I think Mrs Monnerie was in secret a more remarkable woman than she affected to be. However thronged a room might be, you could never be unaware that she was in it. And in the gentle syllabub of polite conversation her silence was like that of an ancient rock with the whispering of the wavelets on the sands at its base. I remember once seeing a comic picture of an old lady with a large feather in her bonnet placidly sitting on a camp-stool beneath a pollard willow on one side of a stream, while a furious, frothing bull stood snorting and rampaging on the other. I think the old lady in the picture was meant to be Britannia; but, whoever or whatever the bull might represent, Mrs Monnerie reminded me of her. She sat more heavily, more pa.s.sively, in her chair than any one I have ever seen.

Of course--quite apart from intelligence--there must be many, many _layers_ in society, and I cannot say at all how far Mrs Monnerie was from the topmost. But I am sure she was able to look down on a good many of them; while I was born always to be "looking up." I was looking up at Mrs Monnerie now from my stool. Widespread in her chair, she had closed her eyes, and to judge from her face, she was dreaming. It looked more faded than usual. The puckers gave it a prunish look. Queer, contorting expressions were floating across her features. Her soul seemed gently to rock in them, like an empty boat at night on a dark river. In the pride of my youth--and a little uneasy over my confidences with Sir Walter--I examined my patroness with a slight stirring of dismay.

"Oh, no, no! never to grow old, not me," a voice was saying in me. Yet, after all, I reminded myself, I was looking only at Mrs Monnerie's outer case. But then, after all, _was_ it only that? "The Resurrection of the body." One may see day at a little hole; says an old proverb--I hope a Kentish proverb. And from Mrs Monnerie, my thoughts drifted away to f.a.n.n.y. She would grow old too. Should we know one another then?

Should we understand, and remember what it was to be young? We had had our secrets.

I came out of these reflections to find Mrs Monnerie's sleepy eyes fixed full upon me; and herself marvellously cheered up by her nap. She had thought very well of Miss Bowater, she told me. So well that she not only very soon found her a charming engagement as a morning governess to the two little girls of a rich fashionable widow--just f.a.n.n.y's "sinecure"--but invited her to stay at No. 2 as a "companion" to herself, until a more permanent post offered itself.

"You and I want more company," she a.s.sured me; "otherwise the flint will use up all the tinder, or vice versa, my dear. A pretty creature and no fool. She sings a little, too, she tells me. So we shall have music wherever she goes."

That afternoon both flint and tinder--whichever of us was which--were kept very busy. Mrs Monnerie fell into one of her long monologues, broken only by Chakka's griding on his bars, and Cherry's whimpering in his dreams. It was another kind of "white meat" for me: and though, no doubt, I was incapable of digesting _all_ Mrs Monnerie's views on life, society, and the world at large, I realized that if in the course of time it might be my fate to wither and wizen away, I should still have my own company and plenty of internal entertainment. I actually saw myself a little bent-up, old, midget woman creeping down some stone steps out of a porch, with a fanlight, under a street lamp. It curdled my blood, that picture. And yet, I thought, what must be, must be. I will _endure_ to be a little, bent-up, old, midget woman, creeping down stone steps out of a porch with a fanlight. And I even nodded up at the street lamp.

In response to a high-spirited scrawl from f.a.n.n.y, I sent her all that was left of my savings to purchase "those horrible little etceteras that just feather down the scales, Midgetina. It would be saintlike of you, and you won't miss it _there_." It was a desperate wrench to me to see the last of my money disappear. I knew no more than the Man in the Moon where the next was to come from.

I counted the days to f.a.n.n.y's coming; and dressed myself for the occasion in the most expensive gold and blue afternoon gown I possessed.

It must have been with a queer, mixed motive in my head. I sat waiting for her, while beyond the gloom-hung window raged a London thunderstorm, with dense torrents of rain. My little silver clock struck three, and she entered my room like a black swan, tossing from her small, velveted head, as she did so, a few beads of rain. From top to toe in deadest black. She must have noticed my glance of wonderment.

"When you want to make a favourable impression on your social superiors, Midgetina, the meeker you look the better," she said.

But this was not the only reason for her black. Only a day or two before, she told me, a letter had come from her mother.... "My father is dead." The words dropped out as if they were quite accustomed to one another's company. But those which followed--"blood-poisoning,"

"mortification," hung up in my mind--in that interminable gallery--a hideous picture. I could only sit and stare at the motionless figure outlined against the sepulchral window.

"It is awful, awful, f.a.n.n.y!" I managed to whisper at last. "It never stops. One after another they all go. Think how he must have longed to be home. And now to be buried--out there--nothing but strangers."

A vacancy came over my mind in which I seemed to see the dead Mr Bowater of my photograph rising like Lazarus in his grave-cloths out of his foreign tomb, and looking incredulously around him.

"And your mother, f.a.n.n.y! Out there, too--those miles and miles of sea away!"

f.a.n.n.y made no movement, though I fancied that her eyes wandered uneasily towards the door. "I quite agree, Midgetina; it's awful!" she said. "But really and truly, it's worse for me. I think I am like my father in some ways. Mother never really understood him. You can't _talk_ a man different; and for that matter holding your tongue at him is not much good either. You must just lie in wait for him with--well, with your charms, I suppose."

The word sounded like a sneer. "Still, I don't mean to say that it was all pure filial bliss for me when he _was_ at home, until, at least, I grew up. Then he and I quarrelled too; but that's pleasure itself by comparison with listening to other people at it. He did his best to spoil me, I suppose. He wanted to make a lady of me." She turned and smiled out of the window; her under-lip quivering and casting a faint shadow on the smooth skin beneath. "So here I am; though I fear you can't make ladies of _quite_ the correct consistency out of dressmaker's clothes and a smatter of Latin. The salt will out. But there," she flung a little gesture with her glove, "as I say, here I am."

And as if for welcome, a gleam of lightning danced at the window, illumining us there, and a crackling peal of thunder rolled hollowly off over the roof-tops of the square. We listened until the sound had emptied itself into quiet; and only the rain in the gutters gurgled and babbled.

"Do you know," she went on, with a far-away challenging thrill in her low, mournful voice, "I don't think I have a solitary relation left in the world now--except mother. 'They are all gone into a world of light'--though I've now and then suspected that a few of the disreputable ones have been buried alive. There's nothing very dreadful in that. Life consists, of course, in shedding various kinds of skin--and tanning the remainder."

f.a.n.n.y, then, _was_ unaware that Mrs Bowater was not her real mother. And I think she never guessed it.

"Nor have I," I said, "not one." As I looked at it there, it seemed a fact more curious than tragic. Besides, in the brooding darkness of that room it was f.a.n.n.y and I who were strange, external beings, not the memoried phantoms of my mother and father. We had still to go on, to live things out. "So you see, f.a.n.n.y," I continued, after a pause, "I do know what it means--a little; and we must try more than ever to be really one another's friend, mustn't we? I mean, if you think I can be."

"Why, I owe you pounds and pounds," cried f.a.n.n.y gaily, pushing back her handkerchief into her bodice. "Here we are--not quite in the same box, perhaps; still strangers and pilgrims. Of course we must help one another.... Just think of this house! The servants! The folly of it, and all for Madame Monnerie--though I wouldn't mind being in her shoes, even for one season. Socialism, my dear, is all a question of shoes. And this is Poppetkin's little boudoir? A pygmy palace, my dear, and if only the lightning would last a little longer I might get a real glimpse of that elfin little exquisite over there in her beautiful blue brocade. But then; it will be roses all the way with you, Miss M. You are independent, and valued for yourself alone."

"How different people are, f.a.n.n.y. You always think first of the use of a thing, and I, stupidly, just of it--itself."

"Do we?" she said indifferently, and rose from her chair. "Anyhow I'm here to be of use. And who," she remarked, with a little yawn, as she came to a pause again beside the streaming window. "Who was that prim, colourless girl with the pale blue eyes? Engaged to be married."

"But f.a.n.n.y, she had her gloves on that morning, I remember it as clearly as--as I always remember everything where you are: how could you possibly tell that Susan Monnerie was engaged?"

It was quite a simple problem, f.a.n.n.y tranquilly a.s.sured me: "The ring bulged under the suede."

Her scornfulness piqued me a little. "Anyhow," I retorted, "Susan's eyes are not _pale_ blue. They are almost cornflower--chicory colour; like the root of a candle-flame."

"Please, Midgetina," f.a.n.n.y begged me, "don't let me canker your new adoration. Perhaps you preened your pretty feathers in them when they were fixed on the demiG.o.d. 'Susan'! I thought all the Susans perished in the 'sixties, or had fled down the area. And who is _he_?" But she did not follow up her question. All things come to him who waits, she had rambled on inconsequently, if he waits long enough; and no doubt G.o.d would temper the wind to the shorn orphan even if she did look a perfect frump in mourning.

"You know you could never look a frump," I replied indignantly, "even if you hadn't a rag on."

f.a.n.n.y shrugged her dainty shoulders. "Alas!" she said.

But her "orphan" had brought me back with a guilty shock to what, no doubt, was an extremely fantastic panorama of Buenos Ayres; and that swiftly back again to Mr Crimble. For an instant or two I looked away.

Perhaps it was my caution that betrayed me.

"It's no use, Midgetina," she sang across at me from her window.

"Whether it's because the chemical reactions of your pat little brain are more intense than ordinary people's, or because you and I are _en rapport_, I can't say. But there's one thing we must agree upon at once: never, never again to mention his name--at least in _this_ house. The Crimble chapter is closed."

Closed indeed. But so sharp were her tones I hadn't the courage to warn her that even Susan had read most of it. f.a.n.n.y came near, and, stooping as Susan had stooped, began fidgeting with the b.u.t.ton of my electric chandelier. The little lamps shone wanly in our faces in the cloud-darkened room.

"You see, my dear," she said playfully, "you think me all mockery and heartlessness. And no doubt you are right. But I want ease and security: just like that--as if I were writing an essay--'ease and security.' I don't care a dash about affection--at least without the aforesaid E. and S. I intend to please Mrs Monnerie, and she is going to be grateful to me. Don't think I am being 'candid.' I should have no objection to saying just the same thing to Mrs Monnerie herself: she'd enjoy it.

Wait, you precious inchy image--wait until you need a sup of fatted calf's-foot jelly, not because you are sick of husks, but because you are deadly poor. Then you will understand. These sumptuosities! Wait till they haven't a ha'penny in their pockets, real or moral, for their next meal. They only look at things--if that; they can't know what they are. Even to be decently charitable one must have been a beggar--and cursed the philanthropists. Oh, I know: and f.a.n.n.y's race is for Success."

"But surely, f.a.n.n.y, a thing is its looks, if only you look long enough.

And I should just like to hear you talking if you were in my place.

Besides, what is the use of success--in the end, I mean? You should see some of the actresses and singers and authors and that kind of thing Mrs Monnerie knows? You wouldn't have realized the actresses were even beautiful unless you had been told so. Why, you couldn't even say the _World_ is a success, except in the country. What is truly the use of it, then?" I had grown so eager in my argument that I had got up from my chair.

"The use, you poor thing?" laughed f.a.n.n.y; "why, only as a kind of face-cream to one's natural pride."

The day was lightening now; but at that the whole darkness of my own situation drew close about me. Success, indeed. What was I? Nothing but a halfpennyless, tame pet in No. 2. What salve could restore to me _my_ natural pride?

Chapter Forty

In happier circ.u.mstances, the next morning's post might have rea.s.sured me. Two letters straddled my breakfast tray, for I always had this meal in my own room. One of them was from Wanderslore--a long, crooked, roundabout letter, that seemed to taunt, upbraid, and entreat me, turn and turn about. It ended with a proposal of marriage.

In most of the novels I have read, the heroine simply basks in such a proposal, even though scarcely her finger-tips are warmed by its rays.

For my part, this letter, far from making me happy or even complacent, produced nothing but a feeling of fretfulness and shame. Thrusting it back into its envelope, I listened a while as if an eavesdropper might have overheard my silent reading of it--as if I must hide. Then, with eyes fixed on my small coffeepot, I sank into a low, empty reverie.

The world had not been so tender to my feelings as to refrain from introducing me to General Tom Thumb and Miss Mercy Lavinia b.u.mp Warren.

"A pair of them! how quaint! how romantic! how _touching_!" I saw myself--gossamer veil, dwarfed orange-blossom, and gypsophila bouquet, all complete. Perhaps Mr. Pellew--perhaps even Miss Fenne's bishop, would officiate. Possibly Percy would be persuaded to "give me away."

And what a gay little sniggling note in the _Morning Post_.

I came out of these sardonic thoughts with cold hands and a sneer on my lips, and the thought that I had seen quite as conspicuously paired human mates even though their size was beyond reproach. Thank goodness, when I read my letter again, slightly better feelings prevailed. After all, the merest cinder of love would have made my darkness light. I shouldn't have cared for a thousand "touching's" then. I was still myself, a light-headed, light-hearted, young woman, for all my troubles and follies. If I had loved him, the rest of the world--much truer and sweeter within than it looks from without--would have vanished like a puff of smoke. But not even love's ashes were in my heart, except, perhaps, those in which f.a.n.n.y had scrawled her name.

I beat about, bruising wings and breast, hating life, hating the friend who had suddenly slammed-to another door in my gilded cage. "You can never, never go back to Wanderslore now," muttered my romantic heart.

Friends we could have remained--only the closer for adversity. Now all that was over; and two human beings who might have been a refuge and reconciliation to one another, amused--as well as amusing--observers of the world at large, had been by this one piece of foolish excess divided for ever. I simply couldn't bear to look ridiculous in my own eyes.

My other letter was from Sir W. P. He had seen the Harrises. Those foxy tortoises had advanced a ridiculous 1 19s. 7d. of my September allowance--the price of a pair of Monnerie bedroom slippers! It was enclosed--and Sir Walter begged me not to worry. Might he be my bank?