Perhaps I did not explain this clearly; nor did I say how charming I thought my double was.

"I am tired--of overwork. I have finished _Wuthering Heights_. It is a mad, untrue book. The world is not like Emily Bronte's conception of it. It is neither dream nor nightmare, Midgetina, but wide, wide awake. And I am convinced that the poets are only cherubs with sugar-sticks to their little rosebud mouths. I abominate whitewash. As for 'putting people out of their misery,'

and cannibal beech-trees: no, fretful midge! If you could see me sitting here looking down on rows and rows of vacant and hostile faces--though one or two are infatuated enough--you would realize that such a practice would lead me into miscellaneous infanticide.

"Personally, I never did think into things too painfully; though as regards 'telling,' the reverse is _certainly_ the wiser course. So you will forgive so short, and perhaps none too sweet, a letter from your affec.--F."

Enclosed with this was a narrow slip of paper:--

"I shall _not_ write to you know who. Think, if you like, but don't _feel_ like a microscope. He is only in love. And however punctilious your own practice may be, pray, Miss M., do not preach--at any rate to your affecte. but unregenerate friend.--F."

I believe I drafted and destroyed three answers to this letter. It broke down my defences far more easily than had the errand boys. It shamed me for a prig, a false friend, a sentimentalist. And the "fretful midge"

rankled like salt in a wounded heart. Yet f.a.n.n.y was faithless even to her postscript. A sheaf of narcissuses hooded in blue tissue paper was left at the house a day or two afterwards. It was accompanied by Mr Crimble's card in a little envelope tied in with the stalks:--

"I am given a ray of hope."

Mrs Bowater had laid this offering on my table with a peculiar grimace, whether scornful or humorous, it was impossible to detect. "From Mr Crimble, miss. Why, one might think he had two irons in the fire!"

I sat gazing at this thank-offering long after she had gone--the waxy wings, the crimson-rimmed corona, the pale-green cl.u.s.ter of pistil and stamen. The heavy perfume stole over my senses, bringing only weariness and self-distaste to my mind. Fly that I was, caught in a web--once more I began a letter to f.a.n.n.y, imploring her to write to her mother, to tell her everything. But that letter, too, was torn up into tiny pieces and burnt in the fire.

Next morning, heavily laden with my parasol, a biscuit or two in my bag, my _Sense and Sensibility_ and a rug in my arms, I set off very early for Wanderslore, having arranged with Mrs Bowater over night that she should meet me under my beech at a quarter to one.

Under the flat, bud-pointed branches, I pressed on between cl.u.s.ters of primrose, celandine, and wild wood anemone, breathing in the earthy freshness of gra.s.s and moss. And presently I came out between the stones and jutting roots in sight of the vacant windows. I stood for a moment confronting their black regard, then descended the knoll and was soon making myself comfortable beside the garden house. But first I managed to clamber up on a fragment of the fallen masonry and peep in at its low windows. A few dead, last-year's flies lay dry on their backs; dusty, derelict spider-webs; a litter of straw, and a few potsherds--the place was empty. But it was mine, and the very remembrance of which it whispered to me--the picture of my poor father's bedroom that night of the storm--only increased my sense of possession.

What was wrong with me just then, what I had sallied out in hope to be delivered from, was the unhappy conviction that my life was worthless, and I of no use in the world. I had taught myself to make knots in strings, but actual experience seemed to have proved that most human fumblings resulted only in "grannies" and not in the true lover's variety. They secured nothing, only tangled and jammed. I was young then, and yet as heavily burdened with other people's responsibilities as was poor Christian with the bundle of his sins. But my bundle, too, in that lovely, desolate loneliness at last fell off my shoulders.

Could I not still be loyal in heart and mind to f.a.n.n.y, even though now I knew how little she cared whether I was loyal or not? I even climbed up behind Mr Crimble's thick spectacles and looked down again at myself from that point of vantage. Whether or not I was his affair, I could try to make him mine--perhaps even persuade f.a.n.n.y to love him.

Oh, dear; was not every singing bird in that wilderness, every unfolding flower and sunlit March leaf welcoming the spirit within me to their quiet habitation? As if in response to this nave thought, welled up in my memory the two last stanzas of my _Tom o' Bedlam_, which, either for pride or shame, had stuck in my throat on the skin mat in Lady Pollacke's sky-lit drawing-room:----

"With a heart of furious fancies, Whereof I am commander: With a burning spear, And a horse of air, To the wilderness I wander.

With a knight of ghosts and shadows, I summoned am to tourney: Ten leagues beyond The wide world's end; Methinks it is no journey."

Parasol for spear, the youngest Miss Shanks's pony for horse of air, there was I (even though common-sized boots might reckon it a mere mile or so), ten leagues at least beyond--Mrs Bowater's. Nor, like her husband, had I broken my leg; nor had f.a.n.n.y broken my heart. All would come right again. Why, what a waste of f.a.n.n.y it would be to make her Mrs Crimble. My bishop, according to Miss Fenne, had had quite a homely helpmate, "little short of a frump, Caroline, as I remember her thirty years ago." Perhaps if I left off my fine colours and bought a nice brown stuff dress and a bonnet, might not Mr Crimble change his mind...?

I have noticed that as soon as I begin to laugh at myself, the whole world seems to smile in return.

Absurd, contrary, volatile creature that I was--a kind of thankfulness spread over my mind. I turned on to my knees where I sat and repeated the prayers which in my haste to be off I had neglected before coming out. And thus kneeling, I opened my eyes on the garden again, bathed delicately in the eastern sunshine. There was my old friend, Mr Clodd's _Nature_, pranking herself under the nimble fingers of spring; and in her sight as well as in the sight of my G.o.dmother's G.o.d, and Mr Crimble's Almighty, and, possibly, of Dr Phelps's Norm, were not, in deed and in truth, all men equal? How mysterious and how entrancing! If "sight," then _eyes_: but whose? where? I gazed round me dazzledly, and if wings had been mine, would have darted through the thin, blue-green veil and been out into the morning.

Poor she-knight! romantical Miss Midge! she had no desire to hunt Big Game, or turn steeplejack; her fancies were not dangerously "furious"; but, as she knelt there, environed about by that untended garden, and not so ridiculously pygmy either, even in the ladder of the world's proportion--saw-edged blade of gra.s.s, gold-cupped moss, starry stonecrop, green musky moschatel, close-packed pebble, wax-winged fly--well, I know not how to complete the sentence except by remarking that I am exceedingly glad I began to write my Life.

I realized too that it is less flattering to compare oneself with the very little things of the world than with the great. Given time, I might scale an Alp; I could only _kill_ an ant. Besides, I am beginning to think that one of the pleasantest ways of living is in one's memory. How much less afflicting at times would my present have been if I had had the foresight to remind myself how beguiling it would appear as the past. Even my old sharpest sorrows have now hushed themselves to sleep, and those for whom I have sorrowed are as quiet.

Having come to a pause in my reflections, I opened my _Sense and Sensibility_ at Chapter x.x.xV. Yet attend to Miss Austen I could not. She is one of those compact and cautious writers that will not feed a wandering mind; and at last, after three times re-reading the same paragraph, an uneasy conviction began to steal over me. There was no doubt now in my mind. I was being watched. Softly, stealthily, I raised my eyes from my book and with not the least motion of head or body, glanced around me. Whereupon, as if it had been playing sentinel out of the thicket near at hand, a blackbird suddenly jangled its challenge, and with warning cries fled away on its wings towards the house.

Chapter Twenty-Two

Then instantly I discovered the cause of the bird's alarm. At first I fancied that this strange figure was at some little distance. Then I realized that his stature had misled me, and that he could not be more than twenty or thirty yards away. Standing there, with fixed, white face and black hair, under a flowering blackthorn, he remained as motionless and as intent as I. He was not more than a few inches, apparently, superior in height to myself.

"So," I seemed to whisper, as gaze met gaze, "there!" hardly certain the while if he was real or an illusion. Indeed, if, even then before my eyes, he had faded out into the tangle of thorn, twig, and thin-spun blossom above and around him, it would not have greatly astonished, though it would have deeply disappointed me. With a peculiar, trembling curiosity, I held him with my gaze. If he would not disclose himself, then must I.

Slowly and deliberately my cold hand crept out and grasped my parasol.

Without for a moment removing my eyes from this interloper's face, I pushed its ribbed silk tent taut into the air. Click! went the tiny spring; and at that he stirred.

"Who are you: watching me?" I cried in a low, steady voice across the s.p.a.ce that divided us. His head stooped a little. I fancied--and feared--that he was about to withdraw. But after a pause he drew himself up and came nearer, casting, as he approached, his crooked shadow away from the sun on the close-cropped turf beside him.

To this day I sometimes strive in vain to see, quite clearly in my mind, that face, as it appeared at that first meeting. A different memory of it obtrudes itself; yet how many, many times have I searched his features for news of himself, and looked pa.s.singly--and once with final intensity--into those living eyes. But I recollect that his clothes looked slightly out of keeping and grotesque amid the green things of early spring. It seemed he had wasted in them. So, too, the cheek had wasted over its bone, and seemed parched; the thin lips, the ears slightly pointed. And then broke out his low, hollow voice. Scarcely rising or falling, the mere sound of it seemed to be as full of meaning as the words.

He looked at me, and at all I possessed, as if piece by piece--as if he had been a long time searching for them all. Yet he now seemed to avoid my eyes, though they were serenely awaiting his. Indeed from this moment almost to the last, I was never at a loss or distressed in his company.

He never called me out of myself beyond an easy and happy return, though he was to creep into my imagination as easily as a single bee creeps into the thousand-celled darkness of its hive.

Whenever I parted from him, his remembrance was like that of one of those strange figures which thrust themselves as if out of the sleep-world into the mind's wakefulness; vividly, darkly, impress themselves upon consciousness, and then are gone. So I sometimes wonder if I ever really knew him, if he was ever perfectly real to me; like f.a.n.n.y, for instance. Yet he made no pretence to be mysterious, and we were soon talking together almost as naturally as if we were playmates of childhood who had met again after a long separation.

He confessed that, quite unknown to me, he had watched me come and go in the cold mornings of winter, when frost had soon driven me home again out of the bare, frozen woods. He had even been present, I think, when f.a.n.n.y and I had shared--or divided--the stars between us. A faint distaste at any rate showed itself on his face when he admitted that he had seen me not alone. I was unaccustomed to that kind of interest, and hardly knew whether to be pleased or angry.

"But you know I come here to be alone," I said as courteously as possible.

"Yes," he answered, with face turned away. "That's how I saw you."

Without my being aware of it, too, he played a kind of chess with me, seizing each answer in turn for hook on which to hang another question.

What had I to conceal? Of my short history, though not of myself, I told him freely; yet asked him few questions in return. Nor at that time did I even consider how strange a chance had brought two such human beings as he and I to this place of meeting. Yet, after all, whales are but little creatures by comparison with the ocean in which they roam, and glow-worm will keep tryst with glow-worm in forests black as night.

Through all he said was woven a thread of secrecy. So low and monotonous was his voice (not lifting itself much, but only increasing in resonance when any thought angered or darkened his mind); so few were his gestures that he might have been talking in his sleep. Not once that long morning did he laugh, not even when I mischievously proffered him my parasol (as he sat a few paces away) to screen him from the March sun! Solemnly he shared Mrs Bowater's biscuits with me, scattering the crumbs to a robin that hopped up between us, as if he had been invited to our breakfast.

His head hung so low between his heavy shoulders that it reminded me of a flower stooping for want of water. Not that there was anything limp or fragile or gentle in his looks. He was, far rather, clumsy and ugly in appearance, yet with a grace in his look like that of an old, haggled thorn-tree when the wind moves its branches. And anyhow, he was come to be my friend--out of the unknown. And when I looked around at the serene wild loveliness of the garden, it seemed to be no less happy a place because it was no longer quite a solitude.

"You read," he said, glancing reflectively, but none too complimentarily, at my book.

"It isn't wise to think too much." I replied solemnly, shutting Miss Austen up. "Besides, as I haven't the opportunity of seeing many people in the flesh, you know, the next best thing is to meet them in books--specially in this kind of book. If only I were Jane Austen; my gracious, I would enjoy myself! Her people are just the same as people are now--inside. I doubt if leopards really want to change their spots.

But of course"--I added, since he did not seem inclined to express any opinion--"I read other kinds of books as well. That's the best of being a dunce--there's so much to learn! Just lately I have been learning to tie knots."

I laughed, and discovered that I was blushing.

He raised his eyes slowly to my face, then looked so long and earnestly at my hands, that I was forced to hide them away under my bag. Long before I had noticed that his own hands were rather large and powerful for his size. f.a.n.n.y's face I had loved to watch for its fairness and beauty--it would have been as lovely if she had not been within. To watch Mrs Bowater's was like spelling out bits of a peculiar language. I often found out what she was feeling or thinking by imitating her expression, and then translating it, after she was gone. This young man's kept me engrossed because of the self that brooded in it--its dark melancholy, too; and because even then, perhaps, I may have remotely and vaguely realized that flesh and spirit could not be long of one company.

He himself was, as it were, a foreigner to me, and I felt I must make the best and most of him before he went off again.

Perhaps memory reads into this experience more than in those green salad days I actually found there. But of this at least I am certain--that the morning sped on unheeded in his company, and I was even unconscious of how cold I was until he suddenly glanced anxiously into my face and told me so. So now we wandered off together towards the great house--which hitherto I had left unapproached. We climbed the green-stained scaling steps from terrace to terrace, tufted with wallflower and snapdragon amongst the weeds, cushioned with bright moss, fretted with lichen.

Standing there, side by side with him, looking up--our two figures alone, on the wide flowerless weed-grown terrace--hale, sour weeds some of them, shoulder-high--I scrutinized the dark, shut windows.