I grew a little weary of the beautiful snow in the days that followed my
first talk with Mr Crimble, and fretted at the close air of the house.
The last day of the year the wind was still in the north. It perplexed
me that the pride which from my seed had sprung up in Fanny, and had
prevented her from taking part in the parish concert, yet allowed her to
attend it. She set off thickly veiled. Not even Mr Crimble's spectacles
were likely to pierce her disguise. I had written a little letter the
afternoon before and had myself handed it to Mrs Bowater with a large
fork of mistletoe from my Christmas bunch. It was an invitation to
herself and Fanny to sit with me and "see in" the New Year. She smiled
at me over it--still her tranquil, though neglected self--and I was
half-satisfied.
Her best black dress was donned for the occasion. She had purchased a
bottle of ginger wine, which she brought in with some glasses and placed
in the middle of the red and black tablecloth. Its white-lettered,
dark-green label "haunts me still." The hours drew on. Fanny returned
from the concert--entering the room like a cloud of beauty. She beguiled
the dwindling minutes of the year with mocking echoes of it.
In a rich falsetto she repeated Mr Crimble's "few words" of sympathetic
apology for her absence: "'I must ask your indulgence, ladies and
gentlemen, for a lamentable hiatus in our programme.'" She gave us Miss
Willett's and Mr Bangor's spirited rendering of "Oh, that we two"; and
of the recitation which rather easily, it appeared, Mrs Bullace had been
prevailed upon to give as an encore after her "Abt Vogler": "The Lady's
'Yes,'" by Elizabeth Barrett Browning. And what a glance of light and
fire she cast me when she came to stanza six of the poem:--
"Lead her from the festive boards,
Point her to the starry skies!..."
And she imitated Lady Pollacke's niece's--Miss Oran's--'cello obligato
to "The Lost Chord," with a plangency that stirred even the soul of
Henry as he lay curled up in my landlady's lap. The black head split
like a pomegranate as he yawned his disgust.
At this Mrs Bowater turned her bony face on me, her hands on her knees,
and with a lift of her eyes disclosed the fact that she was amused, and
that she hoped her amusement would remain a confidence between us. She
got up and put the cat out: and on her return had regained her
solemnity.
"I suppose," she said stiffly, staring into the sparkling fire that was
our only illumination, "I suppose, poor creatures, they did their best:
and it isn't so many years ago, Fanny, since you were as put-about to be
allowed to sing at one of the church concerts as a bird is to hop out of
its cage."
"Yes," said Fanny, "but in this world birds merely hop out of one cage
into another; though I suppose the larger are the more comfortable."
This retort set Mrs Bowater's countenance in an impassive mask--so
impassive that every fitfully-lit photograph in the room seemed to have
imitated her stare. "And, mother," added Fanny seductively, "who
_taught_ me to sing?"
"The Lord knows," cried Mrs Bowater, with conviction, "_I_ never did."
"Yes," muttered Fanny in a low voice, for my information, "but does He
care?" I hastily asked Mrs Bowater if she was glad of to-morrow's New
Year. As if in reply the kitchen clock, always ten minutes fast, began
to chime twelve, half-choking at every stroke. And once more the soul of
poor Mr Hubbins sorrowfully took shape in a gaze at me out of vacancy.
"To them going downhill, miss," my landlady was replying to my question,
"it is not the milestones are the pleasantest company--nor that the
journey's then of much account until it is over. By which I don't mean
to suggest there need be _gloom_. But to you and Fanny here--well, I
expect the little that's the present for you is mostly wasted on the
future." With that, she rose, and poured out the syrupy brown wine from
the green bottle, reserving a remarkably little glass which she had
rummaged out of her years' hoardings for me.
Fanny herself, with musing head--her mockings over--was sitting drawn-up
on a stool by the fire. I doubt if she was thinking. Whether or not, to
my enchanted eyes some phantom within her seemed content merely to be
her beauty. And in rest, there was a grace in her body--the smooth
shoulder, the poised head that, because, perhaps, it was so transitory,
seemed to resemble the never-changing--that mimicry of the unknown which
may be seen in a flower, in a green hill, even in an animal. It is as
though, I do think, what we love most in this life must of necessity
share two worlds.
Faintly out of the frosty air was wafted the knelling of midnight. I
rose, stepped back from the firelight, drew the curtain, and stole a
look into space. Away on the right flashed Sirius, and to east of him
came gliding flat-headed Hydra with Alphard, the Red Bird, in his coil.
So, for a moment in our history, I and the terrestrial globe were alone
together. It seemed indeed that an intenser silence drew over reality as
the earth faced yet one more fleeting revolution round her invisible
lord and master. But no moon was risen yet.
I turned towards the shape by the fire, and without her perceiving it,
wafted kiss and prayer in her direction. Cold, careless Fanny--further
than Uranus. We were alone, for at first stroke of St Peter's Mrs
Bowater had left the room and had opened the front door. She was
smiling; but _was_ she smiling, or was that vague bewitchingness in her
face merely an unmeaning guile of which she was unaware? It might have
been a mermaid sitting there in the firelight.
The bells broke in on our stillness; and fortunately, since there was no
dark man in the house to bring us luck, Henry, already disgusted with
the snow and blacker in hue than any whiskered human I have ever seen,
seized his opportunity, and was the first living creature to cross our
threshold from one year into another.
This auspicious event renewed our spirits which, in waiting, had begun
to flag. From far away came a jangling murmur of shouting and
instruments and bells, which showed that the rest of the parish was
sharing our solemn vigil; and then, with me on my table between them, a
hand of each clasping mine, Mrs Bowater, Fanny, and I, after sipping
each other's health, raised the strains of "Auld Lang Syne." There must
have been Scottish blood in Mrs Bowater; she certainly made up for some
little variation from the tune by a heartfelt pronunciation of the
words. Hardly had we completed this rite than the grandfather's clock in
the narrow passage staidly protested its own rendering of eternity; and
we all--even Mrs Bowater--burst out laughing.
"Good-night, Midgetina; an immense happy New Year to you," whispered a
voice to me about half an hour afterwards. I jumped out of bed, and
peeped through my curtains. On some little errand Fanny had come down
from her bedroom, and with a Paisley shawl over her shoulders stood with
head and candle thrust in at the door. I gazed at her fairness. "Oh,
Fanny!" I cried. "Oh, Fanny!"
New Year's Day brought a change of weather. A slight mist rose over the
fields, it began to thaw. A kind of listlessness now came over Fanny,
which I tried in vain to dispel. Yet she seemed to seek my company;
often to remain silent, and occasionally to ask me curious questions as
if testing one answer against another. And one discovery I made in my
efforts to keep her near me: that she liked being read to. Most of the
volumes in Mrs Bowater's small library were of a nautical character, and
though one of them, on the winds and tides and seas and coasts of the
world, was to console me later in Fanny's absence, the majority defied
even my obstinacy. Fanny hated stories of the sea, seemed to detest
Crusoe; and smiled her slow, mysterious smile while she examined my own
small literary treasures. By a flighty stroke of fortune, tacked up by
an unskilled hand in the stained brown binding of a volume on Disorders
of the Nerves, we discovered among her father's books a copy of
_Wuthering Heights_, by Emily Bronte.
The very first sentence of this strange, dwelling book, was a spell:
"1801.--I have just returned from a visit to my landlord--the solitary
neighbour that I shall be troubled with."... And when, a few lines
farther on, I read: "He little imagined how my heart warmed towards him
when I beheld his black eyes withdraw so suspiciously under their
brows"--the apparition of who but Mr Crumble blinked at me out of the
print, and the enchantment was complete. It was not only gaunt enormous
Yorkshire with its fells and wastes of snow that seized on my
imagination, not only that vast kitchen with its flagstones, green
chairs, and firearms, but the mere music and aroma of the words, "I
beheld his black eyes"; "a range of gaunt thorns"; "a wilderness of
crumbling griffins"; "a huge, liver-coloured bitch pointer"--they rang
in my mind, echoed on in my dreams.
And though in the wet and windy afternoons and evenings which Fanny and
I thus shared, she, much more than poor Mr Crimble, resembled Heathcliff
in being "rather morose," and in frequently expressing "an aversion to
showing displays of feeling," she was more attracted by my discovery
than she condescended to confess. _Jane Eyre_, she said, was a better
story, "though Jane herself was a fool." What cared I? To me this book
was like the kindling of a light in a strange house; and that house my
mind. I gazed, watched, marvelled, and recognized, as I kneeled before
its pages. But though my heart was torn, and my feelings were a little
deranged by the scenes of violence, and my fancy was haunted by that
stalking wolfish spectre, I took no part. I surveyed all with just that
sense of aloofness and absorption with which as children Cathy and
Heathcliff, barefoot in the darkness of the garden, had looked in that
Sunday evening on the Lintons' crimson taper-lit drawing-room.
If, in February, you put a newly gathered sprig of budding thorn into
the fire; instantaneously, in the influence of the heat, it will break
into bright-green tiny leaf. That is what Emily Bronte did for me. Not
so for Fanny. In her "vapid listlessness" she often pretended to yawn
over _Wuthering Heights_, and would shock me with mocking criticism, or
cry "Ah!" at the poignant passages. But I believe it was pure
concealment. She was really playing a part in the story. I have, at any
rate, never seen her face so transfigured as when once she suddenly
looked up in the firelight and caught my eye fixed on her over the book.
It was at the passage where Cathy--in her grand plaid silk frock, white
trousers, and burnished shoes--returns to the dreadful Grange; and,
"dismally beclouded," Heathcliff stares out at her from his
hiding-place. "'He might,'" I read on, "'well skulk behind the settle,
at beholding such a bright, graceful damsel enter the house. "Is
Heathcliff not here?" she demanded, pulling off her gloves, and
displaying fingers wonderfully whitened with doing nothing and staying
indoors.'"
It was at this point that our eyes, as I say, Fanny's and mine, met.
But she, bright, graceful damsel, was not thinking of me.
"Do you like that kind of character, Fanny?" I inquired.
My candle's flames gleamed lean and tiny in her eyes. "Whose?" she
asked.
"Why, Heathcliff's."
She turned slowly away. "You take things so seriously, Midgetina. It's
merely a story. He only wanted taming. You'll see by-and-by." But at
that moment my ear caught the sound of footsteps, and when Mrs Bowater
opened the door to contemplate idle Fanny, the book was under my bed.
As the day drew near for Fanny's return to her "duties," her mood
brightened. She displayed before me in all their stages, the new clothes
which Mrs Bowater lavished on her--to a degree that, amateur though I
was in domestic economy, filled me with astonishment. I had to feign
delight in these fineries--"Ah!" whispered I to each, "when she wears
_you_ she will be far, far away." I envied the very buttons, and indeed
pestered her with entreaties. I implored her to think of me at certain
hours; to say good-night to herself for me; to write day by day in the
first of the evening; to share the moon: "If we both look at her at the
same moment," I argued, "it will be next to looking at one another. You
_cannot_ be utterly gone: and if you see even a flower, or hear the
wind.... Oh, I hope and hope you will be happy."
She promised everything with smiling ease, and would have sealed the
compact in blood if I had thought to cut my thumb for it. Thursday in
Holy Week--_then_ she would be home again. I stared at the blessed day
across the centuries as a condemned man stares in fancy at the scaffold
awaiting him; but on mine hung all my hopes. Long evenings I never saw
her at all; and voices in the kitchen, when she came in late, suggested
that my landlady had also missed her. But Fanny never lost her
self-control even when she lost her temper; and I dared not tax her with
neglecting me. Her cold looks almost suffocated me. I besought her to
spend one last hour of the eve of her departure alone with me and with
the stars in the woods. She promised. At eleven she came home, and went
straight up into her bedroom. I heard her footsteps. She was packing.
Then silence.
I waited on until sick at heart I flung myself on my knees beside my bed
and prayed that God would comfort her. Heathcliff had acquired a feeble
pupil. The next afternoon she was gone.