"He prayeth best who loveth best
All creatures great and small."
This would never do. I bent double over the volume, turned back hastily
three or four leaves, and scrawled in my name under August 25th on a
leaf that bore the quotation:--
"Fie on't; ah, fie! 'tis an unweeded garden,
That grows to seed; things rank and gross in nature
Possess it merely. That it should come to this!"
and beneath the quotation, the signature of Josephine Mildred Spratte.
"Thank you, _thank_ you, she will be overjoyed," blushed the
fair-haired lady. A sudden hunger for solitude seized upon me. I rose
hastily, conscious for the first time of a headache, caused, no doubt,
by the expensive and fumey perfumes in the air. Threading my way between
the trains and flounces and trouser-legs around me, at last my adieux
were over. I was in the porch--in the carriage. The breezes of heaven
were on my cheek. My blessed parlourmaid was once more installed beside
me. Yet even now the Pollacke faces were still flocking in my mind. The
outside world was very sluggishly welling in. Looking up so long had
stiffened my neck. I fixed my eyes on the crested back buttons of Lady
Pollacke's stiff-looking coachman, and committed myself to my thoughts.
It was to a Miss M., with one of her own handkerchiefs laid over her
brows, and sprinkled with vinegar and lavender water, that Mrs Bowater
brought in supper that evening. We had one of our broken talks together,
none the less. But she persisted in desultory accounts of Fanny's
ailments in her infancy; and I had to drag in Brunswick House by myself.
At which she poked the fire and was mum. It was unamiable of her. I
longed to share my little difficulties and triumphs. Surely she was
showing rather too much of that discrimination which Lady Pollacke had
recommended.
She snorted at Mr Pellew, she snorted at my friendly parlourmaid and
even at Mrs Monnerie. Even when I repeated for her ear alone my nursery
passage from _The Observing Eye_, her only comment was that to judge
from _some_ fine folk she knew of, there was no doubt at all that God
watched closely over the pleasures of the meanest of His creatures, but
as for their doing His will, she hadn't much noticed it.
To my sigh of regret that Fanny had not been at home to accompany me,
she retorted with yet another onslaught on the fire, and the apophthegm,
that the world would be a far better place if people kept themselves
_to_ themselves.
"But Mrs Bowater," I argued fretfully, "if I did that, I should
just--distil, as you might say, quite away. Besides, Fanny would have
been far, far the--the gracefullest person there. Mrs Monnerie would
have taken a fancy to _her_, now, if you like."
Mrs Bowater drew in her lips and rubbed her nose. "God forbid," she
said.
But it was her indifference to the impression that I myself had made on
Mrs Monnerie that nettled me the most. "Why, then, who _is_ Lord B.?" I
inquired impatiently at last, pushing back the bandage that had fallen
over my eyes.
"From what I've heard of Lord B.," said Mrs Bowater shortly, "he was a
gentleman of whom the less heard of's the better."
"But surely," I protested, "that isn't Mrs Monnerie's fault any more
than Fanny's being so lovely--I mean, than I being a midget was my
father's fault? Anyhow," I hurried on, "Mrs Monnerie says I look pale,
and must go to the sea."
Mrs Bowater was still kneeling by the fire, just as Fanny used to kneel.
And, like Fanny, when one most expected an answer, she remained silent;
though, unlike Fanny, it seemed to be not because she was dreaming of
something else. How shall I express it?--there fell a kind of loneliness
between us. The severe face made no sign.
"Would you--would you miss me?" some silly self within piped out
pathetically.
"Why, for the matter of that," was her sardonic reply, "there's not very
much of you to miss."
I rose from my bed, flung down the bandage, and ran down my little
staircase. "Oh, Mrs Bowater," I said, burying my face in her camphory
skirts, "be kind to me; be kind to me! I've nobody but you."
The magnanimous creature stroked my vinegar-sodden hair with the tips of
her horny fingers. "Why there, miss. I meant no harm. Isn't all the
gentry and nobility just gaping to snatch you up? You won't want your
old Mrs Bowater very long. What's more, you mustn't get carried away by
yourself. You never know where that journey ends. If sea it is, sea it
must be. Though, Lord preserve us, the word's no favourite of mine."
"But suppose, suppose, Mrs Bowater," I cried, starting up and smiling
enrapturedly into her face, "suppose we could go together!"
"That," said she, with a look of astonishing benignity, "would be just
what I was being led to suppose was the heighth of the impossible."
At which, of course, we at once began discussing ways and means. But,
delicious though this prospect seemed, I determined that nothing should
persuade me to go unless all hope of Fanny's coming home proved vain.
Naturally, from Fanny memory darted to Wanderslore. I laughed up at my
landlady, holding her finger, and suggested demurely that we should go
off together on the morrow to see if my stranger were true to his word.
"We have kept him a very long time, and if, as you seem to think, Mrs
Monnerie isn't such a wonderful lady, you may decide that after all _he_
is a gentleman."
She enjoyed my little joke, was pleased that I had been won over, but
refused to accept my reasoning, though the topic itself was after her
heart.
"The point is, miss, not whether your last conquest is a wonderful lady,
or a grand lady, or even a perfect lady for the matter of that, but,
well, a _lady_. It's that's the kind in my experience that comes nearest
to being as uncommon a sort as any sort of a good woman."
This was a wholly unexpected vista for me, and I peered down its smooth,
green, aristocratic sward with some little awe.
"As for the young fellow who made himself so free in his manners," she
went on placidly, so that I had to scamper back to pick her up again, "I
have no doubt seeing will be believing."
"But what is the story of Wanderslore?" I pressed her none too honestly.
The story--and this time Mrs Bowater poured it out quite freely--was
precisely what I had been told already, but with the addition that the
young woman who had hanged herself in one of its attics had done so for
jealousy.
"Jealousy! But of whom?" I inquired.
"Her husband's, not her own: driven wild by his."
"You really mean," I persisted, "that she couldn't endure to live any
longer because her husband loved her so much that he couldn't bear
anybody else to love her too?"
"In some such measure," replied Mrs Bowater, "though I don't say he
didn't help the other way round. But she was a wild, scattering
creature. It was just her way. The less she cared, the more they
flocked. She couldn't _collect_ herself, and say, 'Here I am; who are
you?' so to speak. Ah, miss, it's a sickly and dangerous thing to be too
much admired."
"But you said 'scattering': was she mad a little?"
"No. Peculiar, perhaps, with her sidelong, startled look. A lovelier
I've never seen."
"You've seen her!"
"Thirty years ago, perhaps. Alive _and_ dead."
"Oh, Mrs Bowater, poor thing, poor thing."
"That you may well say, for lovely in the latter finding she was not."
My eyes were fixed on the fire, but the picture conjured up was dark
even amidst the red-hot coals. "And he? did he die too? At least his
jealousy was broken away."
"And I'm not so sure of that," said Mrs Bowater. "It's like the men to
go on wanting, even when it comes to scrabbling at a grave. And there's
a trashy sort of creature, though well-set-up enough from the outside,
that a spark will put in a blaze. I've no doubt he was that kind."
I thought of my own sparks, but questioned on: "Then there's nothing
else but--but her ghost there now?"
"Lor, _ghosts_, miss, it's an hour, I see, when bed's the proper place
for you and me. I look to be scared by that kind of gentry when they
come true."
"You don't believe, then, in _Destroyers_, Mrs Bowater?"
"Miss, it's those queer books you are reading," was the evasive reply.
"'Destroyers'! Why, wasn't it cruel enough to drive that poor
feather-brained creature into a noose!"
Candle and I and drowsing cinders kept company until St Peter's bell had
told only the sleepless that midnight was over the world. It seemed to
my young mind that there was not a day, scarcely an hour, I lived, but
that Life was unfolding itself in ever new and ravishing disguises. I
had not begun to be in the least tired or afraid of it. Smallest of
bubbles I might be, tossing on the great waters, but I reflected the
universe. What need of courage when no danger was apparent? Surely one
need not mind being different if that difference added to one's share in
the wonderful Banquet. Even Wanderslore's story was only of what
happened when the tangle was so harshly knotted that no mortal fingers
could unravel it. And though my own private existence now had Mrs
Monnerie--and all that _she_ might do and mean and be--to cope with, as
well as my stranger who was yet another queer story and as yet mine
alone, these complications were enticing. One must just keep control of
them; that was all. At which I thought a little unsteadily of Fanny's
"pin," and remembered that that pin was helping to keep her and Mr
Crimble from being torn apart.
He had seemed so peering a guest at Brunswick House. Mrs Monnerie hadn't
so much as glanced at him when he had commented on Mrs Browning's poems.
There seemed to be a shadow over whatever he did. It was as though there
could be a sadness in the very coursing of one's blood. How thankful I
felt that mine hadn't been a really flattering reply to Mrs Monnerie's
question. She was extremely arrogant, even for a younger daughter of a
lord. On the other hand, though, of course, the sheer novelty of me had
had something to do with it, she had certainly singled me out afterwards
to know what I _thought_, and in thoughts there is no particular size,
only effusiveness--no, _piercingness_. I smiled to myself at the word,
pitied my godmother for living so sequestered a life, and wondered how
and why it was that my father and mother had so obstinately shut me away
from the world. If only Fanny was coming home--what a difference she
would find in her fretful Midge! And with that, I discovered that my
feet were cold and that my headache had ached itself away.