A morning or two afterwards we set out on our homeward journey--the sea
curdling softly into foam on its stones, a solitary ship in the distance
on its dim, blue horizon. We were a dejected pair of travellers, keeping
each a solemn face turned aside at the window, thinking our thoughts,
and avoiding, as far as we could, any interchange of looks that might
betray them one to the other. For the first time in our friendship Mrs
Bowater was a little short and impatient with me over difficulties and
inconveniences which I could not avoid, owing to my size.
Her key in the lock of the door, she looked down on me in the porch, a
thin smile between nose and cheek. "No place like home there mayn't be,
miss," she began, "but----" The dark passage was certainly uninviting;
the clock had stopped. "I think I'll be calling round for Henry," she
added abruptly.
I entered the stagnant room, ran up my stairs, my heart with me--and
paused. Not merely my own ghost was there to meet me; but a past that
seemed to mutter, Never again, never again, from every object on shelf
and wall. Yet a faint, sweet, unfamiliar odour lay on the chilly air. I
drew aside the curtain and looked in. Fading on the coverlet of my bed
lay a few limp violets, ivory white and faintly rosy.
I was alone in the house, concealed now even from Mr Bowater's frigid
stare. Yet at sight of these flowers a slight vertigo came over me, and
I had to sit on my bed for a moment to recover myself.
Then I knelt down, my heart knocking against my side, and dragged from
out its hiding-place the box in which I kept my money. Gritty with the
undisturbed dust of our absence, it was locked. I drew back, my hand on
my mouth. What could be the meaning of this? My stranger had come and
gone. Had he been so stupidly punctilious that, having taken out the
twenty pounds, he had relocked an almost empty box?
Or had he, at the last moment...? This riddle distressed me so much
that instantly I was seized with a violent headache. But nothing could
be done for the present. I laid by the violets in a drawer, pushed back
the box, and, making as good a pretence at eating my supper as I could,
prepared for the night.
One by one the clocks in hall and kitchen struck out the hours, and, the
wind being in the East, borne on it came the chimes of St Peter's.
Automatically I counted the strokes, turning this way and that, as if my
life depended on this foolish arithmetic, yet ready, like Job, to curse
the day I was born. What had my existence been but a blind futility, my
thought for others but a mask of egotism and selfishness? Yet, in all
this turmoil of mind, I must have slept, for suddenly I found myself
stiff, drawn-up, and wideawake--listening to a cautious, reiterated
tapping against my window-pane. A tallow night-light burned beside me in
a saucer of water. For the first time in my life--at least since
childhood--I had been afraid to face the dark. Why, I know not; but I at
once leapt out of bed and blew out that light. The night was moonless,
but high and starry. I peered through the curtains, and a shrouded
figure became visible in the garden--Fanny's.
Curtain withdrawn, we looked each at each through the cold, dividing
glass in the gloom--her eyes, in the night-spread pallor of her skin, as
if congealed. The dark lips, with an exaggerated attempt at
articulation, murmured words, but I could catch no meaning. The face
looked almost idiotic in these contortions. I shuddered, shook my head
violently. She drew back.
Terrified that she would be gone--in my dressing-gown and slippers I
groped my way across the room and was soon, with my door open, in the
night air. She had heard me, and with a beckon of her finger, turned as
if to lead me on.
"No, no," I signalled, "I have no key." With a gesture, she drew close,
stooped, and we talked there together, muttering in the porch.
"Midgetina," she whispered, smiling bleakly, "it's this wretched money.
I must explain. I'm at my wit's end--in awful trouble--without it."
Huddled close, I wasted no time in asking questions. She must come in.
But this she flatly refused to do. Yet money, money was her one cry:
and that she must have before she saw her mother again. Not daring to
tell her that I was in doubt whether or not my savings were still in my
possession, I pushed her hand away as she knelt before me on the
uppermost step. "I must fetch it," I said.
By good fortune my money-box was not the weightiest of my grandfather's
French trunks--not the brass-bound friend-in-need of my younger days,
and it contained little but paper. I hoisted it on to my bed, and, as I
had lately seen the porters do at the railway station, contrived to push
under it and raise it on to my shoulder. Its edge drove in on my
collar-bone till I thought it must snap. Thus laden, I staggered
cautiously down the staircase, pushed slowly across the room, and, so,
out into the passage and towards the rounded and dusky oblong of the
open door.
On the threshold Fanny met me, gasping under this burden, and at sight
of me some blessed spirit within her seemed to give her pause. "No, no,"
she muttered, and drew back as if suddenly ashamed of her errand. On I
came, however, and prudence prevailed. With a sound that might have been
sigh or sob she snatched the load from me and gathered it in, as best
she could, under her cloak.
"Oh, Midgetina!" she whispered meaninglessly. "Now we must talk." And
having wedged back the catch of my door, we moved quickly and cautiously
in the direction of Wanderslore.
We climbed on up the quiet hill. The cool, fragrant, night seemed to be
luring us on and on, to swallow us up. Yet, _there_ shone the customary
stars; there, indeed, to my amazement, as if the heavenly clock of the
universe had set back its hands on my behalf, straddled the
constellation of Orion.
Come to our beech-tree, now a vast indistinguishable tent of whispering,
silky leaves, Fanny seated herself upon a jutting root, and I stood
panting before her.
"Well?" she said, with a light, desolate laugh.
"Oh, Fanny, 'well'!" I cried.
"Can't you trust me?"
"Trust you?"
"Oh, oh, mocking-bird!--with all these riches?"
I cast a glance up into the leafy branches, and seated myself opposite
to her.
"Fanny, Fanny. Have you heard?"
"'Heard,' she says!" It was her turn to play the parrot. "What am I here
for, but to hear more? But never mind; that's all over. Has mother----"
"'All over,' Fanny!" I interrupted her. "All over? But, the letters?"
"What letters?" She stared at me, and added, looking away, "Oh, mine?"
She gave out the word with a long, inexhaustible sigh. "That was all
right. He did not hide, he burned.... Neither to nor from; not even to
his mother. Every paper destroyed. I envy _her_ feelings! He just gave
up, went out, _Exit_. I envy that, too."
"Not even to you, Fanny? Not a word even to you?"
The figure before me crouched a little closer together. "They said," was
her evasive reply, "that there is melancholia in the family."
I think the word frightened me even more than its meaning.
"Melancholia," I repeated the melodious syllables. "Oh, Fanny!"
"Listen, Midgetina," her voice broke out coldly. "I can guess easily
enough what's saving up for me when I come home--which won't be yet a
while, I can assure you. I can guess, too, what your friends, Lady
Pollacke and Co., are saying about me. _Let_ them rave. That can't be
helped. I shall bear it, and try to grin. Maybe there would be worse
still, if worse were known. But your worse I won't have, not even from
you. I was not his keeper. I did _not_ play him false. I deny it. Could
I prevent him--caring for me? Was he man enough to come openly? Did he
say to his mother, 'Take her or leave her, I mean to have her'--as _I_
would have done? No, he blew hot and cold. He temporized; he--he was a
coward. Oh, this everlasting dog-fight between body and mind! Ages
before you ever crept upon the scene he pestered and pestered me--until
I have almost retched at the sound of church bells. What was it, I ask
you, but sheer dread of what the man might go and _do_ that kept me
shilly-shallying? And what's more, Miss Wren, who told me to throw the
stone? Pff, it sickens me, this paltering world. I can't and won't see
things but with my reason. My reason, I tell you. What else is a
schoolma'am for? Did he want me for _my_ sake? Who begged and begged
that his beautiful love should be kept secret? There was once a
philosopher called Plato, my dear. He poisoned Man's soul."
Flesh and spirit, Fanny must have been very tired. Her voice fluttered
on like a ragged flag.
"But listen, listen!" I entreated her. "I haven't blamed you for that,
Fanny. I swear it. I mean, you can't help _not_ loving. I know that. But
perhaps if only we had---- It's a dreadful thing to think of him sitting
there alone--the vestry--and then looking up 'with a smile.' Oh, Fanny,
with a smile! I dare hardly go into his mind--and the verger looking in.
I think of him all day."
"And I all night," came the reply, barked out in the gloom. "Wasn't the
man a Christian, then?"
"Fanny," I covered my eyes. "Don't say that. We shall both of us just
suffocate in the bog if you won't even let yourself listen to what you
are saying."
"Well," she said doggedly, "be sure you shall suffocate last, Miss
Midge. There's ample perch-room for you on Fanny's shoulder." I felt,
rather than saw, the glance almost of hatred that she cast at me from
under her brows.
"Mock as you like at me," was my miserable answer, "I have kept my word
to you--all but: and it was I who helped--Oh yes, I know that."
"Ah! 'all but,'" her agile tongue caught up the words. "And what else,
may I ask?"
I took a deep breath, with almost sightless eyes fixed on the beautiful,
mysterious glades stretching beneath us. "He came again. Why, it was not
very many days ago. And we talked and talked, and I grew tired, yes, and
angry at last. I told him you were only making use of me. You were. I
said that all we could do was just to go on loving you--and keep away. I
know, Fanny, I cannot be of any account; I don't understand very much.
But that is true."
She leaned nearer, as if incredulous, her face as tranquil in its
absorption as the planet that hung in the russet-black sky in a rift of
the leaves.
"Candid, and candid," she scoffed brokenly, and all in a gasp.
The voice trailed off. Her mouth relaxed. And suddenly my old love for
her seemed to gush back into my heart. A burning, inarticulate pity rose
up in me.
"Listen, Midgetina," she went on. "That was honest. And I can be honest,
too. I don't care _what_ you said. If you had called me the vilest word
they can set their tongue to, I'd still have forgiven you. But would you
have me give in? Go under? Have you ever _seen_ Mother Grundy? I tell
you, he haunts me--the blackness, the deadness. That outhouse! Do you
suppose I can't see inside that? He sits by my bed. I eat his shadow
with my food. At every corner in the street his black felt hat bobs and
disappears. If even he hadn't been so solemn, so insignificant!..." Her
low, torturing laugh shook under the beechen hollow.
"And I say this"--she went on slowly, as if I sat at a distance, "if
he's not very careful I shall go the same way. I can't bear that--_that_
kind of spying on me. Don't you suppose you can sin _after_ death? If
only he had given me away--betrayed me! We should at least have been
square. But that," she jerked back her head. "That's only one thing. I
had not meant to humble myself like this. You seem not to care what
humiliations I have to endure. You sit there, oh, how absurd for me,
watching and watching me, null and void and meaningless. Yet you are
human: you feel. You said you loved me--oh, yes. But touch me, come
here"--she laid her hand almost fondly on her breast--"and be humanly
generous, no. That's no more your nature than--than a changeling's.
Contamination, perhaps!"
Her eyes fretted round her, as if she had lost her sense of direction.
"And now there's this tongueless, staring ghost." She shuddered, hiding
her face in her hands. "The misery of it all."
"Fanny, Fanny," I besought her. "You know I love you." But the words
sounded cold and distant, and some deadly disinclination held me where I
was, though I longed to comfort her. "And at times, I confess it, I have
hated you too. You haven't always been very kind to me. I was trying to
cure myself. You were curing me. But still I go on--a little."
"It's useless, useless," she replied, dropping her hands into her lap
and gazing vacantly on the ground. "I can't care; I can't even cry. And
all you say is only pity. I don't want that. Would you still pity me, I
wonder, if you knew that even though I had come to take this wretched
money from you, I meant to taunt you, to accuse you of lying to me?"
"Taunt," "lying." My cheek grew hot. I drew back my head with a jerk and
stared at her. "I don't understand you."
"There. What did I say! She doesn't understand me," she cried with a
sob, as if calling on the angels to bear witness to her amazement.
"Well, then, let Fanny tell you, Miss M., whoever and whatever you may
be, that she, yes, even she, can understand that unearthliness, too. Oh,
these last days! I have had my fill of them. Take all: give nothing.
There's no other means of grace in a world like this."
"But you said 'taunt' me," I insisted, with eyes fixed on the box that
lay between the blunt-headed fronds of the springing bracken. "What did
you mean by that? I did my best. Your mother was ill. She fainted,
Fanny, when the newspaper came. I couldn't come back a single hour
earlier. So I wrote to--to a friend, sending him my keys, and asking him
to find the money for you. I know my letter reached him. Perhaps," I
hesitated, in dread of what might be hanging over our heads, "perhaps
the box is empty."
But I need not have wasted myself. The puzzle was not quite
inexplicable. For the moment Fanny's miseries seemed to have vanished.
Animation came into her face and voice and movements as she told me how,
the night before, thinking that her mother and I might have returned
from Lyme Regis, she had come tapping. And suddenly as she stood in the
garden, her face close to the glass, an utterly strange one had thrust
itself into view, and the figure of "a ghastly gloating little dwarfish
creature" had appeared in the porch.
At first she had supposed--but only for an instant--that it was myself.
"Of course, mother had mentioned him in her letters, but"--and Fanny
opened her eyes at me--"I never guessed he was, well, like _that_."
Then in her folly, and without giving him the least opportunity to
explain his presence there, she had begun railing at him, and had
accused him of forcing his way in to rob the house: "And he stood
there, hunched up, looking at me--out of my own house." The very picture
of Fanny helplessly standing there at her own door, and of these two
facing each other like that in the porch--this ridiculous end to my fine
stratagem, filled me with a miserable amusement. I leaned back my head
where I sat, shrilly and dismally laughing and laughing, until tears
sprang pricklingly into my eyes. If any listener had been abroad in the
woods that night, he would, I think, have hastened his departure.
But Fanny seemed to be shocked at my levity. She peered anxiously into
the clear night-glooms around us.
"And what!" I said, still striving to regain command over myself. "What
happened then? Oh, Fanny, not a policeman?"
But her memory of what had followed was confused, or perhaps she had no
wish to be too exact. All that I could win from her for certain was that
after an angry and bitter talk between herself and Mr Anon, he had
simply slammed my door behind him and dared her to do her worst.
"That was pretty brave of him," I remarked.
"Oh," said Fanny amiably, "I am not blaming your friend, Midgetina. He
seemed to be perfectly _competent_."
Yet even now I remained unsatisfied. If Fanny had come secretly to
Beechwood, as she had suggested, and had spent the night with a friend,
solely to hear the last tidings of Mr Crimble, what was this other
trouble, so desperate that she had lost both her wits and her temper at
finding Mr Anon there? Supposing the house had been empty? My curiosity
overcame me, and the none too ingenuous question slipped from my tongue:
"Did you want some of the money for mourning, then, Fanny?"
Her dark, pale face, above the black, enveloping cloak, met my look with
astonishment.
"Mourning!" she cried, "why, that would be the very---- No, not mourning,
Midgetina. I owe a little to a friend--and not money only," she added
with peculiar intensity. "Of course, if you have any doubts about
lending it----"
"Give, not lend," said I.
"Yes, but how are we to get at it? I can't lug _that_ thing about, and
you say _he_ has the key. Shall we _smash_ it open?"
The question came so hurriedly that I had no time to consider what,
besides money--and of course friendship--could be owed to a friend, and
especially to a friend that made her clench her teeth on the word.
"Yes, smash it open," I nodded. "It's only a box."
"But such a pretty little box!"
With knees drawn up, and shivering now after my outburst of merriment, I
watched her labours. My beloved chest might keep out moth and rust, it
was no match for Fanny. She wound up a large stone in her silk scarf. A
few heavy and muffled blows, the lock surrendered, and the starlight
dripped in like milk from heaven upon my hoard.
"Why, Midgetina," whispered Fanny, delicately counting the notes over
between her long, white fingers, "you are richer than I supposed--a
female Croesus. Wasn't it a great risk? I mean," she continued,
receiving no answer, "no wonder he was so cautious. And how much may I
take?"
It seemed as if an empty space, not of yards but of miles, had suddenly
separated us. "All you want," said I.
"But I didn't--I _didn't_ taunt you, now, did I?" she smiled at me, with
head inclined to her slim shoulder, as if in mimicry of my ivory Hypnos.
"There was nothing to taunt me about. Mayn't _I_ have a friend?"
"Why," she retorted lightly, mechanically re-counting the bits of paper,
"friend indeed! What about all those Pollackes and Monneries mother's so
full of? You will soon be flitting to quite another sphere. It's the
_old_ friends that then will be left mourning. You won't sit moon-gazing
then, my dear."
"No, Fanny," I said stubbornly, "I've had enough of that, just for the
present."
"Sst!" she whispered swiftly, raising her head and clasping the notes to
her breast beneath her cloak, "what was that?"
We listened. I heard nothing--nothing but sigh of new-born leaf, or
falling of dead twig cast off from the parent tree. It was early yet for
the nightingale.
"Only the wind," said she.
"Only the wind," I echoed scornfully, "or perhaps a weasel."
She hurriedly divided my savings and thrust my share into my lap. I
pushed it in under my arm.
"Good heavens, Midgetina!" she cried, aghast. "You are almost naked.
How on earth was I to know?"
I clutched close my dressing-gown and stumbled to my feet, trying in
vain to restrain my silly teeth from chattering. "Never mind about me,
Fanny," I muttered. "They don't waste inquests on changelings."
"My God!" was her vindictive comment, "how she harps on the word. As if
I had nothing else to worry about." With a contemptuous foot she pushed
my empty box under cover of a low-growing yew. Seemingly Wanderslore was
fated to entomb one by one all my discarded possessions.
Turning, she stifled a yawn with a sound very like a groan. "Then it's
_au revoir_, Midgetina. Give me five minutes' start.... You know I am
grateful?"
"Yes, Fanny," I said obediently, smiling up into her face.
"Won't you kiss me?" she said. "_Tout comprendre_, you know, _c'est tout
pardonner_."
"Why, Fanny," I replied; "no, thank you. I prefer plain English."
But scarcely a minute had separated us when I sprang up and pursued her
a few paces into the shadows, into which she had disappeared. To forgive
all--how piteously easy now that she was gone. She had tried to conceal
it, brazen it out, but unutterable wretchedness had lurked in every fold
of her cloak, in the accents of her voice, in every fatigued gesture.
Her very eyes had shone the more lustrously in the starlight for the
dark shadows around them. But understand her--I could not even guess
what horrible secret trouble she had been concealing from me. And beyond
that, too--a hideous, selfish dread--my guilty mind was haunted by the
fear of what she might do in her extremity.
"Fanny, Fanny," I called falsely into the silence. "Oh, come back! I
love you; indeed I love you."
How little blessed it is at times even to give. No answer came. I threw
myself on the ground. And I strove with myself in the darkness, crushing
out every thought as it floated into my mind, and sinking on and on into
the depths of unconsciousness.
"Oh, my dear, my dear," came the whisper of a tender, guttural voice in
my ear. "You are deathly cold. Why do you grieve so? She is gone.
Listen, listen. They have neither love nor pity. And I--I cannot live
without you."
I sat up, black with rage. My stranger's face glimmered obscurely in the
gloom.
"Oh, if you spy on me again!" I rasped at him, "'live without me,' what
do I care?--you can go and----"
But, thank God, the _die without me_ was never uttered. I haven't _that_
to haunt me. Some hidden strength that had been mine these few days
melted away like water. "Not now; not now!" I entreated him. I hastened
away.