horror-broke within. I knew the whole awful truth. Like a Shade in the bright light, Mr. Crimble stood there beyond the table, not looking at me, its face turned away. Unspeakable misery bowed my shoulders, chilled my skin.
“But you said ‘ill,’ ” I whispered angrily up at last at Mrs. Bowater’s bonneted figure in the doorway. “I have looked where the cross is. He is dead!”
She closed the door with both hands and seated herself on a chair beside it.
“I’ve trapsed that Front, miss—striving to pick up the ends. It doesn’t bear thinking of: that poor, misguided young man. It’s hid away. …”
“What did he die of, Mrs. Bowater?” I demanded.
She caught at the newspaper, folded it close, nodded, shook her head. “Four nights ago,” she said. And still, some one last shred of devotion—not of fidelity, not of fear, for I longed to pour out my heart to her—sealed my lips. Holy Living and Dying: Holy Living and Dying: I read over and over the faded gilt letters on the cover of Fanny’s gift, and she in her mockery, desperate, too. “Damnation”—the word echoed on in my brain.
But poor Mrs. Bowater was awaiting no confession from me. She had out-trapsed her strength. When next I looked round at her, the bonneted head lay back against the rose-garlanded wallpaper, the mouth ajar, the eyelids fluttering. It was my turn now—to implore her to “come back”: and failing to do so, I managed at last to clamber up and tug at the bellpull.
XXX
I surveyed with horror the recumbent, angular figure stretched out on the long, narrow, horsehair sofa. The shut eyes—it was selfish to leave me like this.
“There, miss, don’t take on,” Mrs. Petrie was saying. “The poor thing’s coming round now. Slipping dead off out of things—many’s the time I’ve wished I could—even though you have come down for a bit of pleasuring.”
But it was Lyme Regis’s solemn, round-shouldered doctor who reassured me. At first sight of him I knew Mrs. Bowater was not going to die. He looked down on her, politely protesting that she must not attempt to get up. “This unseasonable heat, perhaps. The heart, of course, not so strong as it might be.” He ordered her complete rest in bed for a few days—light nourishment, no worry, and he would look in again. Me he had not detected under the serge window-curtain, though he cast an uneasy glance around him, I fancied, on leaving the room.
After remaining alone under the still, sunshiny window until I could endure it no longer, I climbed up the steep, narrow stairs to Mrs. Bowater’s bedroom, and sat a while clasping the hand that hung down from the bed. The blind gently ballooned in the breeze. Raying lights circled across the ceiling, as carriage and cart glided by on the esplanade. Fearful lest even my fingertips should betray me to the flat shape beneath the counterpane, I tried hard to think. My mind was in a whirl of fears and forebodings; but there was but one thing, supremely urgent, facing me now. I must forget my own miseries, and somehow contrive to send Fanny the money she needed.
Somehow; but how? The poor little hoard which I had saved from my quarterly allowances lay locked up on Beechwood Hill in my box beneath my bed. By what conceivable means could I regain possession of it, unknown to Mrs. Bowater?
Conscience muttered harsh words in my ear as I sat there holding that cold, limp hand with mine, while these inward schemings shuttled softly to and fro.
When my patient had fallen asleep, I got downstairs again—a more resolute, if not a better woman. Removing latch and box keys from their ribbon round my neck, I enclosed them in an envelope with a letter:—
“Dear Mr. Anon—I want you, please, to help me. The large one of these two keys unlocks my little house door: the smaller one a box under my bed. Would you please let yourself in at Mrs. Bowater’s tomorrow evening when it’s dark—there will be nobody there—take out twenty pounds which you will find in the box, and send them to Miss Fanny Bowater, the Crown and Anchor Hotel, B⸺. I will thank you when I come.
It is curious. Many a false, pandering word had sprung to my tongue when I was concocting this letter in my mind beside Mrs. Bowater’s bed, and even with Mrs. Petrie’s stubby, ink-corroded pen in my hand. Yet some last shred of honesty compelled me to be brief and frigid. I was simply determined to be utterly open with him, even though I seemed to myself like the dark picture of a man in a bog struggling to grope his way out. I dipped my fingers into a vase of wallflowers, wetted the gum, sealed down the envelope, and wrote on it this address: Mr. ⸻, Lodging at a cottage near the Farm, Northwest of Wanderslore, Beechwood, Kent. And I prayed heaven for its safe delivery.
For Fanny no words would come—nothing but a mere bare promise that I would help her as soon as I could—an idiot’s message. The next three days were an almost insupportable solitude. From Mr. Anon no answer could be expected, since in my haste I had forgotten to give him Mrs. Petrie’s address. I brooded in horror of what the failure of my letter to reach him might entail. I shared Fanny’s damnation. Wherever I went, a silent Mr. Crimble dogged my footsteps. Meanwhile, Mrs. Bowater’s newspaper, I discovered, lay concealed beneath her pillow.
At length I could bear myself no longer, and standing beside her bed, asked if I might read it. Until that moment we had neither of us even referred to the subject. Propped up on her pillows, her long face looking a strange colour against their whiteness, she considered my request.
“Well, miss,” she said at last, “you know too much to know no more.”
I spread out the creased sheets on the worn carpet, and read slowly the smudged, matter-of-fact account from beginning to end. There were passages in it that imprinted themselves on my memory like a photograph. Mr. Crimble had taken the evening Service that last day looking “ill and worn, though never in what may be described as robust health, owing to his indefatigable devotion to his ecclesiastical and parochial duties.” The Service over, and the scanty congregation dispersed, he had sat alone in the vestry for so unusual a time that the verger of St. Peter’s, a Mr. Soames, anxious to get home to his supper, had at length looked in on him at the door, to ask if his services were required any further. Mr. Crimble had “raised his head as if startled,” and “had smiled in the negative,” and then, “closing the eastern door behind him,” had “hastened” out of the church. No other human eye had encountered him until he was found at 11:27 p.m. in an outhouse at the foot of his mother’s garden. “The head of the unfortunate gentleman was well-nigh severed from the body.” “He was an only son, and was in his twenty-ninth year. Universal sympathy will be extended by all to the aged lady who is prostrated by this tragic occurrence.”
Propped on my hands and knees, fearful that Mrs. Bowater might interrupt me before I was prepared, I stared fixedly at the newspaper. I understood all that it said, yet it was as strange to me as if it had been written in Hebrew. I had seen, I had known, Mr. Crimble. Who, then, was this? My throat drew together as I turned my head a little and managed to inquire, “What is an inquest, Mrs. Bowater?”
“Fretting out the why’s and wherefore’s,” came the response, muffled by a handkerchief pressed close to her mouth.
“And—this ‘why’?” I whispered, stooping low.
“That’s between him and his Maker,” said the voice. “The poor young man had set his heart on we know where. As we make our bed so we must lie on it, miss. It’s for nobody to judge: though it may be a lesson.”
“Oh, Mrs. Bowater, then you knew I knew.”
“No, no. Not your lesson, miss. I didn’t mean that. It’s not for you to fret yourself, though I must say—I have always made it a habit, though without prying, please God, to be aware of more than interference could set right. Fanny and I have talked the affair over till we couldn’t look in each other’s faces for fear of what we might say. But she’s Mr. Bowater’s child, through and through, and my firm hand was not firm enough, maybe. You did what you could. It’s not in human conscience to ask more than the natural frame can bear.”
Did what I could. … I cowered, staring at my knuckles, and it seemed that a little concourse of strangers, heads close together, were talking in my mind. My eyes were dry; I think the spectre of a smile had dragged up my lips. Mrs. Bowater raised herself in her bed, and peered over at me.
“It’s the letters,” she whispered at me. “If he hasn’t destroyed them, they’ll be read to the whole parish.”
I crouched lower. “You’ll be thankful to be rid of me. I shall be thankful to be rid of myself, Mrs. Bowater.”
She thrust a long, skinny arm clean out of the bed. “Come away, there; come away,” she cried.
“Oh,” I said, “take me away, take me away. I can’t bear it, Mrs. Bowater. I don’t want to be alive.”
“There, miss, rest now, and think no more.” She smoothed my hair, clucked a little low, whistling tune, as if for lullaby. “Why, there now,” she muttered sardonically, “you might almost suppose I had been a mother myself!”
There was silence between us for a while, then, quietly raising herself, she looked down at me on the pillow, and, finding me to be still awake, a long smile spread over her face: “Why, we don’t seem neither of us to be much good at daytime sleeping.”
XXXI
A morning or two afterwards we set out on our homeward journey—the sea curdling softly into foam on its stones, a solitary ship in the distance on its dim, blue horizon. We were a dejected pair of travellers, keeping each a solemn face turned aside at the window, thinking our thoughts, and avoiding, as far as we could, any interchange of looks that might betray them one to the other. For the first time in our friendship Mrs. Bowater was a little short and impatient with me over difficulties and inconveniences which I could not avoid, owing to my size.
Her key in the lock of the door, she looked down on me in the porch, a thin smile between nose and cheek. “No place like home there mayn’t be, miss,” she began, “but—” The dark passage was certainly uninviting; the clock had stopped. “I think I’ll be calling round for Henry,” she added abruptly.
I entered the stagnant room, ran up my stairs, my heart with me—and paused. Not merely my own ghost was there to meet me; but a past that seemed to mutter, Never again, never again, from every object on shelf and wall. Yet a faint, sweet, unfamiliar odour lay on the chilly air. I drew aside the curtain and looked in. Fading on the coverlet of my bed lay a few limp violets, ivory white and faintly rosy.
I was alone in the house, concealed now even from Mr. Bowater’s frigid stare. Yet at sight of these flowers a slight vertigo came over me, and I had to sit on my bed for a moment to recover myself.
Then I knelt down, my heart knocking against my side, and dragged from out its hiding-place the box in which I kept my money. Gritty with the undisturbed dust of our absence, it was locked. I drew back, my hand on my mouth. What could be the meaning of this? My stranger had come and gone. Had he been so stupidly punctilious that, having taken out the twenty pounds, he had relocked an almost empty box?
Or had he, at the last moment … ? This riddle distressed me so much that instantly I was seized with a violent headache. But nothing could be done for the present. I laid by the violets in a drawer, pushed back the box, and, making as good a pretence at eating my supper as I could, prepared for the night.
One by one the clocks in hall and kitchen struck out the hours, and, the wind being in the East, borne on it came the chimes of St. Peter’s. Automatically I counted the strokes, turning this way and that, as if my life depended on this foolish arithmetic, yet ready, like Job, to curse the day I was born. What had my existence been but a blind futility, my thought for others but a mask of egotism and selfishness? Yet, in all this turmoil of mind, I must have slept, for suddenly I found myself stiff, drawn-up, and wide awake—listening to a cautious, reiterated tapping against my windowpane. A tallow night-light burned beside me in a saucer of water. For the first time in my life—at least since childhood—I had been afraid to face the dark. Why, I know not; but I at once leapt out of bed and blew out that light. The night was moonless, but high and starry. I peered through the curtains, and a shrouded figure became visible in the garden—Fanny’s.
Curtain withdrawn, we looked each at each through the cold, dividing glass in the gloom—her eyes, in the night-spread pallor of her skin, as if congealed. The dark lips, with an exaggerated attempt at articulation, murmured words, but I could catch no meaning. The face looked almost idiotic in these contortions. I shuddered, shook my head violently. She drew back.
Terrified that she would be gone—in my dressing-gown and slippers I groped my way across the room and was soon, with my door open, in the night air. She had heard me, and with a beckon of her finger, turned as if to lead me on.
“No, no,” I signalled, “I have no key.” With a gesture, she drew close, stooped, and we talked there together, muttering in the porch.
“Midgetina,” she whispered, smiling bleakly, “it’s this wretched money. I must explain. I’m at my wit’s end—in awful trouble—without it.”
Huddled close, I wasted no time in asking questions. She must come in. But this she flatly refused to do. Yet money, money was her one cry: and that she must have before she saw her mother again. Not daring to tell her that I was in doubt whether or not my savings were still in my possession, I pushed her hand away as she knelt before me on the uppermost step. “I must fetch it,” I said.
By good fortune my money-box was not the weightiest of my grandfather’s French trunks—not the brassbound friend-in-need of my younger days, and it contained little but paper. I hoisted it on to my bed, and, as I had lately seen the porters do at the railway station, contrived to push under it and raise it on to my shoulder. Its edge drove in on my collarbone till I thought it must snap. Thus laden, I staggered cautiously down the staircase, pushed slowly across the room, and, so, out into the passage and towards the rounded and dusky oblong of the open door.
On the threshold Fanny met me, gasping under this burden, and at sight of me some blessed spirit within her seemed to give her pause. “No, no,” she muttered, and drew back as if suddenly ashamed of her errand. On I came, however, and prudence prevailed. With a sound that might have been sigh or sob she snatched the load from me and gathered it in, as best she could, under her cloak.
“Oh, Midgetina!” she whispered meaninglessly. “Now we must talk.” And having wedged back the catch of my door, we moved quickly and cautiously in the direction of Wanderslore.
We climbed on up the quiet hill. The cool, fragrant, night seemed to be luring us on and on, to swallow us up. Yet, there shone the customary stars; there, indeed, to my amazement, as if the heavenly clock of the universe had set back its hands on my behalf, straddled the constellation of Orion.
Come to our beech-tree, now a vast indistinguishable tent of whispering, silky leaves, Fanny seated herself upon a jutting root, and I stood panting before her.
“Well?” she said, with a light, desolate laugh.
“Oh, Fanny, ‘well’!” I cried.
“Can’t you trust me?”
“Trust you?”
“Oh, oh, mockingbird!—with all these riches?”
I cast a glance up into the leafy branches, and seated myself opposite to her.
“Fanny, Fanny. Have you heard?”
“ ‘Heard,’ she says!” It was her turn to play the parrot. “What am I here for, but to hear more? But never mind; that’s all over. Has mother—”
“ ‘All over,’ Fanny!” I interrupted her. “All over? But, the letters?”
“What letters?” She stared at me, and added, looking away, “Oh, mine?” She gave out the word with a long, inexhaustible sigh. “That was all right. He did not hide, he burned. … Neither to nor from; not even to his mother. Every paper destroyed. I envy her feelings! He just gave up, went out, Exit. I envy that, too.”
“Not even to you, Fanny? Not a word even to you?”
The figure before me crouched a little closer together. “They said,” was her evasive reply, “that there is melancholia in the family.”
I think the word frightened me even more than its meaning. “Melancholia,” I repeated the melodious syllables. “Oh, Fanny!”
“Listen, Midgetina,” her voice broke out coldly. “I can guess easily enough what’s saving up for me when I come home—which won’t be yet a while, I can assure you. I can guess, too, what your friends, Lady Pollacke and Co., are saying about me. Let them rave. That can’t be helped. I shall bear it, and try to grin. Maybe there would be worse still, if worse were known. But your worse I won’t have, not even from you. I was not his keeper. I did not play him false. I deny it. Could I prevent him—caring for me? Was he man enough to come openly? Did he say to his mother, ‘Take her or leave her, I mean to have her’—as I would have done? No, he blew hot and cold. He temporized; he—he was a coward. Oh, this everlasting dogfight between body and mind! Ages before you ever crept upon the scene he pestered and pestered me—until I have almost retched at the sound of church bells. What was it, I ask you, but sheer dread of what the man might go and do that kept me shilly-shallying? And what’s more, Miss Wren, who told me to throw the stone? Pff, it sickens me, this paltering world. I can’t and won’t see things but with my reason. My reason, I tell you. What else is a schoolma’am for? Did he want me for my sake? Who begged and begged that his beautiful love should be kept secret? There was once a philosopher called Plato, my dear. He poisoned Man’s soul.”
Flesh and spirit, Fanny 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, Fanny. 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, Fanny, 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?”
“Fanny,” 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 Fanny’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, Fanny, 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.”
“Fanny, Fanny,” 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 Fanny 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, Fanny, 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 Fanny’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 glass, 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 Fanny 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 Fanny 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 amusement. I leaned back my head where I sat, shrilly and dismally laughing and laughing, until tears sprang pricklingly into my eyes. If any listener had been abroad in the woods that night, he would, I think, have hastened his departure.
But Fanny 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, Fanny, 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 Fanny amiably, “I am not blaming your friend, Midgetina. He seemed to be perfectly competent.”
Yet even now I remained unsatisfied. If Fanny 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, Fanny?”
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 Fanny. She wound up a large stone in her silk scarf. A few heavy and muffled blows, the lock surrendered, and the starlight dripped in like milk from heaven upon my hoard.
“Why, Midgetina,” whispered Fanny, 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 space, 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 recounting 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, Fanny,” 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 newborn leaf, or falling of dead twig cast off from the parent tree. It was early yet for the nightingale.
“Only the wind,” said she.
“Only the wind,” I echoed scornfully, “or perhaps a weasel.”
She hurriedly divided my savings and thrust my share into my lap. I pushed it in under my arm.
“Good heavens, Midgetina!” she cried, aghast. “You are almost naked. How on earth was I to know?”
I clutched close my dressing-gown and stumbled to my feet, trying in vain to restrain my silly teeth from chattering. “Never mind about me, Fanny,” I muttered. “They don’t waste inquests on changelings.”
“My God!” was her vindictive comment, “how she harps on the word. As if I had nothing else to worry about.” With a contemptuous foot she pushed my empty box under cover of a low-growing yew. Seemingly Wanderslore was fated to entomb one by one all my discarded possessions.
Turning, she stifled a yawn with a sound very like a groan. “Then it’s au revoir, Midgetina. Give me five minutes’ start. … You know I am grateful?”
“Yes, Fanny,” I said obediently, smiling up into her face.
“Won’t you kiss me?” she said. “Tout comprendre, you know, c’est tout pardonner.”
“Why, Fanny,” I replied; “no, thank you. I prefer plain English.”
But scarcely a minute had separated us when I sprang up and pursued her a few paces into the shadows, into which she had disappeared. To forgive all—how piteously easy now that she was gone. She had tried to conceal it, brazen it out, but unutterable wretchedness had lurked in every fold of her cloak, in the accents of her voice, in every fatigued gesture. Her very eyes had shone the more lustrously in the starlight for the dark shadows around them. But understand her—I could not even guess what horrible secret trouble she had been concealing from me. And beyond that, too—a hideous, selfish dread—my guilty mind was haunted by the fear of what she might do in her extremity.
“Fanny, Fanny,” I called falsely into the silence. “Oh, come back! I love you; indeed I love you.”
How little blessed it is at times even to give. No answer came. I threw myself on the ground. And I strove with myself in the darkness, crushing out every thought as it floated into my mind, and sinking on and on into the depths of unconsciousness.
“Oh, my dear, my dear,” came the whisper of a tender, guttural voice in my ear. “You are deathly cold. Why do you grieve so? She is gone. Listen, listen. They have neither love nor pity. And I—I cannot live without you.”
I sat up, black with rage. My stranger’s face glimmered obscurely in the gloom.
“Oh, if you spy on me again!” I rasped at him, “ ‘live without me,’ what do I care?—you can go and—”
But, thank God, the die without me was never uttered. I haven’t that to haunt me. Some hidden strength that had been mine these few days melted away like water. “Not now; not now!” I entreated him. I hastened away.