"But think! There may never come another hour like this. Know, know now, that you have made me happy. I can never be so alone again. I share my secretest thoughts--my imagination, with you; isn't that a kind of love?

I a.s.sure you that it is. Once I heard my mother talking, and sometimes I have wondered myself, if I am quite like--oh, you know what they say: a freak of Nature. Tell me; if by some enchantment I were really and indeed come from those snow mountains of yours, and that sea, would you recognize me? Would you? No, no; it's only a story--why, even all this green and loveliness is only skin deep. If the Old World were just to shrug its shoulders, Mr Anon, we should all, big and little, be clean gone."

My words seemed merely to be like drops of water dripping upon a sponge.

"Wake!" I tugged at his hand. "Look!" Kneeling down sidelong, I stooped my cheek up at him from a cool, green mat of gra.s.s, amid which a glow-worm burned: "Is this a--a _Stranger's_ face?"

He came no nearer; surveyed me with a long, quiet smile of infinitely sorrowful indulgence. "A Stranger's? How else could it be, if I love you?"

Intoxicated in that earthy fragrance, washed about with the colours of the motionless flowers, it seemed I was merely talking to some one who could a.s.sure me that I was still in life, still myself. A strand of my hair had fallen loose, and smiling, its gold pin between my lips, I looped it back. "Oh, but you see--haven't I told you?--I can't love you.

Perhaps; I don't know.... What shall I do? What shall I say? Now suppose," I went on, "I like myself _that_ much," and I held my thumb and finger just ajar, "then I like _you_, think of you, hope for you, why, that!"--and I swept my hand clean across the empty zenith. "_Now_ do you understand?"

"Oh, my dear, my dear," he said, and smiled into my eyes.

I laughed out in triumph at the success of my device. And he laughed too, as if in a conspiracy with me--and with Misery, I could see, sitting like an old hag at the door from which the sound came. And out of the distance the nightjar set again to its churring.

"Then I have made you a little--a little less unhappy?" I asked him, and hid my face in my hands in a desolate peace and solitude.

He knelt beside me, held out his hand as if to touch me, withdrew it again. All presence of him distanced and vanished away in that small darkness. I prayed not to think any more, not to be exiled again into--how can I explain my meaning except by saying--Myself? Would some further world have withdrawn its veils and have let me in then and for ever if that lightless quiet could have continued a little longer? Is it the experience of every human being seemingly to trespa.s.s at times so close upon the confines of existence as that?

It was his own harsh voice that broke the spell.

"Wake, wake!" it called in my ear. "The woman is looking for you. We must go."

My hands slipped from my face. A slow, sobbing breath drew itself into my body. And there beneath evening's vacancy of twilight showed the transfigured scene of the garden, and, near me, the anxious, suffering face of this stranger, faintly greened by the light of the worm.

"Wake!" he bade me, rapping softly with his bony finger on my hand. I stared at him out of a dream.

Chapter Thirty-Seven

Time and circ.u.mstance have strangely divided me from the Miss M. of those days. I look back on her, not with shame, but with a shrug of my shoulders, a sort of incredulous tolerance--almost as if she too were a stranger. Perhaps a few years hence I shall be looking back with an equal detachment on the Miss M. seated here at this moment with her books and her pen in the solitude of her thoughts, vainly endeavouring to fret out and spin together mere memories that n.o.body will ever have the patience to read. Shall I then be able to tell myself what I want now, give words to the vague desires that still haunt me? Shall I still be waiting on for some unconceived eventuality?

There is, too, another small riddle of a different kind, which I cannot answer. In memory and imagination, as I steadily gaze out of this familiar room recalling the past, I am that very self in that distant garden of Wanderslore. But even as I look, I am not only _within_ myself there, but also outside of myself. I seem, I mean, actually to be contemplating, as if with my own eyes, those two queer, silent figures returning through the drowsying, moth-haunted flowers and gra.s.ses to the black, vigilant woman awaiting them beside the garden house. "Alas, you poor, blind thing," I seem, like a ghost, to warn the one small creature, "have a care; seize your happiness; it is vanishing!"

All that I write, then, is an attempt only to tell, not to explain. I realize that sometimes I was pretending things, yet did not know that I was pretending; that often I acted with no more conscience or consciousness, maybe, than has a carrion crow that picks out the eyes of a lamb, or a flower that draws in its petals at noon. Yet I know--know absolutely, that I was, and am, responsible not only for myself, but for everything. For my whole world. And I cannot explain this either. At times, as if to free myself, I had to stare at what appalled me. I am sure, for instance, that Mrs Monnerie never dreamed that her mention of Mr Crimble sent me off in fancy at the first opportunity to that woeful outhouse in his mother's garden to look in on him there--again. But I did so look at him, and was a little more at peace with him after that.

Why, then, cannot I be at peace with one who loved me?

Maybe if I could have foreseen how I was to come to Wanderslore again, I should have been a less selfish, showy, and capricious companion to him that June evening. But I was soon lapped back into my life in London; and thought only of Mr Anon, as I am apt to think of G.o.d: namely, when I needed his presence and his help. As a matter of fact, I had small time to think. Even the doubts and misgivings that occasionally woke me in the night melted like dreams in the morning. Every morrow blotted out its yesterday--as faded flowers are flung away out of a vase.

In that vortex of visits and visitors, that endless vista of amus.e.m.e.nts and eating and drinking--some hidden spring of life in me began to fail.

What a little self-conscious affected donkey I became, shrilly hee-hawing away; the centre of a simpering throng plying me with flattery. What airs I put on.

If this Life of mine had been a Biography, the author of it would have had the satisfaction of copying out from a pygmy blue morocco diary the names of all the celebrated and distinguished people I met at No. 2. A few of them underlined in red! The amusing thing is that, like my father, I was still a Radical at heart and preferred low life--flea-bane and chickweed--to the fine flowers of culture; which only means, of course, that in this I am a sn.o.b inside out. Nevertheless, the attention I had shunned I now began to covet, and, like a famous artist or dancer, would go sulky to bed, if I had been left to blush at being unseen. I forced myself to be more and more fastidious: and tried to admire as little as possible. I would even imitate and affect languid pretentiousnesses and effronteries; and learned to be downright rude to people in a cultivated way. As for small talk, I soon acc.u.mulated a repertory of that, and could use the fashionable slang and current "conversations" like a native. All this intensely amused Mrs Monnerie.

For, of course, the more like the general run of these high livers I was, the more conspicuous I became.

The truth is, the Lioness's head was in peril of being turned, and, like a blind kitten in a bucket of water, I came very near to being drowned in the social cream-bowl. For what little I gained in public by all this silly vanity I paid a heavy price when alone. I began to be fretful and utterly useless to myself--just lived on from excitement to excitement. And Fleming soon had better reasons for detesting me than merely because I was horribly undersized.

Perhaps I am exaggerating; but the truth is I find it extremely difficult to keep patience with Mrs Monnerie's pampered _protegee_. She was weak and stupid. Yet learning had not lost its charm. My mind persisted in being hungry, however much satiated were my senses and fine feelings. I even infected Susan with my enthusiasm for indigestible knowledge. For since Mrs Monnerie had begun to find my pa.s.sion for sh.e.l.ls, fossils, flints, b.u.t.terflies, and stuffed animals a little wearisome, it was her niece who now accompanied me to my many Meccas in her stead. By a happy chance we often met on these pilgrimages the dark, straight-nosed young man whom I had looked down upon at my first ballet, and who also apparently was a fanatic.

However deeply engrossed in mementoes of the Dark or Stone Ages he might be, he never failed to see us the moment we entered his echoing gallery.

He would lift his eyebrows; his monocle would drop out; and he would come sauntering over to meet us, looking as fresh as apples cold with dew. I liked Captain Valentine. So much so that I sent an almost rapturous description of him to Mr Anon.

He did not seem in the least to mind being seen in my company. We had our little private jokes together. We both enjoyed the company of Susan.

He was so crisp and easy and quick-witted, and yet--to my unpractised eye--looked delightfully domesticatable. Even the crustiest old caretaker, at a word and a smile from Captain Valentine, would allow me to seat myself on the gla.s.s cases. So I could gloat on their contents at leisure. And certainly of the three of us I was by far the most diligent student.

Long hours, too, of the none too many which will make up my life would melt away like snow in Mrs Monnerie's library. A b.u.t.ton specially fixed for me in the wainscot would summon a manservant. Having ranged round the lofty walls, I would point up at what books I wanted. They would be strewn around me on the floor--gilded and leathery volumes, some of them almost of my own height, and many times my weight. I would open the lid, turn the great pages, and carefully sprawling on my elbows between them, would pore for hours together on their coloured pictures of birds and flowers, gems and gla.s.s, ruins, palaces, mountains--hunting, c.o.c.k-fighting, fashions, fine ladies, and foreign marvels. And I dipped into novels so like the unpleasanter parts of my own life that they might just as well have been autobiographies.

The secret charm of all this was that I was alone; and while I was reading I ceased to worry. I just drugged my mind with books. I would go rooting and rummaging in Mrs Monnerie's library, like a little pig after truffles. There was hardly a subject I left untasted--old plays, and street ballads; Johnson's enormous dictionary, that extraordinary book on Melancholy with its borage and h.e.l.lebore and the hatted young man in love; _Bel and the Dragon_, the _Newgate Calendar_. I even nibbled at Debrett--and clean through all its "M's." The more I read, the more ignorant I seemed to become; and quite apart from this smattering jumble of knowledge, I pushed my way through memoirs and romances at the very sight of which my poor G.o.dmother would have fainted dead off.

They may have been harmful; but I certainly can't say that I regret having read them--which may be part of the harm. You could tell the really bad ones almost at a sniff. They had bad smells, like a beetle cupboard or a scented old man. I read on of witchcraft and devils, yet hated the cloud they cast over me--like some horrible treacle in the mind. But as for the authors who just reasoned about Time and G.o.d and Miracles, and so on, I poked about in them willingly enough; but my imagination went off the other way--with my heart in its pocket.

Possibly without knowing it. But I do know this: that never to my dying day shall I learn what a common-sized person with a pen or a pencil, can _not_ make shocking, or be shocked at. It seemed to me that to some of these authors the whole universe was nothing better than a Squid, and a very much scandalized young woman would attempt to replace their works on the shelves.

When in good faith I occasionally ventured to share (or possibly to show off) some curious sc.r.a.p of information with Mrs Monnerie, I thought her eyes would goggle out of her head. It was perhaps my old _mole_ habit that prevented me from dividing things up into the mentionable and unmentionable. Possibly I carried this habit to excess; and yet, of course, remained the slave of my own small pruderies. Still, I don't think it was either Mrs Monnerie's or Percy's pruderies that I had to be careful about. To make _him_ laugh was one of the most hateful of my experiences at No. 2.

I have read somewhere that the human instincts are "unlike Apollyon, since they always degrade themselves by their disguises. They dress themselves up as Apes and Mandrils; he as a ringed, supple, self-flattering, seductive serpent." Possibly that has something to do with it. Or is it that my instincts are also on a petty scale? I don't know. I hate and fear pain even more than most people, and have fought pretty hard in the cause of self-preservation. On the other hand, I haven't the faintest wish in the world to "perpetuate my species." Not that I might not have been happy in a husband and in my children. I suppose that kind of thing comes on one just as naturally as breathing.

Nevertheless, I suspect I was born to be an Old Maid. Calling up Spirits from the vasty deep has always seemed to me to be a far more dreadful mystery than Death. It is not, indeed, the ghosts of the dead and the past which I think should oppress the people I see around me, but those of the children to come. I thank G.o.d from the bottom of my heart for the happiness and misery of having been alive, but my small mind reels when I brood on what the gift of it implies.

Well, well, well; of one burden at least I can absolve Mrs Monnerie--that of making me so sententious. Somehow or other, but ever more sluggishly, those few crowded summer months of my twentieth year wore away. It is more of a mercy than a curse, I suppose, that Time never stands still.

Meanwhile two events occurred which, for the time being, sobered and alarmed me. A few days before I had actually planned to pay a second visit to Mrs Bowater's, the almost incredible news reached me that she was sailing for South America. It would hardly have surprised me more to hear that she was sailing for Sirius. She came to bid me good-bye. It was _Mr_ Bowater, she told me. She had been too confident of the "good nursing." Far from mending in this world, his leg threatened "to carry him off into the next." At these tidings Shame thrust out a very ugly head at me from her retreat. I had utterly forgotten the anxiety my poor old friend was in.

She put on her spectacles with trembling fingers, and pushed her husband's letter across to me. The handwriting was bold and thick, yet I fancied it looked a little weak in the loops:--

"DEAR EMILY,--The leg's giving me the devil in this hole of a place. It looks as if I shouldn't get through with it. I should be greatly obliged if you would come out to me. They'll give you all the necessary information at the shipping office. Ask for Pullen.

My love to f.a.n.n.y. What's she looking like now? I should like to see her before I go; but better say nothing about it. You've got about a month or three weeks, I should think; if that.

"I remain, your affec. husband,

"JOSEPH BOWATER."

"Easy enough in _appearance_," was Mrs Bowater's comment, as she folded up this stained and flimsy letter again, and stuffed it into her purse, "but it's past even Mr Bowater to control what can be read between the lines."

She looked at me dumbly; the skin seemed to hang more loosely on her face. In vain I tried to think of a comforting speech. The tune of "Eternal Father," one of the hymns we used to sing on windy winter Sunday evenings together, had begun droning in my head. The thought, too, was worrying me, though I did not put it into words, that Mr Bowater, far rather than in Buenos Ayres, would have preferred to find his last resting-place in Nero Deep or the Virgin's Trough--those enormous pits of blue in the oceans which I myself had so often gloated on in his Atlas. We were old friends now, he and I. He was f.a.n.n.y's father. The very ferocity of his look had become a secret understanding between us. And now--at this very moment perhaps--he was dying. The jaunty "_devil_" in his letter, I am afraid, affected me far more than Mrs Bowater's troubled face or even her courage.

Without a moment's hesitation she had made up her mind to face the Atlantic's thousands of miles of wind and water to join the husband she had told me had long been "worse than" dead. The very tone in which she uttered the word "steamer," was even more lugubrious than the enormous, mocking hoot of a vessel that had once alarmed me out of the sea one still evening at Lyme Regis. It was a horrifying prospect, yet she just quietly said, "steamer," and looked at me over her spectacles.

While she was away, the little house on Beechwood Hill, "bought, thank G.o.d, with my own money," was to be shut up, but it was mine if I cared to return to it, and would ask a neighbour of hers, Mrs Chantry, for the key. It would be f.a.n.n.y's if anything "happened" to herself. So dismal was all this that Mrs Bowater seemed already lost to me, and _I_ twice an orphan. We talked on together in low, cautious voices. After a single sharp, cold glance at my visitor, Fleming had left us to ourselves over an enormous silver teapot. I grew so nervous at last, watching Mrs Bowater's slow glances of disapproval at her surroundings; her hot, tired face; and listening to her long drawn sighs, that again and again I lost the thread of what she was saying, and could answer Yes, or No, only by instinct.

What with an antiquated time-table, a mislaid railway ticket, and an impudent 'bus-conductor, her journey had been a trying experience. I discovered, too, that Mrs Bowater disliked the West End. She had first knocked at No. 4 by mistake. Its butler had known nothing whatever at all about any Miss M., and Mrs Bowater had been too considerate to specify my dimensions. She had then shared a few hot moments in the porch of No. 2 with a more fashionable visitor--to neither's satisfaction. A manservant had admitted her to Mrs Monnerie's marble halls and "barefaced" statuary, and had apparently thought the large parcel she carried in her arms should have been delivered in the area.

She bore no resentment, though I myself felt a little uneasy. Life was like that, she seemed to imply, and she had been no party to it. There was no doubt a better world where things would be different--it was extraordinary what a number of conflicting sentiments she could convey in a pause or a shut of her mouth. Black and erect, she sat glooming over that alien teapot, sipping Mrs Monnerie's colourless China tea, firmly declining to grimace at its insipidity, until she had told me all there was to tell.

At last, having gathered herself together, she exhorted me to write to that young Mr Anon. "I see a fidelity one might almost say dog-like, miss, on that face, apart, as I have reasons for supposing, from a sufficiency in his pocket. Though, the Lord knows, you are young yet and seemingly in no need of a home."