"Not at all," she replied. "All young people boast of their health. When
I was your age every thought of illness was as black as a visitation of
the devil. _That's_ the door where we must lay all such evils, isn't it,
Mr Pellew?"
A lean, tall, birdlike figure, the hair on his head still showing traces
of auburn, disengaged itself from a knot of charmed spectators.
"Ah," he said. "But I doubt, now," he continued, with a little
deprecating wave of his tea-cup at me, "if Miss M. can remember me. When
we first met we were precisely one week old, precisely one week old."
Why, like Dr Phelps, Mr Pellew referred to me as _we_ I had not time to
consider, for he was already confiding to Mrs Monnerie that he had never
baptized an infant who more strenuously objected to Holy Water than had
I. I looked at his long, fair eyelashes and the smile-line on his cheek
as he bent with a sort of jocular urbanity over her chair, but could
not recall his younger face, though during my christening I must, of
course, have gazed at him even more absorbedly.
"'Remember' you--I'll be bound she did," cried Mrs Monnerie with
enthusiasm, "or was it the bachelor thumb? The mercy is you didn't drop
her into the font. Can you swim, my dear?"
"I couldn't at a week," I replied as archly as possible. "But I _can_
swim; my father taught me."
"But how wonderful!" broke our listeners into chorus.
"There we are, then," asserted Mrs Monnerie; "sea-bathing! And are _we_
a swimmer, Mr Pellew?"
Mr Pellew seemed not to have caught her question. He was assuring me
that Miss Fenne had kept him well informed--well informed of all my
doings. He trusted I was comfortable with the excellent Mrs Bowater, and
hoped that some day I should be able to pay a visit to his rectory in
Devonshire. "Mrs Pellew, he knew...." What he knew about Mrs Pellew,
however, was never divulged, for Mrs Monnerie swallowed him up:--
"Devonshire, my dear Mr Pellew! no, indeed. Penthouse lanes, redhot
fields, staring cows. Imagine it! She would be dried up like a leaf.
What she wants is a mild but bracing sea-air. It shall be arranged. And
who is this Mrs Bowater?"
At this precise moment, among the strange faces far above me, I descried
that of Mr Crimble, modestly peering out of the background. He coughed,
and in a voice I should scarcely have recognized as his, informed Mrs
Monnerie that my landlady was "a most res--an admirable woman." He
paused, coughed again, swept my soul with his glance--"I assure you, Mrs
Monnerie, in view of--of all the circumstances, one couldn't be in
better hands. Indeed the house is on the crest of the hill, well out of
the town, yet not a quarter of an hour's walk from my mother's."
"Hah!" remarked Mrs Monnerie, with an inflection that I am sure need not
have brought a warmth to my cheek, or a duskier pallor to Mr Crimble's.
"You have perhaps heard the tragic story of Wanderslore," persisted Mr
Crimble; "Miss M.'s--er--lodgings are immediately adjacent to the park."
"Hah!" repeated Mrs Monnerie, even more emphatically. "Mrs Bowater, eh?
Well, I must see for myself. And I'm told, Miss M.," she swept down at
me, "that you have a beautiful gift for recitation." She looked round,
patted her lap imperiously, and cried, "Come, now, who's to break the
ice?"
In _fact_, no doubt, Mrs Monnerie was not so arbitrary a mistress of
Lady Pollacke's little ceremony as this account of it may suggest. But
that is how she impressed me at the time. She the sun, and I the
least--but I hope not the least grateful--of her obsequious planets.
Lady Pollacke at any rate set immediately to breaking the ice. She
prevailed upon a Miss Templemaine to sing. And we all sat mute.
I liked Miss Templemaine's appearance--brown hair, straight nose, dark
eyelashes, pretty fringe beneath her peak-brimmed hat. But I was a
little distressed by her song, which, so far as I could gather, was
about two persons with more or less broken hearts who were compelled to
part and said, "Ah" for a long time. Only physically distressed,
however, for though I seemed to be shaken in its strains like a linnet
in the wind, its adieux were protracted enough to enable me to examine
the rest of the company at my leisure. Their eyes, I found, were far
more politely engaged the while in gazing composedly down at the carpet
or up at the ceiling. And when I did happen to intercept a gliding
glance in my direction, it was almost as if with a tiny explosion that
it collided with mine and broke away.
Mrs Monnerie's eyelids, on the other hand, with a faintly fluttering
motion, remained closed from the first bar to the last--a method of
appreciation I experimented with for a moment but quickly abandoned;
while at the first clash of the keys, Sir Walter had dexterously
contrived to slide himself out of the room by the door at which he had
unexpectedly entered it on my first visit. Such was the social situation
when, after murmurs of gratitude and applause, Miss Templemaine took up
her gloves and rose from the piano, and Mrs Monnerie reopened herself to
the outer world with the ejaculation, "That's right. _Now_, my dear!"
The summons was to me. My moment had come, but I was prepared for it. In
my last ordeal I had broken down because I had chosen a poem that was a
kind of secret thing in my mind. So, after receiving Lady Pollacke's
letter, I had hunted about for a recitation as short, but less personal:
one, I mean, whose sentiments I didn't mind. And since Mrs Bullace had
chosen two of Mrs Browning's pieces for her triumph on New Year's Eve, I
argued that she knew the parish taste, and that I could do no better.
Of course, too, composure over what I was going to do was far more
important than the composition.
"Prepared for it," I said just now, but I meant it only in the sense
that one prepares for a cold bath. There was still the plunge. I clasped
my hands, stood up. Ceiling and floor gently rocked a little. There
seemed to be faces--faces everywhere, and every eye in them was fixed on
me. Thus completely encompassed, I could find no refuge from them, for
unfortunately my Hypnos was completely obliterated from view by the lady
with the lorgnette. So I fixed my attention, instead, on the window,
where showed a blank break of clear, fair, blue sky between the
rain-clouds of afternoon. A nervous cough from Lady Pollacke plunged me
over, and I announced my title: "The Weakest Thing," by Elizabeth
Barrett Browning:--
"Which is the weakest thing of all
Mine heart can ponder?
The sun, a little cloud can pall
With darkness yonder!
The cloud, a little wind can move
Where'er it listeth;
The wind, a little leaf above,
Though sere, resisteth!
What time that yellow leaf was green,
My days were gladder:
Now on its branch each summer-sheen
May find me sadder!
Ah, me! a _leaf_ with sighs can wring
My lips asunder--
Then is my heart the weakest thing
Itself can ponder.
Yet, Heart, when sun and cloud are pined
And drop together;
And at a blast which is not wind,
The forests wither,
Thou, from the darkening, deathly curse
To glory breakest,--
The Strongest of the Universe
Guarding the weakest."
The applause, in which Miss Templemaine generously joined, was this
time quite unconcealed, and Lady Pollacke's sister's last "Touching" had
hardly died away when Mrs Monnerie added _her_ approbation.
"Charming, perfectly charming," she murmured, eyeing me like a
turtle-dove. "But tell me, my dear, why that particular poem? It seemed
to have even less sense than usual."
"No-o; ye-es," breathed Lady Pollacke, and many heads nodded in discreet
accord.
"Doesn't--er--perhaps, Mrs Browning dwell rather assiduously on the
tragic side of life?" Mr Crimble ventured to inquire.
Lady Pollacke jerked her head, either in the affirmative or in the
negative, and looked inquiringly at Mrs Monnerie, who merely drooped her
eyes a little closer towards me and smiled, almost as if she and I were
in a little plot together.
"What do _you_ say, Miss M.?"
"Well, Mrs Monnerie," I replied a little nervously, for all eyes were
turned on me, "I don't think I know myself what _exactly_ the poem
means--the who's and what's--and what the blast was which was not wind.
But I thought it was a poem which every one would understand as much as
_possible_ of."
To judge from the way she quivered in her chair, though quite inaudibly,
Mrs Monnerie was extremely amused at this criticism.
"And that is why you chose it?"
"Well, yes," said I, "you see, when one is listening to poetry, not
reading it to oneself, I mean, one hasn't time to pry about for all its
bits of meaning, but only just to get the general--general--"
"Aroma?" suggested Mrs Monnerie.
"Yes--aroma."
"And the moral?"
The silence that hung over this little exchange was growing more and
more dense. Luckless Miss M.! She only plunged herself deeper into it by
her reply that, "Oh, there's nothing very much in the moral, Mrs
Monnerie. That's quite ordinary. At least I read about that in _prose_,
why, before I was seven!"
"Touch--" began that further voice, but was silenced by a testy lift of
Mrs Monnerie's eyelid. "Indeed!" she said, "and couldn't you, wouldn't
you, now, give me the prose version? That's more my mark."
"It was in a little nursery lesson-book of mine, called _The Observing
Eye_; letters about snails and coral insects and spiders and things----"
I paused. "A book, rather, you know, for Sundays. But my--my family and
I----"
"Oh, but do," cried Lady Pollacke in a voice I should hardly have
recognized, "I _adore_ snails."
Once more I was cornered. So I steeled myself anew, and stumbled through
the brief passage in the squat, blue book. It tells how,--
"The history of each one of the animals we have now considered,
teaches us that our kind God watches over the wants and the
pleasures of the meanest of His creatures. We see that He gives to
them, not only the sagacity and the instruments which they need for
catching their food, but that He also provides them with some means
of defending themselves. We learn by their history that the
gracious Eye watches under the mighty waters, as well as over the
earth, and that no creature can stop doing His will without His eye
seeing it."