"I shall _not_ write to you know who. Think, if you like, but don't
_feel_ like a microscope. He is only in love. And however
punctilious your own practice may be, pray, Miss M., do not
preach--at any rate to your affecte. but unregenerate friend.--F."
I believe I drafted and destroyed three answers to this letter. It broke
down my defences far more easily than had the errand boys. It shamed me
for a prig, a false friend, a sentimentalist. And the "fretful midge"
rankled like salt in a wounded heart. Yet Fanny was faithless even to
her postscript. A sheaf of narcissuses hooded in blue tissue paper was
left at the house a day or two afterwards. It was accompanied by Mr
Crimble's card in a little envelope tied in with the stalks:--
"I am given a ray of hope."
Mrs Bowater had laid this offering on my table with a peculiar grimace,
whether scornful or humorous, it was impossible to detect. "From Mr
Crimble, miss. Why, one might think he had two irons in the fire!"
I sat gazing at this thank-offering long after she had gone--the waxy
wings, the crimson-rimmed corona, the pale-green cluster of pistil and
stamen. The heavy perfume stole over my senses, bringing only weariness
and self-distaste to my mind. Fly that I was, caught in a web--once more
I began a letter to Fanny, imploring her to write to her mother, to tell
her everything. But that letter, too, was torn up into tiny pieces and
burnt in the fire.
Next morning, heavily laden with my parasol, a biscuit or two in my bag,
my _Sense and Sensibility_ and a rug in my arms, I set off very early
for Wanderslore, having arranged with Mrs Bowater over night that she
should meet me under my beech at a quarter to one.
Under the flat, bud-pointed branches, I pressed on between clusters of
primrose, celandine, and wild wood anemone, breathing in the earthy
freshness of grass and moss. And presently I came out between the stones
and jutting roots in sight of the vacant windows. I stood for a moment
confronting their black regard, then descended the knoll and was soon
making myself comfortable beside the garden house. But first I managed
to clamber up on a fragment of the fallen masonry and peep in at its low
windows. A few dead, last-year's flies lay dry on their backs; dusty,
derelict spider-webs; a litter of straw, and a few potsherds--the place
was empty. But it was mine, and the very remembrance of which it
whispered to me--the picture of my poor father's bedroom that night of
the storm--only increased my sense of possession.
What was wrong with me just then, what I had sallied out in hope to be
delivered from, was the unhappy conviction that my life was worthless,
and I of no use in the world. I had taught myself to make knots in
strings, but actual experience seemed to have proved that most human
fumblings resulted only in "grannies" and not in the true lover's
variety. They secured nothing, only tangled and jammed. I was young
then, and yet as heavily burdened with other people's responsibilities
as was poor Christian with the bundle of his sins. But my bundle, too,
in that lovely, desolate loneliness at last fell off my shoulders.
Could I not still be loyal in heart and mind to Fanny, even though now I
knew how little she cared whether I was loyal or not? I even climbed up
behind Mr Crimble's thick spectacles and looked down again at myself
from that point of vantage. Whether or not I was his affair, I could try
to make him mine--perhaps even persuade Fanny to love him.
Oh, dear; was not every singing bird in that wilderness, every unfolding
flower and sunlit March leaf welcoming the spirit within me to their
quiet habitation? As if in response to this naive thought, welled up in
my memory the two last stanzas of my _Tom o' Bedlam_, which, either for
pride or shame, had stuck in my throat on the skin mat in Lady
Pollacke's sky-lit drawing-room:----
"With a heart of furious fancies,
Whereof I am commander:
With a burning spear,
And a horse of air,
To the wilderness I wander.
With a knight of ghosts and shadows,
I summoned am to tourney:
Ten leagues beyond
The wide world's end;
Methinks it is no journey."
Parasol for spear, the youngest Miss Shanks's pony for horse of air,
there was I (even though common-sized boots might reckon it a mere mile
or so), ten leagues at least beyond--Mrs Bowater's. Nor, like her
husband, had I broken my leg; nor had Fanny broken my heart. All would
come right again. Why, what a waste of Fanny it would be to make her Mrs
Crimble. My bishop, according to Miss Fenne, had had quite a homely
helpmate, "little short of a frump, Caroline, as I remember her thirty
years ago." Perhaps if I left off my fine colours and bought a nice
brown stuff dress and a bonnet, might not Mr Crimble change his mind...?
I have noticed that as soon as I begin to laugh at myself, the whole
world seems to smile in return.
Absurd, contrary, volatile creature that I was--a kind of thankfulness
spread over my mind. I turned on to my knees where I sat and repeated
the prayers which in my haste to be off I had neglected before coming
out. And thus kneeling, I opened my eyes on the garden again, bathed
delicately in the eastern sunshine. There was my old friend, Mr Clodd's
_Nature_, pranking herself under the nimble fingers of spring; and in
her sight as well as in the sight of my godmother's God, and Mr
Crimble's Almighty, and, possibly, of Dr Phelps's Norm, were not, in
deed and in truth, all men equal? How mysterious and how entrancing! If
"sight," then _eyes_: but whose? where? I gazed round me dazzledly, and
if wings had been mine, would have darted through the thin, blue-green
veil and been out into the morning.
Poor she-knight! romantical Miss Midge! she had no desire to hunt Big
Game, or turn steeplejack; her fancies were not dangerously "furious";
but, as she knelt there, environed about by that untended garden, and
not so ridiculously pygmy either, even in the ladder of the world's
proportion--saw-edged blade of grass, gold-cupped moss, starry
stonecrop, green musky moschatel, close-packed pebble, wax-winged
fly--well, I know not how to complete the sentence except by remarking
that I am exceedingly glad I began to write my Life.
I realized too that it is less flattering to compare oneself with the
very little things of the world than with the great. Given time, I might
scale an Alp; I could only _kill_ an ant. Besides, I am beginning to
think that one of the pleasantest ways of living is in one's memory. How
much less afflicting at times would my present have been if I had had
the foresight to remind myself how beguiling it would appear as the
past. Even my old sharpest sorrows have now hushed themselves to sleep,
and those for whom I have sorrowed are as quiet.
Having come to a pause in my reflections, I opened my _Sense and
Sensibility_ at Chapter XXXV. Yet attend to Miss Austen I could not. She
is one of those compact and cautious writers that will not feed a
wandering mind; and at last, after three times re-reading the same
paragraph, an uneasy conviction began to steal over me. There was no
doubt now in my mind. I was being watched. Softly, stealthily, I raised
my eyes from my book and with not the least motion of head or body,
glanced around me. Whereupon, as if it had been playing sentinel out of
the thicket near at hand, a blackbird suddenly jangled its challenge,
and with warning cries fled away on its wings towards the house.