He raised his eyes slowly to my face, then looked so long and earnestly
at my hands, that I was forced to hide them away under my bag. Long
before I had noticed that his own hands were rather large and powerful
for his size. Fanny's face I had loved to watch for its fairness and
beauty--it would have been as lovely if she had not been within. To
watch Mrs Bowater's was like spelling out bits of a peculiar language. I
often found out what she was feeling or thinking by imitating her
expression, and then translating it, after she was gone. This young
man's kept me engrossed because of the self that brooded in it--its dark
melancholy, too; and because even then, perhaps, I may have remotely and
vaguely realized that flesh and spirit could not be long of one company.
He himself was, as it were, a foreigner to me, and I felt I must make
the best and most of him before he went off again.
Perhaps memory reads into this experience more than in those green salad
days I actually found there. But of this at least I am certain--that the
morning sped on unheeded in his company, and I was even unconscious of
how cold I was until he suddenly glanced anxiously into my face and told
me so. So now we wandered off together towards the great house--which
hitherto I had left unapproached. We climbed the green-stained scaling
steps from terrace to terrace, tufted with wallflower and snapdragon
amongst the weeds, cushioned with bright moss, fretted with lichen.
Standing there, side by side with him, looking up--our two figures
alone, on the wide flowerless weed-grown terrace--hale, sour weeds some
of them, shoulder-high--I scrutinized the dark, shut windows.
What was the secret that had kept it so long vacant, I inquired. Mrs
Bowater had never given me any coherent answer to this question. My
words dropped into the silence, like a pebble into a vast, black pool of
water.
"There was a tale about," he replied indifferently, and yet, as I
fancied, not so indifferently as he intended, "that many years ago a
woman"--he pronounced the word almost as if it had reference to a
different species from ourselves--"that a woman had hanged herself in
one of its upper rooms."
"Hanged herself!" It was the kind of fable Mrs Ballard used to share
with Adam Waggett's mother over their tea and shrimps. Frowning in
horror and curiosity, I scanned his face. Was this the water I could dip
for in his well? Alas, how familiar I was to become with the bucket.
He made a movement with his hands; at which I saw the poor creature up
there in the darkness, suspended lifeless, poor, poor human, with head
awry.
"Why?" I asked him, pondering childishly over this picture.
"It was mere gossip," he replied, "and true or not, such as 'they' make
up to explain their own silly superstitions. Just thinking long enough
and hard enough would soon invite an evil spirit into any old empty
house. Human beings are no better than sheep, though they don't always
see the dogs and shepherds that drive them."
"And does it," I faltered, glancing covertly up the walls, and conscious
of a novel vein of interest in this strangely inexhaustible world, "does
the evil spirit ever look out of the windows?"
He turned his face to me, smiling; and inquired if I had ever heard the
phrase, "the eyelids of the dawn." "There's Night, too," he said.
"But whose spirit? Whose?" I persisted. "When I am here alone in the
garden, why, it is just peace. How could that be, if an evil spirit
haunted here?"
"Yes," he said, "but a selfish, solitary peace. Dead birds don't sing.
Don't come when you can't get back; or the clouds are down."
"You are trying to frighten me," I said, in a louder voice. "And I have
been too much alone for that. Of course things must look after
themselves. Don't _we_? And you said an _evil_ spirit. What is the good
of dreaming when you are wide awake?"
"Then," said he, almost coldly, "do you deny that Man is an evil spirit?
He distorts and destroys."
But with that the words of my mother came back to me out of a far-away
morning: "He made us of His Power and Love." Yet I could not answer him,
could only wait, as if expectant that by mere silence I should be able
to share the thoughts he was thinking. And, all the while, my eyes were
brooding in some dark chamber of my mind on Fanny, and not, as they well
might have, on the dark bark of Mr Crimble tossing in jeopardy beneath
its fleeting ray of hope.
Truly this stranger was making life very interesting, even if he was
only prodding over its dead moles. And truly I was an incorrigibly
romantic young lady; for when, with a glance at my grandfather's watch,
I discovered that it was long past noon, and told him I must be gone;
without a single moment's hesitation, I promised to come again to meet
him on the very first fine morning that showed. So strong within me was
the desire to do so, that a profound dismay chilled my mind when, on
turning about at the end of the terrace--for he had shown no inclination
to accompany me--I found that he was already out of sight. I formally
waved my hand towards where he had vanished in case he should be
watching; sighed, and went on.
It was colder under the high, sunless trees. I gathered my cloak closer
around me, and at that discovered not only that Miss Austen had been
left behind, but that Fanny's letter still lay in undisturbed
concealment beneath its stone. It was too late to return for them now,
and a vague misgiving that had sprung up in me amid the tree-trunks was
quieted by the assurance that for these--rather than for any other
reason--I must return to Wanderslore as soon as I could. So, in
remarkably gay spirits, I hastened light-heeled on my way in the
direction of civilized society, of nefarious Man, and of my
never-to-be-blessed-too-much Mrs Bowater.