"No-o; ye-es," breathed Lady Pollacke, and many heads nodded in discreet accord.

"Doesn't--er--perhaps, Mrs Browning dwell rather a.s.siduously on the tragic side of life?" Mr Crimble ventured to inquire.

Lady Pollacke jerked her head, either in the affirmative or in the negative, and looked inquiringly at Mrs Monnerie, who merely drooped her eyes a little closer towards me and smiled, almost as if she and I were in a little plot together.

"What do _you_ say, Miss M.?"

"Well, Mrs Monnerie," I replied a little nervously, for all eyes were turned on me, "I don't think I know myself what _exactly_ the poem means--the who's and what's--and what the blast was which was not wind.

But I thought it was a poem which every one would understand as much as _possible_ of."

To judge from the way she quivered in her chair, though quite inaudibly, Mrs Monnerie was extremely amused at this criticism.

"And that is why you chose it?"

"Well, yes," said I, "you see, when one is listening to poetry, not reading it to oneself, I mean, one hasn't time to pry about for all its bits of meaning, but only just to get the general--general--"

"Aroma?" suggested Mrs Monnerie.

"Yes--aroma."

"And the moral?"

The silence that hung over this little exchange was growing more and more dense. Luckless Miss M.! She only plunged herself deeper into it by her reply that, "Oh, there's nothing very much in the moral, Mrs Monnerie. That's quite ordinary. At least I read about that in _prose_, why, before I was seven!"

"Touch--" began that further voice, but was silenced by a testy lift of Mrs Monnerie's eyelid. "Indeed!" she said, "and couldn't you, wouldn't you, now, give me the prose version? That's more my mark."

"It was in a little nursery lesson-book of mine, called _The Observing Eye_; letters about snails and coral insects and spiders and things----"

I paused. "A book, rather, you know, for Sundays. But my--my family and I----"

"Oh, but do," cried Lady Pollacke in a voice I should hardly have recognized, "I _adore_ snails."

Once more I was cornered. So I steeled myself anew, and stumbled through the brief pa.s.sage in the squat, blue book. It tells how,--

"The history of each one of the animals we have now considered, teaches us that our kind G.o.d watches over the wants and the pleasures of the meanest of His creatures. We see that He gives to them, not only the sagacity and the instruments which they need for catching their food, but that He also provides them with some means of defending themselves. We learn by their history that the gracious Eye watches under the mighty waters, as well as over the earth, and that no creature can stop doing His will without His eye seeing it."

Chapter Twenty-Five

Once more I sat down, but this time in the midst of what seemed to me a rather unpleasant silence, as if the room had grown colder: a silence which was broken only by the distant whistlings of a thrush. At one and the same moment both Mr Pellew and Mr Crimble returned to tea-cups which I should have supposed must have, by this time, been empty, and Lady Pollacke's widowed sister folded up her lorgnette.

"My dear Miss M.," said Mrs Monnerie dryly, with an almost wicked ray of amus.e.m.e.nt in her deep-set eyes, "wherever the top of Beechwood Hill may be, and whatever supplies of food may be caught on its crest, there is no doubt that _you_ have been provided with the means of defending yourself. But tell me now, what do you think, perhaps, Mr _Pellew's_ little 'instruments' are? Or, better still--mine? Am I a mollusc with a hard sh.e.l.l, or a scorpion with a sting?"

Lady Pollacke rose to her feet and stood looking down on me like a hen, though not exactly a motherly one. But this was a serious question over which I must not be fl.u.s.tered, so I took my time. I folded my hands, and fixed a long, long look on Mrs Monnerie. Even after all these years, I confess it moves me to recall it.

"Of course, really and truly," I said at last, as deferentially as I could, "I haven't known you long enough to say. But I should think, Mrs Monnerie, you always knew the truth."

I was glad I had not been too impetuous. My reply evidently pleased her.

She chuckled all over.

"Ah," she said reposefully, "the truth. And that is why, I suppose, like Sleeping Beauty, I am so thickly hedged in with the thorns and briers of affection. Well, well, there's one little truth we'll share alone, you and I." She raised herself in her chair and stooped her great face close to my ear: "We must know more of one another, my dear," she whispered.

"I have taken a great fancy to you. We must meet again." She hoisted herself up. Sir Walter Pollacke had hastened in and stood smiling, with arm hooked, and genial, beaming countenance in front of her. Mr Crimble had already vanished. Mr Pellew was talking earnestly with Lady Pollacke. Conversation broke out, like a storm-shower, on every side.

For a while I was extraordinarily alone.

Into this derelict moment a fair-cheeked, breathless lady descended, and surrept.i.tiously thrusting a crimson padded birthday book and a miniature pencil into my lap, entreated my autograph--"Just your signature, you know--for my small daughter. How she would have _loved_ to be here!"

This lady cannot have been many years older than I, and one of those instantaneous, fleeting affections sprang up in me as I looked up at her for the first and only time, and seemed to see that small daughter smiling at me out of her face.

Alas, such is vanity. I turned over the leaves to August 30th and found printed there, for motto, a pa.s.sage from Shakespeare:--

"He that has had a little tiny wit,-- With hey, ho, the wind and the rain,-- Must make content with his fortunes fit, For the rain it raineth every day."

The 29th was little less depressing, from Samuel Taylor Coleridge:--

"He prayeth best who loveth best All creatures great and small."

This would never do. I bent double over the volume, turned back hastily three or four leaves, and scrawled in my name under August 25th on a leaf that bore the quotation:--

"Fie on't; ah, fie! 'tis an unweeded garden, That grows to seed; things rank and gross in nature Possess it merely. That it should come to this!"

and beneath the quotation, the signature of Josephine Mildred Spratte.

"Thank you, _thank_ you, she will be overjoyed," blushed the fair-haired lady. A sudden hunger for solitude seized upon me. I rose hastily, conscious for the first time of a headache, caused, no doubt, by the expensive and fumey perfumes in the air. Threading my way between the trains and flounces and trouser-legs around me, at last my adieux were over. I was in the porch--in the carriage. The breezes of heaven were on my cheek. My blessed parlourmaid was once more installed beside me. Yet even now the Pollacke faces were still flocking in my mind. The outside world was very sluggishly welling in. Looking up so long had stiffened my neck. I fixed my eyes on the crested back b.u.t.tons of Lady Pollacke's stiff-looking coachman, and committed myself to my thoughts.

It was to a Miss M., with one of her own handkerchiefs laid over her brows, and sprinkled with vinegar and lavender water, that Mrs Bowater brought in supper that evening. We had one of our broken talks together, none the less. But she persisted in desultory accounts of f.a.n.n.y's ailments in her infancy; and I had to drag in Brunswick House by myself.

At which she poked the fire and was mum. It was unamiable of her. I longed to share my little difficulties and triumphs. Surely she was showing rather too much of that discrimination which Lady Pollacke had recommended.

She snorted at Mr Pellew, she snorted at my friendly parlourmaid and even at Mrs Monnerie. Even when I repeated for her ear alone my nursery pa.s.sage from _The Observing Eye_, her only comment was that to judge from _some_ fine folk she knew of, there was no doubt at all that G.o.d watched closely over the pleasures of the meanest of His creatures, but as for their doing His will, she hadn't much noticed it.

To my sigh of regret that f.a.n.n.y had not been at home to accompany me, she retorted with yet another onslaught on the fire, and the apophthegm, that the world would be a far better place if people kept themselves _to_ themselves.

"But Mrs Bowater," I argued fretfully, "if I did that, I should just--distil, as you might say, quite away. Besides, f.a.n.n.y would have been far, far the--the gracefullest person there. Mrs Monnerie would have taken a fancy to _her_, now, if you like."

Mrs Bowater drew in her lips and rubbed her nose. "G.o.d forbid," she said.

But it was her indifference to the impression that I myself had made on Mrs Monnerie that nettled me the most. "Why, then, who _is_ Lord B.?" I inquired impatiently at last, pushing back the bandage that had fallen over my eyes.

"From what I've heard of Lord B.," said Mrs Bowater shortly, "he was a gentleman of whom the less heard of's the better."

"But surely," I protested, "that isn't Mrs Monnerie's fault any more than f.a.n.n.y's being so lovely--I mean, than I being a midget was my father's fault? Anyhow," I hurried on, "Mrs Monnerie says I look pale, and must go to the sea."