Then by chance I found hidden in my star-book the photograph of an infant in arms and of a pensive, ringleted woman, who, in spite of this morsel in her lap, seemed in her gaze out of nowhere to be vaguely afraid. On the back was scrawled in pencil: ‘F.: six weeks’ – and an extremely cross six weeks ‘F.’ looked. For some inexplicable reason I pushed back this lady’s photograph into the book, and said nothing about it. The suspicion had entered my mind that Fanny was only a daughter by marriage. I sank into a kind of twilight reflection at this. It seemed, in an odd fashion, to make Mrs. Bowater more admirable, her husband more formidable, and the unknown Fanny more mysterious and enigmatical. At the first opportunity I crept my way to the subject and asked my landlady if she could show me a portrait of her daughter.
The photograph she produced from upstairs had in fading almost become a caricature. It had both blackened and greyed. It depicted herself many years younger but hardly less grim in appearance in full flounced skirts, Fanny as a child of about five or six standing at her knee, and Mr. Bowater leaning with singular amenity behind her richly-carved chair, the fingers of his left hand resting disposedly on her right shoulder. I looked anxiously at the child. It was certainly crosspatch ‘F.’, and a far from prepossessing little creature with that fixed, level gaze. Mr. Bowater, on the other hand, had not yet adopted the wild and rigid stare which dominated the small parlour.
Mrs. Bowater surveyed the group with a lackadaisical detachment. ‘Fractious! – you can see the tears on her cheeks for all what the young man could do with his woolly lamb and grimaces. It was the heyday.’
What was the heyday, I wondered. ‘Was Mr. Bowater attached to her?’ seemed a less intrusive question.
‘Doted,’ she replied, polishing the glass with her apron. ‘But not to much purpose – with an eye for every petticoat.’
This seemed a difficult conversation to maintain. ‘Don’t you think, Mrs. Bowater,’ I returned zealously, ‘there is just the faintest tinge of Mr. Bowater in the chin? I don’t’, I added candidly, ‘see the faintest glimpse of you.’
Mrs. Bowater merely tightened her lips.
‘And is she like that now?’ I asked presently.
Mrs. Bowater re-wrapped frame and photograph in their piece of newspaper. ‘It’s looks, miss, that are my constant anxiety: and you may be thankful for being as you might say preserved from the world. What’s more, the father will out, I suppose, from now till Day of Judgment.’
How strangely her sentiments at times resembled my godmother’s, and yet how different they were in effect. My thoughts after this often drifted to Mrs. Bowater’s early married life. And so peculiar are the workings of the mind that her husband’s star-chart, his sleek appearance as a young father, the mysterious reference to the petticoats, awoke in me an almost romantic interest in him. To such a degree that it gradually became my custom to cast his portrait a satirical little bow of greeting when I emerged from my bedroom in the morning, and even to kiss my hand to his invisible stare when I retired for the night. To all of which advances he made no reply.
My next bout of star-gazing presaged disaster. I say star-gazing, for it is true that I stole out after honest folk are abed only when the heavens were swept and garnished. But, as a matter of fact, my real tryst was with another Self. Had my lot been different, I might have sought that self in Terra del Fuego or Malay, or in a fine marriage. Mine was a smaller world. Bo-peep I would play with shadow and dew-bead. And if Ulysses, as my father had read me, stopped his ears against the Sirens, I contrariwise unsealed mine to the ethereal airs of that bare wintry solitude.
The spectral rattle of the parched beechleaves on the saplings, the faintest whisper in the skeleton bracken set me peeping, peering, tippeting; and the Invisibles, if they heeded me, merely smiled on me from their grave, all-seeing eyes. As for the first crystal sparkling of frost, I remember in my folly I sat down (bunched up, fortunately, in honest lamb’s-wool) and remained, minute by minute, unstirring, unwinking, watching as if in my own mind the exquisite small fires kindle and flit from point to point of lichen and bark, until – out of this engrossment – little but a burning icicle was left to trudge along home.
It was December 23rd. I remember that date, and even now hardly understand the meaning or intention of what it brought me. Love for the frosty, star-roofed woods, that was easy. And yet what if – though easy – it is not enough? I had lingered on, talking in my childish fashion – a habit never to leave me – to every sudden lovely morsel in turn, when, to my dismay, I heard St. Peter’s clock toll midnight. Was it my fancy that at the stroke, and as peacefully as a mother when she is alone with her sleeping children, the giant tree sighed, and the whole night stilled as if at the opening of a door? I don’t know, for I would sometimes pretend to be afraid merely to enjoy the pretending. And even my small Bowater astronomy had taught me that as the earth has her poles and equator, so these are in relation to the ecliptic and the equinoctial. So too, then, each one of us – even a mammet like myself – must live in a world of the imagination which is in everlasting relation to its heavens. But I must keep my feet.
I waved adieu to the woods and unseen Wanderslore. As if out of the duskiness a kind of reflex of me waved back; and I was soon hastening along down the hill, the only thing stirring in the cold, white, luminous dust. Instinctively, in drawing near, I raised my eyes to the upper windows of Mrs. Bowater’s crouching house. To my utter confusion. For one of them was wide open, and seated there, as if in wait for me, was a muffled figure – and that not my landlady’s – looking out. All my fine boldness and excitement died in me. I may have had no apprehension of telling Mrs. Bowater of my pilgrimage, but not having told her, I had a lively distaste of being ‘found out’.
Stiff as a post, I gazed up through the shadowed air at the vague, motionless figure – to all appearance completely unaware of my presence. But there is a commerce between minds as well as between eyes. I was perfectly certain that I was being thought about, up there.
For a while my mind faltered. The old childish desire gathered in me – to fly, to be gone, to pass myself away. There was a door in the woods. Better sense, and perhaps a creeping curiosity, prevailed, however. With a bold front, and as if my stay in the street had been of my own choosing, I entered the gate, ascended my ‘Bateses’, and so into the house. Then I listened. Faintly at last sounded a stealthy footfall overhead; the window was furtively closed. Doubt vanished. In preparation for the night’s expedition I had lain down in the early evening for a nap. Evidently while I had been asleep, Fanny had come home. The English mistress had caught her mother’s lodger playing truant!
Chapter Eleven
If it was the child of wrath in me that hungered at times after the night, woods, and solitude to such a degree that my very breast seemed empty within me; it was now the child of grace that prevailed. With girlish exaggeration I began torturing myself in my bed with remorse at the deceit I had been practising. Now Conscience told me that I must make a full confession the first thing in the morning; and now that it would be more decent to let Fanny ‘tell on me’. At length thought tangled with dreams, and a grisly night was mine.
What was that? It was day; Mrs. Bowater was herself softly calling me beyond my curtains, and her eye peeped in. Always before I had been up and dressed when she brought in my breakfast. Through a violent headache I surveyed the stooping face. Something in my appearance convinced her that I was ill, and she insisted on my staying in bed.
‘But Mrs. Bowater …’ I expostulated.
‘No, no, miss; it was in a butt they drowned the sexton. Here you stay; and its being Christmas Eve, you must rest and keep quiet. What with those old books and all, you have been burning the candle at both ends.’
Early in the afternoon on finding that her patient was little better, my landlady went off to the chemist’s to get me some physic; I could bear inactivity no longer, and rose and dressed. The fire was low, the room sluggish, when in the dusk, as I sat di
smally brooding in my chair, the door opened and a stranger came in with my tea. She was dressed in black, and was carrying a light. With that raised in one hand, and my tea-tray held between finger and thumb of the other, she looked at me with face a little sidelong. Her hair was dark above her clear pale skin, and drawn, without a fringe, smoothly over her brows. Her eyes were almost unnaturally light in colour. I looked at her in astonishment; she was new in my world. She put the tray on my table, poked the fire into a blaze, blew out her candle at a single puff from her pursed lips, and seating herself on the hearthrug, clasped her hands round her knees.
‘Mother told me you were in bed, ill,’ she said, ‘I hope you are better.’
I assured her in a voice scarcely above a whisper that I was quite well again.
She nestled her chin down and broke into a little laugh: ‘My! how you startled me!’
‘Then it was you,’ I managed to say.
‘Oh, yes; it was me, it was me.’ The words were uttered as if to herself. She stooped her cheek over her knees again, and smiled round at me. ‘I’m not telling,’ she added softly.
Her tone, her expression, filled me with confusion. ‘But please do not suppose’, I began angrily, ‘that I am not my own mistress here. I have my own key – ‘
‘Oh, yes, your own mistress,’ she interrupted suavely, ‘but you see that’s just what I’m not. And the key! why, it’s just envy that’s gnawing at the roots. I’ve never, never in my life seen anything so queer.’ She suddenly raised her strange eyes on me. ‘What were you doing out there?’
A lie perched on my lip; but the wide, light eyes searched me through. ‘I went’, said I, ‘to be in the woods – to see the stars’; then added in a rather pompous voice, ‘only the southern and eastern constellations are visible from this poky little window.’
There was no change in the expression of the two eyes that drank me in. ‘I see; and you want them all. That’s odd, now,’ she went on reflectively, stabbing again at the fire; ‘they have never attracted me very much – angels’ tin-tacks, as they say in the Sunday Schools. Fanny Bowater was looking for the moon.’
She turned once more, opened her lips, showing the firm row of teeth beneath them, and sang in a low voice the first words, I suppose, of some old madrigal: ‘“She enchants me”. And if I had my little key, and my little secret door … But never mind. “Telltale Tit, her tongue shall be slit.” It’s safe with me. I’m no sneak. But you might like to know, Miss M., that my mother thinks the very world of you. And so do I, for that matter; though perhaps for different reasons.’
The calm, insolent words infuriated me, and yet her very accents, with a curious sweet rasp in them, like that in a skylark’s song when he slides his last twenty feet from the clouds, were an enchantment. Ever and always there seemed to be two Fannies; one visible, her face; the other audible, her voice. But the enchantment was merely fuel for the flames.
‘Will you please remember’, I broke out peremptorily, ‘that neither myself nor what I choose to do is any affair of yours. Mrs. Bowater is an excellent landlady; you can tell her precisely what you please; and – and’ (I seemed to be choking) ‘I am accustomed to take my meals alone.’
The sidelong face grew hard and solemn in the firelight, then slowly turned, and once more the eyes surveyed me under lifted brows – like the eyes of an angel, empty of mockery or astonishment or of any meaning but that of their beauty. ‘There you are,’ she said. ‘One talks like one human being to another, and I should have thought you’d be grateful for that; and this is the result. Facts are facts; and I’m not sorry for them, good or bad. If you wish to see the last of me, here it is. I don’t thrust myself on people – there’s no need. But still; I’m not telling.’
She rose, and with one light foot on my fender, surveyed herself for a moment with infinite composure in the large looking-glass that spanned the chimneypiece.
And I? – I was exceedingly tired. My head was burning like a coal; my thoughts in confusion. Suddenly I lost control of myself and broke into an angry, ridiculous sobbing. I simply sat there, my face hidden in my dry, hot hands, miserable and defeated. And strange Fanny Bowater, what did she do?
‘Heavens!’ she muttered scornfully, ‘I gave up snivelling when I was a baby.’ Then voice, manner, even attitude suddenly changed – ‘And there’s mother!’
When Mrs. Bowater knocked at my door, though still in my day-clothes, I was in bed again, and my tea lay untasted on a chair beside it.
‘Dear, dear,’ she said, leaning anxiously over me, ‘your poor cheeks are red as a firebrand, miss. Those chemists daren’t put a nose outside their soaps and tooth powders. It must be Dr. Phelps to-morrow if you are no better. And as plump a little Christmas pudding boiling for you in the pot as ever you could see! Tell me, now; there’s no pain anywhere – throat, limbs, or elsewhere?’
I shook my head. She sprinkled a drop or two of eau de Cologne on my sheet and pillow, gently bathed my temples and hands, kindled a night-light, and left me once more to my own reflections.
They were none too comfortable. One thing only was in my mind – Fanny Bowater, her face, her voice, every glance and intonation, smile, and gesture. That few minutes’ talk seemed now as remote and incredible as a nightmare. The stars, the woods, my solitary delights in learning and thinking were all suddenly become empty and meaningless. She despised me: and I hated her with a passion I cannot describe.
Yet in the midst of my hatred I longed for her company again, distracting myself with the sharp and clever speeches I might have made to her, and picturing her confounded by my contempt and indifference. But should I ever see her alone again? At every sound and movement in the house, which before had so little concerned me, I lay listening, with held breath. I might have been a mummy in a Pyramid hearkening after the fluttering pinions of its spirit come back to bring it life. But no tidings came of the stranger.
When my door opened again, it was only to admit Mrs. Bowater with my supper – a bowl of infant’s gruel, not the customary old lady’s rusk and milk. I laughed angrily within to think that her daughter must have witnessed its preparation. Even at twenty, then, I had not grown used to being of so little consequence in other people’s eyes. Yet, after all, who ever quite succeeds in being that? My real rage was not that Fanny had taken me as a midget, but as such a midget. Yet can I honestly say that I have ever taken her as mere Fanny, and not as such a Fanny?
The truth is she had wounded my vanity, and vanity may be a more fractious nursling even than a wounded heart. Tired and fretful, I had hardly realized the flattering candour of her advances. Even her promises not to ‘tell’ of my night-wanderings, implied that she trusted in my honour not to tell of her promise. I thought and thought of her. She remained an enigma. Cold and hard – no one had ever spoken to me like that before. Yet her voice – it was as if it had run about in my blood, and made my eyes shine. A mere human sound to set me sobbing! More dangerous yet, I began to think of what Miss Bowater must be thinking of me, until, exhausted, I fell asleep, to dream that I was a child again and shut up in one of Mrs. Ballard’s glass jars, and that a hairy woman who was a kind of mixture of Mrs. Bowater and Miss Fenne, was tapping with a thimbled finger on its side to increase my terror.
Next morning, thank Heaven, admitted me to my right mind again. I got out of bed and peered through the window. It was Christmas Day. A thin scatter of snow was powdering down out of the grey sky. The fields were calm and frozen. I felt, as I might say, the hunger in my face, looking out. There was something astonishingly new in my life. Everything familiar had become a little strange.
Overnight, too, someone – and with mingled feelings I guessed who – must have stolen into my room while I lay asleep. Laid out on a bedside chair was a crimson padded dressing-jacket, threaded with gold, a delicate piece of needle-work that would have gladdened my grandfather. Rolled up on the floor beside it was a thick woollen mat, lozenged in green and scarlet, and just of a size to spread besid
e my bed. These gifts multiplied my self-reproaches and made me acutely homesick.
What should I do? Beneath these thoughts was a quiet fizz of expectation and delight, like water under a boat. Pride and common sense fought out their battle in my mind. It was pride that lost the day. When Mrs. Bowater brought in my breakfast, she found her invalid sitting up in Fanny’s handsome jacket, and the mat laid over the bedrail for my constant contemplation. Nor had I forgotten Mrs. Bowater. By a little ruse I had found out the name and address of a chemist in the town, and on the tray beside my breakfast was the fine bottle of lavender water which I had myself ordered him to send by the Christmas Eve post.
‘Well there, miss, you did take me in that time,’ she assured me. ‘And more like a Valentine than a Christmas present; and its being the only scent so-called that I’ve any nose for.’
Clearly this was no occasion for the confessional, even if I had had a mind to it. But I made at least half a vow never to go stargazing again without her knowledge. My looks pleased her better, too, though not so much better as to persuade her to countermand Dr. Phelps. Her yellowish long hand with its worn wedding ring was smoothing my counterpane. I clutched at it, and, shame-stricken, smiled up into her face.
‘You have made me very happy,’ I said. At this small remark, the heavy eyelids trembled, but she made no reply.
‘Did,’ I managed to inquire at last, ‘did she have any breakfast before she went for the doctor?’
‘A cup of tea,’ said Mrs. Bowater shortly. A curious happiness took possession of me.
‘She is very young to be teaching; not much older than I am.’
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