"But surely," expostulated the wiseacre in me, "that's what we cannot help being. We even die alone, f.a.n.n.y."

"Oh, but I'm going to help it. I'm not dead yet. Do you ever think of the future?"

For an instant its great black hole yawned close, but I shook my head.

"Well, that," replied she, "is what f.a.n.n.y Bowater is doing all the time.

There's nothing," she added satirically, "so important, so imperative for teachers as learning. And you must learn your lesson, my dear, before you are heard it--if you want to escape a slapping. Every little donkey knows that."

"I suppose the truth is," said I, as if seized with a bright idea, "there are two kinds of ambitions, of wants, I mean. We are all like those Chinese boxes; and some of us want to live in the biggest, the outsidest we can possibly manage; and some in the inmost one of all. The one," I added a little drearily, "no one can share."

"Quite, quite true," said f.a.n.n.y, mimicking my sententiousness, "the teeniest, tiniest, ickiest one, which no mortal ingenuity has ever been able to open--and so discover the nothing inside. I know your Chinese Boxes!"

"Poor f.a.n.n.y," I cried, rising up and kneeling beside the ice-cold hand that lay on the frosty leaves. "All that I have shall help you."

Infatuated thing; I stooped low as I knelt, and stroked softly with my own the outstretched fingers on which she was leaning.

I might have been a pet animal for all the heed she paid to my caress.

"f.a.n.n.y," I whispered tragically, "will you please sing to me--if you are not frozenly cold? You remember--the Moon Song: I have never forgotten it; and only three notes, yet it sometimes wakes me at night. It's queer, isn't it, being you and me?"

She laughed, tilting her chin; and her voice began at once to sing, as if at the scarcely opened door of her throat, and a tune so plain it seemed but the words speaking:--

"Twas a Cuckoo, cried 'cuck-oo'

In the youth of the year; And the timid things nesting, Crouched, ruffled in fear; And the Cuckoo cried, 'cuck-oo,'

For the honest to hear.

One--two notes: a bell sound In the blue and the green; 'Cuck-oo: cuck-oo: cuck-oo!'

And a silence between.

Ay, mistress, have a care, lest Harsh love, he hie by, And for kindness a monster To nourish you try-- In your bosom to lie: 'Cuck-oo,' and a 'cuck-oo,'

And 'cuck-oo!'"

The sounds fell like beads into the quiet--as if a small child had come up out of her heart and gone down again; and she callous and unmoved. I cannot say why the clear, muted notes saddened and thrilled me so. Was _she_ the monster?

I had drawn back, and stayed eyeing her pale face, the high cheek, the delicate straight nose, the darkened lips, the slim black eyebrows, the light, clear, unfathomable eyes reflecting the solitude and the thin brilliance of the wood. Yet the secret of herself remained her own. She tried in vain not to be disturbed at my scrutiny.

"Well," she inquired at last, with motionless glance fixed on the distance. "Do you think you could honestly give me a testimonial, Miss Midget?"

It is strange. The Sphinx had spoken, yet without much enlightenment.

"Now look at me," I commanded. "If I went away, you couldn't follow.

When you go away, you cannot escape from me. I can go back and--and _be_ where I was." My own meaning was half-concealed from me; but a startled something that had not been there before peeped out of those eyes so close to mine.

"If," she said, "I could care like that too, yet wanted nothing, then I should be free too."

"What do you mean?" said I, lifting my hand from the unanswering fingers.

"I mean," she exclaimed, leaping to her feet, "that I'm sick to death of the stars and am going home to bed. Hateful, listening old woods!"

I turned sharp round, as if in apprehension that some secret hearer might have caught her remark. But f.a.n.n.y stretched out her arms, and, laughing a foolish tune, in affected abandonment began softly to dance in the crisp leaves, quite lost to me again. So twirling, she set off down the path by which she had come trespa.s.sing. A physical exhaustion came over me. I watched her no more, but stumbled along, with unheeding eyes, in her wake. What had I not given, I thought bitterly, and this my reward. Thus solitary, I had gone only a little distance, and had reached the outskirts of the woods, when a far from indifferent f.a.n.n.y came hastening back to intercept me.

And no wonder. She had remembered to attire herself becomingly for her moonlight tryst, but had forgotten the door key. We stood looking at one another aghast, as, from eternity, I suppose, have all fellow-conspirators in danger of discovery. It was I who first awoke to action. There was but one thing to be done, and, warning f.a.n.n.y that I had never before attempted to unlatch the big front door of her mother's house, I set off resolutely down the hill.

"You walk so slowly!" she said suddenly, turning back on me. "I will carry you."

Again we paused. I looked up at her with an inextricable medley of emotions struggling together in my mind, and shook my head.

"But why, why?" she repeated impatiently. "We could get there in half the time."

"If you could _fly_, f.a.n.n.y, I'd walk," I replied stubbornly.

"You mean----" and her cold anger distorted her face. "Oh, pride! What childish nonsense! And you said we were to be friends. Do you suppose I care whether...?" But the question remained unfinished.

"I _am_ your friend," said I, "and that is why I will not, I _will_ not give way to you." It was hardly friendship that gleamed out of the wide eyes then. But mine the victory--a victory in which only a t.i.the of the spoils, unrecognized by the vanquished, had fallen to the victor.

Without another word she turned on her heel, and for the rest of our dejected journey she might have been mistaken for a cross nurse trailing on pace for pace beside a rebellious child. My dignity was less ruffled than hers, however, and for a brief while I had earned my freedom.

Arrived at the house, dumbly hostile in the luminous night, f.a.n.n.y concealed herself as best she could behind the gate-post and kept watch on the windows. Far away in the stillness we heard a footfall echoing on the hill. "There is some one coming," she whispered, "you must hurry."

She might, I think, have serpented her way in by my own little door.

Where the _head_ leads, the heart may follow. But she did not suggest it. Nor did I.

I tugged and pushed as best I could, but the umbrella with which from a chair I at last managed to draw the upper bolt of the door was extremely c.u.mbersome. The latch for a while resisted my efforts. And the knowledge that f.a.n.n.y was fretting and fuming behind the gatepost hardly increased my skill. The house was sunken in quiet; Mrs Bowater apparently was sleeping without her usual accompaniment; only Henry shared my labours, and he sat moodily at the foot of the stairs, refusing to draw near until at the same moment f.a.n.n.y entered, and he leapt out.

Once safely within, and the door closed and bolted again, f.a.n.n.y stood for a few moments listening. Then with a sigh and a curious gesture she bent herself and kissed the black veil that concealed my fair hair.

"I am sorry, Midgetina," she whispered into its folds, "I was impatient.

Mother wouldn't have liked the astronomy, you know. That was all. And I am truly sorry for--for----"

"My dear," I replied in firm, elderly tones, whose echo is in my ear to this very day; "My dear, it was my mind you hurt, not my feelings." With that piece of sententiousness I scrambled blindly through my Bates's doorway, shut the door behind me, and more disturbed at heart than I can tell, soon sank into the thronging slumber of the guilty and the obsessed.

Chapter Fourteen

When my eyes opened next morning, a strange, still glare lay over the ceiling, and I looked out of my window on a world mantled and cold with snow. For a while I forgot the fever of the last few days in watching the birds hopping and twittering among the crumbs that Mrs Bowater scattered out on the windowsill for my pleasure. And yet--their every virtue, every grace, f.a.n.n.y Bowater, all were thine! The very snow, in my girlish fantasy, was the fairness beneath which the unknown Self in her must, as I fondly believed, lie slumbering; a beauty that hid also from me for a while the restless, self-centred mind. How believe that such beauty is any the less a gift to its possessor than its bespeckled breast and song to a thrush, its sheen to a starling? It is a riddle that still baffles me. If we are all shut up in our bodies as the poets and the Scriptures say we are, then how is it that many of the loveliest seem to be all but uninhabited, or to harbour such dingy tenants; while quite plain faces may throng with animated ghosts?

f.a.n.n.y did not come to share my delight in the snow that morning. And as I looked out on it, waiting on in vain, hope flagged, and a sadness stole over its beauty. Probably she had not given the fantastic lodger a thought. She slid through life, it seemed, as easily as a seal through water. But I was not the only friend who survived her caprices. In spite of her warning about the dish-washing, Mr Crimble came to see her that afternoon. She was out. With a little bundle of papers in his hand he paused at the gate-post to push his spectacles more firmly on to his nose and cast a kind of homeless look over the fields before turning his face towards St Peter's. Next day, Holy Innocents', he came again; but this time with more determination, for he asked to see me.

To rid myself, as far as possible, of one piece of duplicity, I at once took the bull by the horns, and in the presence of Mrs Bowater boldly invited him to stay to tea. With a flurried glance of the eye in her direction he accepted my invitation.

"A cold afternoon, Mrs Bowater," he intoned. "The cup that cheers, the cup that cheers."

My landlady left the conventions to take care of themselves; and presently he and I found ourselves positively _tete-a-tete_ over her seed cake and thin bread and b.u.t.ter.

But though we both set to work to make conversation, an absent intentness in his manner, a listening turn of his head, hinted that his thoughts were not wholly with me.