"Believe me,

"Yours sincerely,

"LYDIA PRESTON POLLACKE."

I searched my memory for memorial of Lord B.; alas, in vain. This lapse made the thought of meeting his younger daughter a little alarming. Yet I must confess to having been pleasantly flattered by these attentions.

Even the black draught administered by f.a.n.n.y, who had not even thought it worth her while to send me a word of excuse or explanation, lost much of its bitterness. I asked Mrs Bowater if she supposed I might make Sir Walter a little present in return for his. Would it be a proper thing to do, would it be _lady_like?

"What's meant kindly," she a.s.sured me, after a moment's reflection, "even if taken amiss, which, to judge from his letter, it won't be, is nothing to be thought of but only _felt_."

This advice decided me, and early on my Friday morning I trimmed and freshened up as well as I could one of my grandfather's dwarf cedar-trees which, in the old days, had stood on my window balcony. Its branches were now a little dishevelled, but it was still a fresh and pretty thing in its grey-green pot.

Chapter Twenty-Four

With this dwarf tree in my arms, when came the auspicious afternoon, I followed Lady Pollacke's parlourmaid--her neat little bonnet tied with a bow under her ear--down my Bateses, and was lifted by Mrs Bowater into the carriage. How demure a greeting we exchanged when, the maid and I having seated ourselves together under its hood, my glance fell upon the bloodstone brooch pinned conspicuously for the occasion near the topmost b.u.t.ton of her trim, outdoor jacket. It gave me so much confidence that even the sudden clatter of conversation that gushed out over me in the doorway of Lady Pollacke's drawing-room failed to be disconcerting. The long, flowery room was thronged with company, and everybody was talking to everybody else. On my entry, as if a seraph had spoken, the busy tongues sank instantly to a hush. I stood stilettoed by a score of eyes.

But Sir Walter had been keeping good watch for me, and I at once delivered my great pot into his pink, outstretched hands.

"My dear, dear young lady," he cried, stooping plumply over me, "the pleasure you give me! A little masterpiece: and real old Nankin. Alas, my poor Hypnos!"

"But it is me, _me_," I cried. "If I could only tell you!"

A murmur of admiration rippled across the room, in which I distinctly heard a quavering, nasal voice exclaim, "Touching, touching!"

The words--as if a pleasant sheep had bleated--came, I fancied, from a rather less fashionable lady with a lorgnette, who was sitting almost alone on the outskirts of the room, and who I afterwards discovered was only a widowed sister of Lady Pollacke's. But I could spare her but one startled glance, for, at the same moment, I was being presented to the younger daughter of Lord B. Mrs Monnerie sat amply reclining in an immense gilded chair--a lady with a large and surprising countenance.

Lady Pollacke's "_younger_" had misled my fancy. Far from being the slim, fair, sylphlike thing of my expectations, Mrs Monnerie cannot have been many years the junior of my G.o.dmother, Miss Fenne.

Her skin had fallen into the queerest folds and puckers. Her black swimming eye under a thick eyebrow gazed down her fine, drooping nose at me with a dwelling expression at once indulgent, engrossed, and amused.

With a gracious sweep of her hand she drew aside her voluminous silk skirts so that I could at once install myself by her side in a small, cane-seated chair that had once, I should fancy, accommodated a baby Pollacke, and had been brought down from the nursery for this occasion.

Thus, then, I found myself--the exquisitely self-conscious centre of attention--striving to nibble a biscuit, nurse my child-size handleless tea-cup, and respond to her advances at one and the same time.

Lady Pollacke hung like a cloud at sunset over us both, her cheek flushed with the effort to be amused at every sentence which Mrs Monnerie uttered and to share it as far as possible with the rest of her guests.

"A little pale, eh?" mused Mrs Monnerie, brooding at me with her great eye. "She wants sea-air; sea-air--just to _tinge_ that rose-leaf porcelain. I must arrange it."

I a.s.sured her that I was in the best of health.

"Not at all," she replied. "All young people boast of their health. When I was your age every thought of illness was as black as a visitation of the devil. _That's_ the door where we must lay all such evils, isn't it, Mr Pellew?"

A lean, tall, birdlike figure, the hair on his head still showing traces of auburn, disengaged itself from a knot of charmed spectators.

"Ah," he said. "But I doubt, now," he continued, with a little deprecating wave of his tea-cup at me, "if Miss M. can remember me. When we first met we were precisely one week old, precisely one week old."

Why, like Dr Phelps, Mr Pellew referred to me as _we_ I had not time to consider, for he was already confiding to Mrs Monnerie that he had never baptized an infant who more strenuously objected to Holy Water than had I. I looked at his long, fair eyelashes and the smile-line on his cheek as he bent with a sort of jocular urbanity over her chair, but could not recall his younger face, though during my christening I must, of course, have gazed at him even more absorbedly.

"'Remember' you--I'll be bound she did," cried Mrs Monnerie with enthusiasm, "or was it the bachelor thumb? The mercy is you didn't drop her into the font. Can you swim, my dear?"

"I couldn't at a week," I replied as archly as possible. "But I _can_ swim; my father taught me."

"But how wonderful!" broke our listeners into chorus.

"There we are, then," a.s.serted Mrs Monnerie; "sea-bathing! And are _we_ a swimmer, Mr Pellew?"

Mr Pellew seemed not to have caught her question. He was a.s.suring me that Miss Fenne had kept him well informed--well informed of all my doings. He trusted I was comfortable with the excellent Mrs Bowater, and hoped that some day I should be able to pay a visit to his rectory in Devonshire. "Mrs Pellew, he knew...." What he knew about Mrs Pellew, however, was never divulged, for Mrs Monnerie swallowed him up:--

"Devonshire, my dear Mr Pellew! no, indeed. Penthouse lanes, redhot fields, staring cows. Imagine it! She would be dried up like a leaf.

What she wants is a mild but bracing sea-air. It shall be arranged. And who is this Mrs Bowater?"

At this precise moment, among the strange faces far above me, I descried that of Mr Crimble, modestly peering out of the background. He coughed, and in a voice I should scarcely have recognized as his, informed Mrs Monnerie that my landlady was "a most res--an admirable woman." He paused, coughed again, swept my soul with his glance--"I a.s.sure you, Mrs Monnerie, in view of--of all the circ.u.mstances, one couldn't be in better hands. Indeed the house is on the crest of the hill, well out of the town, yet not a quarter of an hour's walk from my mother's."

"Hah!" remarked Mrs Monnerie, with an inflection that I am sure need not have brought a warmth to my cheek, or a duskier pallor to Mr Crimble's.

"You have perhaps heard the tragic story of Wanderslore," persisted Mr Crimble; "Miss M.'s--er--lodgings are immediately adjacent to the park."

"Hah!" repeated Mrs Monnerie, even more emphatically. "Mrs Bowater, eh?

Well, I must see for myself. And I'm told, Miss M.," she swept down at me, "that you have a beautiful gift for recitation." She looked round, patted her lap imperiously, and cried, "Come, now, who's to break the ice?"

In _fact_, no doubt, Mrs Monnerie was not so arbitrary a mistress of Lady Pollacke's little ceremony as this account of it may suggest. But that is how she impressed me at the time. She the sun, and I the least--but I hope not the least grateful--of her obsequious planets.

Lady Pollacke at any rate set immediately to breaking the ice. She prevailed upon a Miss Templemaine to sing. And we all sat mute.

I liked Miss Templemaine's appearance--brown hair, straight nose, dark eyelashes, pretty fringe beneath her peak-brimmed hat. But I was a little distressed by her song, which, so far as I could gather, was about two persons with more or less broken hearts who were compelled to part and said, "Ah" for a long time. Only physically distressed, however, for though I seemed to be shaken in its strains like a linnet in the wind, its adieux were protracted enough to enable me to examine the rest of the company at my leisure. Their eyes, I found, were far more politely engaged the while in gazing composedly down at the carpet or up at the ceiling. And when I did happen to intercept a gliding glance in my direction, it was almost as if with a tiny explosion that it collided with mine and broke away.

Mrs Monnerie's eyelids, on the other hand, with a faintly fluttering motion, remained closed from the first bar to the last--a method of appreciation I experimented with for a moment but quickly abandoned; while at the first clash of the keys, Sir Walter had dexterously contrived to slide himself out of the room by the door at which he had unexpectedly entered it on my first visit. Such was the social situation when, after murmurs of grat.i.tude and applause, Miss Templemaine took up her gloves and rose from the piano, and Mrs Monnerie reopened herself to the outer world with the e.j.a.c.u.l.a.t.i.o.n, "That's right. _Now_, my dear!"

The summons was to me. My moment had come, but I was prepared for it. In my last ordeal I had broken down because I had chosen a poem that was a kind of secret thing in my mind. So, after receiving Lady Pollacke's letter, I had hunted about for a recitation as short, but less personal: one, I mean, whose sentiments I didn't mind. And since Mrs Bullace had chosen two of Mrs Browning's pieces for her triumph on New Year's Eve, I argued that she knew the parish taste, and that I could do no better.

Of course, too, composure over what I was going to do was far more important than the composition.

"Prepared for it," I said just now, but I meant it only in the sense that one prepares for a cold bath. There was still the plunge. I clasped my hands, stood up. Ceiling and floor gently rocked a little. There seemed to be faces--faces everywhere, and every eye in them was fixed on me. Thus completely encompa.s.sed, I could find no refuge from them, for unfortunately my Hypnos was completely obliterated from view by the lady with the lorgnette. So I fixed my attention, instead, on the window, where showed a blank break of clear, fair, blue sky between the rain-clouds of afternoon. A nervous cough from Lady Pollacke plunged me over, and I announced my t.i.tle: "The Weakest Thing," by Elizabeth Barrett Browning:--

"Which is the weakest thing of all Mine heart can ponder?

The sun, a little cloud can pall With darkness yonder!

The cloud, a little wind can move Where'er it listeth; The wind, a little leaf above, Though sere, resisteth!

What time that yellow leaf was green, My days were gladder: Now on its branch each summer-sheen May find me sadder!

Ah, me! a _leaf_ with sighs can wring My lips asunder-- Then is my heart the weakest thing Itself can ponder.

Yet, Heart, when sun and cloud are pined And drop together; And at a blast which is not wind, The forests wither, Thou, from the darkening, deathly curse To glory breakest,-- The Strongest of the Universe Guarding the weakest."

The applause, in which Miss Templemaine generously joined, was this time quite unconcealed, and Lady Pollacke's sister's last "Touching" had hardly died away when Mrs Monnerie added _her_ approbation.

"Charming, perfectly charming," she murmured, eyeing me like a turtle-dove. "But tell me, my dear, why that particular poem? It seemed to have even less sense than usual."