So it was with a deep sigh--half of regret at being called away, and all
of joy at the thought of seeing my old friend again--that I followed
Marvell's coat-tails over the threshold. With a silly, animal-like
affection I brushed purposely against Fanny's skirts as I passed her by;
and even smirked in a kind of secret triumph at Percy Maudlen, who
happened to be idling on the staircase as I hastened from room to room.
The door of the library closed gently behind me, as if with a breath of
peace. I paused--looked across. Sir Walter was standing at the further
end of its high, daylit, solemn spaciousness. He was deep in
contemplation of a white marble bust that graced the lofty
chimney-piece--so rapt, indeed, that until I had walked up into the full
stream of sunshine from a nearer window and had announced my approach
with a cough, he did not notice my entrance. Then he flicked round with
an exclamation of welcome.
"My dear, dear young lady," he cried, beaming down on me from between
his peaked collar-tips, over his little black bow, the gold rim of his
large eye-glasses pressed to his lip, "a far--far more refreshing sight!
Would you believe it, it was the pleasing little hobby of that oiled and
curled monstrosity up there--Heliogabalus--to smother his guests in
roses--literally, smother them? Now," and he looked at me quizzically as
if through a microscope, "the one question is how have _you_ survived
what I imagine must have been a similar ordeal? Not quite at the last
gasp, I hope? _Comparatively_ happy? It's all we can hope for, my dear,
in this world."
I nodded, hungrily viewing him, meeting as best I could the bright blue
eyes, and realizing all in a moment the dark inward of my mind.
Those other eyes began thinking as well as looking. "Well, well, that's
right. And now we must have a little quiet talk before his Eminence
reappears. So our old friend Mrs Bowater has gone husband-hunting?
Gallant soul: she came to see me."
Squatted up on a crimson leather stool, I must have looked the picture
of astonishment.
"Yes," he assured me, "there are divinities that shape our ends; and Mrs
Bowater is one of them. If anything can hasten her husband's
recovery---- But never mind that. She has left me in charge. And here I
am. The question is, can we have too many trustees, guardians? Perhaps
not. Look at the Koh-i-Noor, now."
I much preferred to continue to look at Sir Walter, even though, from
the moment I had entered the room, at least five or six voices had begun
arguing in my mind. And here, as if positively in answer to them, was
his very word--_trustee_. I pounced on it like a wasp on a plum. It was
a piece of temerity that saved me from--well, as I sit thinking things
over in quiet and leisure in my old Stonecote, the house of my
childhood, I don't know what it hasn't saved me from.
"Too many trustees, Sir Walter?" I breathed. "I suppose, not--if they
are _honest_."
"But bless me, my dear young lady," his face seemed to be shining like
the sun's in mist; "whose heresies are these? Have they given you a
French maid?"
"Fleming; oh, no," I replied, laughing out, "she's a Woman of Kent, all
_but_. What I was really thinking is, that I would, if I may--and please
forgive me--very much like to show you a letter. I simply can't make
head or tail of it. But it's dreadfully--suggestive."
"My dear, I came in certain hope of being shown nothing less vital than
your heart," he retorted gallantly.
So off I went--with my visitor all encouraging smiles as he opened the
door for me--to fetch my lawyer's bombshell.
Glasses on tip of his small, hawklike nose, Sir Walter's glittering eyes
seemed to master this obscure document at one swoop.
"H'm," he said cautiously, and once more communed with the bust of
Heliogabalus. "Now what did you think of it all? Was it _worth_ six and
eightpence, do you think?"
"I couldn't think. It frightened me. 'The Shares,' you know. Whose
Shares? Of what? I'm terribly, terribly ignorant."
"Ah," he echoed, "the Shares--as the blackbird said to the Cherry Tree.
And there was nobody, you thought, to discuss the letter with? You
didn't answer it?"
"Nobody," said I, with a shake of my head, and smoothing my silk skirts
over my knees.
"Why, of course not," he sparkled. "You see how admirably things work
out. Miss Fenne, Mr Pellew, Mrs Bowater, my wife, Tom o' Bedlam, Hypnos,
Mrs Monnerie, Mr Bowater, Mrs Bowater, the Harrises, _Me_. 'Pon my word,
you'd think it was a plot. Now, supposing I keep this letter--could you
trust it with me for a while?--and supposing I see these gentlemen, and
make a few inquiries; and that in the meantime--we--we bottle the
Cherries? But first, I must have a little more information. Your father,
my dear. Let's just unbosom ourselves of all this horrible old
money-grubbing, and see exactly how we stand."
I needed no second invitation, and poured out helter-skelter all (how
very little, in my girlish folly) that I knew about my father's affairs,
and of how I had been "left."
"And Miss Fenne, now?" he peered out, as if at my godmother herself.
"Why didn't she send word to France? Where is this providential
step-grandfather, Monsieur Pierre de Ronvel, all this time? Not dead
too?"
Shamefully I had to confess that I did not know; had not even inquired.
"It is my miserable ingratitude. I just blow hot and cold; that is my
nature."
"Well, well, it may be so." He smiled at me, as if out of the distance,
with the serenest kindliness. "But you and I are going to share the
temperate zone--a cool, steady, Trade Wind."
"If only," I smiled, taking him up on this familiar ground, "if only I
could keep clear of the Tropics--and that Sargasso Sea!"
At this little sally he gleamed at me as goldenly as the spade guinea
that dangled on his waistcoat. Then he rose and surveyed one by one a
row of silent, sumptuous tomes in their glazed retreat: "The Sargasso
Sea; h'm, h'm, h'm; and one might suppose," he cast a comprehensive
glance at the taciturn shelves around and above us, "one might suppose
the tuppenny box would afford some of these a more sociable haven."
But this was Greek to me. "Mrs Monnerie is generous?" he went on,
"indulgent? Groundsel, seed, sugar, _and_ a Fleming. Yet perhaps the
door might be pushed just an inch or two farther open, eh? What I'm
meaning, my dear, is, will you perhaps wait in patience a little? And if
anything should go amiss, will you make me a promise to send just a wisp
of a word and a penny stamp to an old friend who will be doing his best?
The first lawyer, you know, was a waif that was adopted by a tortoise
and a fox. Now _I_'m going to be a mole--with its fur on the bias, as
Miss Rossetti happened to notice--and burrow. So you see, all will come
well!"
I must have been sitting very straight and awkward on my stool, and not
heeding what my face was telling.
"Is there anything else distressing you, my dear?" he asked anxiously,
almost timidly.
"Only myself," I muttered. "There doesn't seem to be any end to it all.
I grope on and on, and--the kindness only makes it worse. _Can_ there be
a riddle, Sir Walter, that hasn't any answer? I remember reading in a
book that was given me that Man 'comes into the world like morning
mushrooms.' Don't you think that's true; even, I mean, of--everybody?"
But his views on this subject were not to be shared with me for many a
long day. Our half-hour was over; and there stood Mrs Monnerie,
mushroom-shaped, it is true, but suggesting nothing of the evanescent,
as she looked in on us from the mahogany doorway.
"How d'ye do, Sir Walter," she greeted him. "If it hadn't been for an
exceedingly interesting young creature disguised, I understand, as a
Miss Bowater, I should have had the happiness of seeing you earlier. And
how is our Peri looking, do you think?"
"How is our Peri looking?" he repeated musingly, poising himself, and
eyeing me, on his flat, gleaming boots; "why, Mrs Monnerie, as I suppose
a Peri _should_ be looking--into Paradise."
"Then, my Peri," said Mrs Monnerie blandly, "ask Sir Walter to be a
complete angel, and stay to luncheon."
Mrs Monnerie, I remember, was in an unusually vivacious humour at that
meal; and devoured immense quantities of salmon mayonnaise. One might
have supposed that Fanny's influence had added a slim crescent of
silvery light to her habitual earthshine. None the less, when our guest
was gone, she seemed to subside into a shallow dejection; and I into a
much deeper. We sate on together in an uneasy silence, she pushing out
her lips, restlessly prodding Cherry with her foot, and occasionally
uttering some inarticulate sound that was certainly not intended as
conversation.
I think Mrs Monnerie was in secret a more remarkable woman than she
affected to be. However thronged a room might be, you could never be
unaware that she was in it. And in the gentle syllabub of polite
conversation her silence was like that of an ancient rock with the
whispering of the wavelets on the sands at its base. I remember once
seeing a comic picture of an old lady with a large feather in her bonnet
placidly sitting on a camp-stool beneath a pollard willow on one side of
a stream, while a furious, frothing bull stood snorting and rampaging on
the other. I think the old lady in the picture was meant to be
Britannia; but, whoever or whatever the bull might represent, Mrs
Monnerie reminded me of her. She sat more heavily, more passively, in
her chair than any one I have ever seen.
Of course--quite apart from intelligence--there must be many, many
_layers_ in society, and I cannot say at all how far Mrs Monnerie was
from the topmost. But I am sure she was able to look down on a good many
of them; while I was born always to be "looking up." I was looking up at
Mrs Monnerie now from my stool. Widespread in her chair, she had closed
her eyes, and to judge from her face, she was dreaming. It looked more
faded than usual. The puckers gave it a prunish look. Queer, contorting
expressions were floating across her features. Her soul seemed gently to
rock in them, like an empty boat at night on a dark river. In the pride
of my youth--and a little uneasy over my confidences with Sir Walter--I
examined my patroness with a slight stirring of dismay.
"Oh, no, no! never to grow old, not me," a voice was saying in me. Yet,
after all, I reminded myself, I was looking only at Mrs Monnerie's
outer case. But then, after all, _was_ it only that? "The Resurrection
of the body." One may see day at a little hole; says an old proverb--I
hope a Kentish proverb. And from Mrs Monnerie, my thoughts drifted away
to Fanny. She would grow old too. Should we know one another then?
Should we understand, and remember what it was to be young? We had had
our secrets.
I came out of these reflections to find Mrs Monnerie's sleepy eyes fixed
full upon me; and herself marvellously cheered up by her nap. She had
thought very well of Miss Bowater, she told me. So well that she not
only very soon found her a charming engagement as a morning governess to
the two little girls of a rich fashionable widow--just Fanny's
"sinecure"--but invited her to stay at No. 2 as a "companion" to
herself, until a more permanent post offered itself.
"You and I want more company," she assured me; "otherwise the flint will
use up all the tinder, or vice versa, my dear. A pretty creature and no
fool. She sings a little, too, she tells me. So we shall have music
wherever she goes."
That afternoon both flint and tinder--whichever of us was which--were
kept very busy. Mrs Monnerie fell into one of her long monologues,
broken only by Chakka's griding on his bars, and Cherry's whimpering in
his dreams. It was another kind of "white meat" for me: and though, no
doubt, I was incapable of digesting _all_ Mrs Monnerie's views on life,
society, and the world at large, I realized that if in the course of
time it might be my fate to wither and wizen away, I should still have
my own company and plenty of internal entertainment. I actually saw
myself a little bent-up, old, midget woman creeping down some stone
steps out of a porch, with a fanlight, under a street lamp. It curdled
my blood, that picture. And yet, I thought, what must be, must be. I
will _endure_ to be a little, bent-up, old, midget woman, creeping down
stone steps out of a porch with a fanlight. And I even nodded up at the
street lamp.
In response to a high-spirited scrawl from Fanny, I sent her all that
was left of my savings to purchase "those horrible little etceteras that
just feather down the scales, Midgetina. It would be saintlike of you,
and you won't miss it _there_." It was a desperate wrench to me to see
the last of my money disappear. I knew no more than the Man in the Moon
where the next was to come from.
I counted the days to Fanny's coming; and dressed myself for the
occasion in the most expensive gold and blue afternoon gown I possessed.
It must have been with a queer, mixed motive in my head. I sat waiting
for her, while beyond the gloom-hung window raged a London thunderstorm,
with dense torrents of rain. My little silver clock struck three, and
she entered my room like a black swan, tossing from her small, velveted
head, as she did so, a few beads of rain. From top to toe in deadest
black. She must have noticed my glance of wonderment.
"When you want to make a favourable impression on your social superiors,
Midgetina, the meeker you look the better," she said.
But this was not the only reason for her black. Only a day or two
before, she told me, a letter had come from her mother.... "My father is
dead." The words dropped out as if they were quite accustomed to one
another's company. But those which followed--"blood-poisoning,"
"mortification," hung up in my mind--in that interminable gallery--a
hideous picture. I could only sit and stare at the motionless figure
outlined against the sepulchral window.
"It is awful, awful, Fanny!" I managed to whisper at last. "It never
stops. One after another they all go. Think how he must have longed to
be home. And now to be buried--out there--nothing but strangers."
A vacancy came over my mind in which I seemed to see the dead Mr Bowater
of my photograph rising like Lazarus in his grave-cloths out of his
foreign tomb, and looking incredulously around him.
"And your mother, Fanny! Out there, too--those miles and miles of sea
away!"
Fanny made no movement, though I fancied that her eyes wandered uneasily
towards the door. "I quite agree, Midgetina; it's awful!" she said. "But
really and truly, it's worse for me. I think I am like my father in some
ways. Mother never really understood him. You can't _talk_ a man
different; and for that matter holding your tongue at him is not much
good either. You must just lie in wait for him with--well, with your
charms, I suppose."
The word sounded like a sneer. "Still, I don't mean to say that it was
all pure filial bliss for me when he _was_ at home, until, at least, I
grew up. Then he and I quarrelled too; but that's pleasure itself by
comparison with listening to other people at it. He did his best to
spoil me, I suppose. He wanted to make a lady of me." She turned and
smiled out of the window; her under-lip quivering and casting a faint
shadow on the smooth skin beneath. "So here I am; though I fear you
can't make ladies of _quite_ the correct consistency out of dressmaker's
clothes and a smatter of Latin. The salt will out. But there," she flung
a little gesture with her glove, "as I say, here I am."
And as if for welcome, a gleam of lightning danced at the window,
illumining us there, and a crackling peal of thunder rolled hollowly off
over the roof-tops of the square. We listened until the sound had
emptied itself into quiet; and only the rain in the gutters gurgled and
babbled.
"Do you know," she went on, with a far-away challenging thrill in her
low, mournful voice, "I don't think I have a solitary relation left in
the world now--except mother. 'They are all gone into a world of
light'--though I've now and then suspected that a few of the
disreputable ones have been buried alive. There's nothing very dreadful
in that. Life consists, of course, in shedding various kinds of
skin--and tanning the remainder."
Fanny, then, _was_ unaware that Mrs Bowater was not her real mother. And
I think she never guessed it.
"Nor have I," I said, "not one." As I looked at it there, it seemed a
fact more curious than tragic. Besides, in the brooding darkness of that
room it was Fanny and I who were strange, external beings, not the
memoried phantoms of my mother and father. We had still to go on, to
live things out. "So you see, Fanny," I continued, after a pause, "I do
know what it means--a little; and we must try more than ever to be
really one another's friend, mustn't we? I mean, if you think I can be."
"Why, I owe you pounds and pounds," cried Fanny gaily, pushing back her
handkerchief into her bodice. "Here we are--not quite in the same box,
perhaps; still strangers and pilgrims. Of course we must help one
another.... Just think of this house! The servants! The folly of it, and
all for Madame Monnerie--though I wouldn't mind being in her shoes, even
for one season. Socialism, my dear, is all a question of shoes. And this
is Poppetkin's little boudoir? A pygmy palace, my dear, and if only the
lightning would last a little longer I might get a real glimpse of that
elfin little exquisite over there in her beautiful blue brocade. But
then; it will be roses all the way with you, Miss M. You are
independent, and valued for yourself alone."
"How different people are, Fanny. You always think first of the use of a
thing, and I, stupidly, just of it--itself."
"Do we?" she said indifferently, and rose from her chair. "Anyhow I'm
here to be of use. And who," she remarked, with a little yawn, as she
came to a pause again beside the streaming window. "Who was that prim,
colourless girl with the pale blue eyes? Engaged to be married."
"But Fanny, she had her gloves on that morning, I remember it as clearly
as--as I always remember everything where you are: how could you
possibly tell that Susan Monnerie was engaged?"
It was quite a simple problem, Fanny tranquilly assured me: "The ring
bulged under the suede."
Her scornfulness piqued me a little. "Anyhow," I retorted, "Susan's eyes
are not _pale_ blue. They are almost cornflower--chicory colour; like
the root of a candle-flame."
"Please, Midgetina," Fanny begged me, "don't let me canker your new
adoration. Perhaps you preened your pretty feathers in them when they
were fixed on the demigod. 'Susan'! I thought all the Susans perished in
the 'sixties, or had fled down the area. And who is _he_?" But she did
not follow up her question. All things come to him who waits, she had
rambled on inconsequently, if he waits long enough; and no doubt God
would temper the wind to the shorn orphan even if she did look a perfect
frump in mourning.
"You know you could never look a frump," I replied indignantly, "even if
you hadn't a rag on."
Fanny shrugged her dainty shoulders. "Alas!" she said.
But her "orphan" had brought me back with a guilty shock to what, no
doubt, was an extremely fantastic panorama of Buenos Ayres; and that
swiftly back again to Mr Crimble. For an instant or two I looked away.
Perhaps it was my caution that betrayed me.
"It's no use, Midgetina," she sang across at me from her window.
"Whether it's because the chemical reactions of your pat little brain
are more intense than ordinary people's, or because you and I are _en
rapport_, I can't say. But there's one thing we must agree upon at once:
never, never again to mention his name--at least in _this_ house. The
Crimble chapter is closed."
Closed indeed. But so sharp were her tones I hadn't the courage to warn
her that even Susan had read most of it. Fanny came near, and, stooping
as Susan had stooped, began fidgeting with the button of my electric
chandelier. The little lamps shone wanly in our faces in the
cloud-darkened room.
"You see, my dear," she said playfully, "you think me all mockery and
heartlessness. And no doubt you are right. But I want ease and security:
just like that--as if I were writing an essay--'ease and security.' I
don't care a dash about affection--at least without the aforesaid E. and
S. I intend to please Mrs Monnerie, and she is going to be grateful to
me. Don't think I am being 'candid.' I should have no objection to
saying just the same thing to Mrs Monnerie herself: she'd enjoy it.
Wait, you precious inchy image--wait until you need a sup of fatted
calf's-foot jelly, not because you are sick of husks, but because you
are deadly poor. Then you will understand. These sumptuosities! Wait
till they haven't a ha'penny in their pockets, real or moral, for their
next meal. They only look at things--if that; they can't know what they
are. Even to be decently charitable one must have been a beggar--and
cursed the philanthropists. Oh, I know: and Fanny's race is for
Success."
"But surely, Fanny, a thing is its looks, if only you look long enough.
And I should just like to hear you talking if you were in my place.
Besides, what is the use of success--in the end, I mean? You should see
some of the actresses and singers and authors and that kind of thing Mrs
Monnerie knows? You wouldn't have realized the actresses were even
beautiful unless you had been told so. Why, you couldn't even say the
_World_ is a success, except in the country. What is truly the use of
it, then?" I had grown so eager in my argument that I had got up from
my chair.
"The use, you poor thing?" laughed Fanny; "why, only as a kind of
face-cream to one's natural pride."
The day was lightening now; but at that the whole darkness of my own
situation drew close about me. Success, indeed. What was I? Nothing but
a halfpennyless, tame pet in No. 2. What salve could restore to me _my_
natural pride?