Vulgar, vulgar f.a.n.n.y!

"Fare thee well, Midgetina. 'One cried, "G.o.d bless us," and "Amen,"

the other.' Prost.i.tuted though he may have been for scholastic purposes, W. S. knew something of Life.

"Yours,--F."

What was the alluring and horrifying charm for me of f.a.n.n.y's letters?

This one set my mind, as always, wandering off into a maze. There was a sour taste in it, and yet--it was all really and truly f.a.n.n.y. I could see her unhappy eyes glittering through the mask. She saw _herself_--perhaps more plainly than one should. "Vulgar f.a.n.n.y." As for its effect on me; it was as if I had fallen into a bed of nettles, and she herself, picking me up, had scoffed, "Poor little Midgekin," and supplied the dock. Her cynicism was its own antidote, I suppose. The selfishness, the vanity, and impenetrable hardness--even love had never been so blind as to ignore all that, and now what love remained for her had the sharpest of sharp eyes.

And yet, though my little Bowater parlour looked cheap and dingy after the splendours of No. 2, f.a.n.n.y somehow survived every odious comparison.

She was very _intelligent_, I whispered to myself. Mrs Monnerie would certainly approve of that. And I p.r.i.c.kled at the thought. And I--I was too "concentrated." In spite of my plumping "figure," I could never, never be full-size. If only f.a.n.n.y had meant that as a compliment, or even as a kind of explanation to go on with. No, she had meant it for the truth. And it must be far easier for a leopard to change his spots than his inside. The accusation set all the machinery of my mind emptily whirring.

My glance fell on my Paris frock, left in a shimmering slovenly ring on the floor. It wandered off to f.a.n.n.y's postal order, spread over my lap like an expensive antimaca.s.sar. She had worked for that money; while I had never been anything more useful than "an angel." In fancy I saw her blooming in a house as sumptuous as Mrs Monnerie's. Bloom indeed! I hated the thought, yet realized, too, that it was safer--even if for the time being not so profitable--to be life-size. And, as if out of the listening air, a cold dart pierced me through. Suppose my Messrs Harris and Harris and Harris might not be such honest trustees as Miss Fenne had vouched for. Suppose they decamped with my 110 per annum!--I caught a horrifying glimpse of the wolf that was always sniffing at f.a.n.n.y's door.

Mrs Bowater brought in my luncheon, and--as I insisted--her own, too.

The ice from Mr Tidy, the fishmonger's, had given a slightly marine flavour to the cream, and I had to keep my face averted as much as possible from the scorched red chop sprawling and oozing on her plate.

How could she bring herself to eat it? We are such stuff as dreams are made on, said Hamlet. So then was Mrs Bowater. What a mystery then was this mutton fat! But chop or no chop, it was a happy meal.

Having waved my extremely "f.a.n.n.yish" letter at her, I rapidly dammed that current of her thoughts by explaining that I had changed my clothes not (as a gleam from her eye had seemed to suspect) because I was afraid of spoiling my London finery, but in order to be really at home. For the first time I surprised her muttering a grace over the bone on her plate.

Then she removed the tray, accepted a strawberry, folded her hands in her lap, and we began to talk. She asked a hundred and one questions concerning my health and happiness, but never once mentioned Mrs Monnerie; and at last, after a small pause, filled by us both with the same thought, she remarked that "that young Mr Anon was nothing if not persistent."

Since I had gone, not a week had pa.s.sed, she told me, but he had come rapping at the door after dusk to inquire after me. "Though why he should scowl like a pitchpot to hear that you are enjoying the lap of luxury----" The angular shoulders achieved a shrug at least as Parisian as my discarded gown.

"Why doesn't he write to me, then? Twice in ten weeks!"

"Well it's _six_, miss, I've counted, though _seemingly_ sixty. But that being the question, he is there to answer it, at any time this evening, or at six to-morrow morning, if London ways haven't cured you of early-rising."

So we went off together, Mrs Bowater and I, in the cool of the evening about half an hour after sunset--she, alas, a little ruffled because I had refused to change back again into my Monnerie finery. "But Mrs Bowater, imagine such a thing in a real wild garden!" I protested, but without mollifying her, and without further explaining--how could I do that?--that the gown which Miss Sentimentality (or Miss Coquette) was actually wearing was that in which she had first met Mr Anon.

Chapter Thirty-Six

I trod close in Mrs Bowater's track as she convoyed me through a sea of greenery breaking here and there to my waist and even above my hat.

Summer had been busy in Wanderslore. Honeysuckle and acid-sweet brier were in bloom; sleeping bindweed and pimpernel. The air was liquidly sweet with uncountable odours. And the fading skies dyed bright the frowning front of the house, about which the new-come swifts shrieked in their play over my wilderness. Mr Anon looked peculiar, standing alone there.

Having bidden him a gracious good-evening, Mrs Bowater after a long, ruminating glance at us, decided that she would "take a stroll through the grounds." We watched her black figure trail slowly away up the overgrown terraces towards the house. Then he turned. His clear, dwelling eyes, with that darker line encircling the grey-black iris, fixed themselves on me, his mouth tight-shut.

"Well," he said at last, almost wearily. "It has been a long waiting."

I was unprepared for this sighing. "It has indeed," I replied. "But it is exceedingly pleasant to see Beechwood Hill again. I wrote; but you did not answer my letter, at least not the last."

My voice dropped away; every one of the fine little speeches I had thought to make, forgotten.

"And now you are here."

"Yes," I said quickly, a little timid of any silence between us, "and that's pleasant too. You can have no notion what a stiff, glaring garden it is up there--geraniums and gravel, you know, and windows, windows, windows. They are wonderfully kind to me--but I don't much love it."

"Then why stay?" he smiled. "Still, you are, at least, safely out of _her_ clutches."

"Clutches!" I hated the way we were talking. "Thank you very much. You forget you are speaking of one of my friends. Besides, I can take care of myself." He made no answer.

"You are so gloomy," I continued. "So--oh, I don't know--about everything. It's because you are always cooped up in one place, I suppose. One must take the world--a little--as it is, you know. Why don't you go away; travel; _see_ things? Oh, if I were a man."

His eyes watched my lips. Everything seemed to have turned sour. To have waited and dreamed; to have actually changed my clothes and come scuttling out in a silly longing excitement--for this. Why, I felt more lonely and helpless under Wanderslore's evening sky than ever I had been in my cedar-wood privacy in No. 2.

"I mean it, I mean it," I broke out suddenly. "You domineer over me. You pamper me up with silly stories--'trailing clouds of glory,' I suppose.

They are not true. It's every one for himself in this world, I can tell you; and in future, please understand, I intend to be my own mistress.

Simply because in a little private difficulty I asked you to help me----"

He turned irresolutely. "They have dipped you pretty deep in the dye-pot."

"And what, may I ask, do you mean by that?"

"I mean," and he faced me, "that I am precisely what your friend, Miss Bowater, called me. What more is there to say?"

"And pray, am I responsible for everything my friends say? And to have dragged up _that_ wretched fiasco after we had talked it out to the very dregs! Oh, how I have been longing and longing to come home. And this is what you make of it."

He turned his face towards the west, and its vast light irradiated his sharp-boned features, the sloping forehead beneath the straight, black hair. Fume as I might, resentment fainted away in me.

"You don't seem to understand," I went on; "it's the waste--the waste of it all. Why do you make it so that I can't talk naturally to you, as friends talk? If I am alone in the world, so are you. Surely we can tell the truth to one another. I am utterly wretched."

"There is only one truth that matters: you do not love me. Why should you? But that's the barrier. And the charm of it is that not only the G.o.ds, but the miserable Humans, if only they knew it, would enjoy the sport."

"Love! I detest the very sound of the word. What has it ever meant to me, I should like to know, in this--this cage?"

"Scarcely a streak of gilding on the bars," he sneered miserably. "Still we are sharing the same language now."

The same language. Self-pitying tears p.r.i.c.ked into my eyes; I turned my head away. And in the silence, stealthily, out of a dark woody hollow nearer the house, as if at an incantation, broke a low, sinister, protracted rattle, like the croaking of a toad. I knew that sound; it came straight out of Lyndsey--called me back.

"S-sh!" I whispered, caught up with delight. "A nightjar! Listen. Let's go and look."

I held out my hand. His sent a shiver down my spine. It was clammy cold, as if he had just come out of the sea. Thrusting our way between the denser clumps of weeds, we pushed on cautiously until we actually stood under the creature's enormous oak. So elusive and deceitful was the throbbing croon of sound that it was impossible to detect on which naked branch in the black leafiness the bird sat churring. The wafted fragrances, the placid dusky air, and far, far above, the delicate, shallowing deepening of the faint-starred blue--how I longed to sip but one drop of drowsy mandragora and forget this fretting, inconstant self.

We stood, listening; and an old story I had read somewhere floated back into memory. "Once, did you ever hear it?" I whispered close to him, "there was a ghost came to a house near Cirencester. I read of it in a book. And when it was asked, 'Are you a good spirit or a bad?' it made no answer, but vanished, the book said--I remember the very words--'with a curious perfume and most melodious tw.a.n.g.' With a curious perfume," I repeated, "and most melodious tw.a.n.g. There now, would you like _me_ to go like that? Oh, if I were a moth, I would flit in there and ask that old Death-thing to catch me. Even if _I_ cannot love you, you are part of all this. You feed my very self. Mayn't that be enough?"

His grip tightened round my fingers; the entrancing, toneless dulcimer thrummed on.

I leaned nearer, as if to raise the shadowed lids above the brooding eyes. "What can I give you--only to be your peace? I do a.s.sure you it is yours. But I haven't the secret of knowing what half the world means.

Look at me. Is it not _all_ a mystery? Oh, I know it, even though they jeer and laugh at me. I beseech you be merciful, and keep me what I am."

So I pleaded and argued, scarcely heeding the words I said. Yet I realize now that it was only my mind that wrestled with him there. It was what came after that took the heart out of me. There came a clap of wings, and the bird swooped out of its secrecy into the air above us, a moment showed his white-splashed, cinder-coloured feathers in the dusk, seemed to tumble as if broken-winged upon the air, squawked, and was gone. The interruption only hastened me on.

"Still, still listen," I implored: "if Time would but cease a while and let me breathe."

"There, there," he muttered. "I was unkind. A filthy jealousy."