Truly this stranger was making life very interesting, even if he was only prodding over its dead moles. And truly I was an incorrigibly romantic young lady; for when, with a glance at my grandfather’s watch, I discovered that it was long past noon, and told him I must be gone; without a single moment’s hesitation, I promised to come again to meet him on the very first fine morning that showed. So strong within me was the desire to do so, that a profound dismay chilled my mind when, on turning about at the end of the terrace – for he had shown no inclination to accompany me – I found that he was already out of sight. I formally waved my hand towards where he had vanished in case he should be watching; sighed, and went on.
It was colder under the high, sunless trees. I gathered my cloak closer around me, and at that discovered not only that Miss Austen had been left behind, but that Fanny’s letter still lay in undisturbed concealment beneath its stone. It was too late to return for them now, and a vague misgiving that had sprung up in me amid the tree-trunks was quieted by the assurance that for these – rather than for any other reason – I must return to Wanderslore as soon as I could. So, in remarkably gay spirits, I hastened light-heeled on my way in the direction of civilized society, of nefarious Man, and of my never-to-be-blessed-too-much Mrs. Bowater.
Chapter Twenty-Three
My landlady was already awaiting me at the place appointed, and we walked off together towards the house. It had been a prudent arrangement, for we met and passed at least half a dozen strangers before we arrived there, and one and all by the unfeigned astonishment with which they turned to watch our two figures out of sight (for I stooped once or twice, as if to tie my shoelace, in order to see), clearly proved themselves to belong to that type of humanity to which my new acquaintance had referred frigidly as THEY. Vanity of vanities, when one old loitering gentleman did not so much as lift an eyelid at me – he was so absorbed in his own thoughts – I felt a pang of annoyance.
As soon as I was safely installed in my own room again, I confided in Mrs. Bowater a full account of my morning’s adventure. Not so much because I wished to keep free of any further deceit, as because I simply couldn’t contain myself, and must talk of my Stranger. She heard me to the end without question, but with an unusual rigidity of features. She compressed her lips even tighter before beginning her catechism.
‘What was the young man’s name,’ she inquired, ‘and where did he live?’
My hope had been that she herself would be able to supply these little particulars. With a blank face, I shook my head: ‘We just talked of things in general.’
‘I see,’ she said, and glanced at me, as if over her spectacles. Her next question was even less manageable. ‘Was the young fellow a gentleman?’
Alas! she had fastened on a flaw in my education. This was a problem absolutely new to me. I thought of my father, of Mr. Waggett, Dr. Grose, Dr. Phelps, the old farmer in the railway train, of Sir Walter Pollacke, my bishop, Heathcliff Mr. Bowater, Mr. Clodd, even Henry – or rather all these male phantoms went whisking across the back of my mind, calling up every other two-legged creature of the same gender within sight or hearing. Meanwhile, Mrs. Bowater stood like Patience on her Brussels carpet, or rather like Thomas de Torquemada, watching these intellectual contortions.
‘Well, really, do you know, Mrs. Bowater,’ I was forced to acknowledge at last, with a sigh and a smile, ‘I simply can’t say. I didn’t think of it. That seems rather on his side, doesn’t it? But to be quite, quite candid, perhaps not a gentleman; not exactly, I mean.’
‘Which is no more than I supposed,’ was her comment, ‘and if not – and any kind of not, miss – what was he, then? And if not, why, you can never go there again!’
‘Indeed, but I must,’ I said, as if to myself.
‘With your small knowledge of the world,’ she retorted unmovedly, ‘you must, if you please, be guided by those with more. Who isn’t a gentleman couldn’t be desirable company if chanced on like a stranger in a young lady’s lonely rambles. And how tall did you say? And what’s more,’ she continued, not pausing for an answer, and gathering momentum on her way, ‘if he is a gentleman, I’d better come along with you, miss, and see for myself.’
A rebellious and horrified glance followed her retreating figure out of the room. So this was the reward for being open and aboveboard. What a ridiculous figure I should cut, tippeting along behind my landlady. What would my stranger think of me? What would she think of him? Was he a ‘gentleman’? To decide whether or not the Spirit of Man is an evil spirit had been an easy problem by comparison. Gentle man – why, of course, self muttered in shame to self convicted of yet another mean little snobbery. He had been almost absurdly gentle – had treated me as if I were an angel rather than a young woman.
But the nettlerash produced by Mrs. Bowater’s bigotry was not to be so easily allayed as all that. It had invited yet another kind of THEM in. An old, green, rotting board hung over the wicket gate that led up the stony path into Wanderslore – ‘Trespassers will be prosecuted’. Why couldn’t one put boards up in the Wanderslore of one’s mind? My landlady had never inquired if Lady Pollacke was a gentlewoman. How mechanical things were in their unexpectedness. That morning I had gone out to free myself from the Crimble tangle, merely to return with a few more knots in the skein.
A dead calm descended on me. I was adrift in the Sargasso Sea – in the Doldrums, and had dropped my sextant overboard. Even a long stare at the master-mariner on the wall gave me no help. Yet I must confess that these foolish reflections made me happy. I would share them with Fanny – perhaps with the ‘gentleman’ himself, some day. I leaned over the side of my small vessel, more deeply interested in the voyage than I had been since Pollie had carried me out of my girlhood into the Waggett’s wagonette. And as I sat there, simmering over these novelties, a voice, clear as a cockcrow, exclaimed in my mind, ‘If father hadn’t died, I’d have had nothing of all this.’ My hands clenched damp in my lap at this monstrosity. But I kept my wits and managed to face it. ‘If father hadn’t died’, I answered myself, ‘you don’t know what would have happened. And if you think that, because I am happy now, anything could make me not wish him back, it’s a lie.’ But I remained a little less comfortable in mind.
The evening post brought me a letter and a registered parcel. I turned them over and over, examining the unfamiliar handwriting, the bright red seals; but all in vain. In spite of my hard-won knotlore, I was still kneeling over the package and wrestling with string and wax, when Mrs. Bowater, folding her letter away in its envelope, announced baldly: ‘She’s not coming home, it seems, at all these holidays, having been invited by some school friend into the country – Merriden, or some such place. Not that you might expect Fanny to write plain, when she doesn’t mean plain.’
‘Oh, Mrs. Bowater! Not at all?’
Cold fogs of disappointment swept in, blotting out my fool’s paradise. That inward light without which life is dark indeed died in eclipse. The one thought and desire which I now realized I had been feeding on from hour to hour, had been snatched away. To think that they had been nothing but waste. ‘Oh, Fanny,’ I whispered bitterly to myself, ‘oh, Fanny!’ But the face I lifted to her mother showed only defiance.
‘Well,’ I muttered, ‘who cares? Let’s hope she will enjoy herself better than mooning about in this dingy old place.’
Mrs. Bowater merely continued to look quietly over the envelope at me.
‘Oh, but you know, Mrs. Bowater,’ I quaked miserably, ‘it’s not dingy to me. Surely a promise is a promise, whoever you make it to!’
With that I stooped my face over the stuffy-smelling brown paper, and attacked the last knot with my teeth. With eyes still a little asquint with resentment I smoothed away the wrappings from the shape within. Then every thought evaporated in a sigh. For there, of a delicate veined fairness against the white paper, lay a minute copy in ivory of none but lovely Hypnos. Half-blindly I stared at it – lost in a serenity beyond all hope of my
poor, foolish life – then lifted it with both hands away from my face: ‘A present – to me! Look!’ I cried, ‘look!’
Mrs. Bowater settled her face over the image as if it had been some tropical and noxious insect I was offering for her inspection. But I thrust it into her hand and opened my letter:
MY DEAR YOUNG LADY. – I am no poet, and therefore cannot hope to share with you the music of ‘the flaming drake’, but we did share my Hypnos. Only a replica, as I told you, but none the less one of the most beautiful things I possess. Will you, then, give me the pleasure of accepting the contents of the little package I am having posted with this – as a small token of the delight your enthusiasm gave.
Yours most sincerely,
WALTER POLLACKE
P.S. – Lady Pollacke tells me that we may perhaps again look forward to your company to tea in a few days; please do not think, then, of acknowledging this little message by post.
But I did acknowledge it, not with that guardedness of the feelings which Miss Austen seemed to recommend, but from the very depths of my heart. Next morning came Lady Pollacke’s invitation:
DEAR MISS M. – I hasten to renew my invitation of last Thursday. Will you give us the pleasure of your company at tea on Friday afternoon? Mrs. Monnerie – the younger daughter, as you will remember, of Lord B. – has expressed an exceedingly warm wish to make your acquaintance, and Mr. Pellew, who is giving us a course of sermons at St. Peter’s, during Holy Week, will also be with us. May we, perhaps, share yet another of those delightful recitations?
Believe me,
Yours sincerely,
LYDIA PRESTON POLLACKE
I searched my memory for memorial of Lord B.; alas, in vain. This lapse made the thought of meeting his younger daughter a little alarming. Yet I must confess to having been pleasantly flattered by these attentions. Even the black draught administered by Fanny, who had not even thought it worth her while to send me a word of excuse or explanation, lost much of its bitterness. I asked Mrs. Bowater if she supposed I might make Sir Walter a little present in return for his. Would it be a proper thing to do, would it be ladylike?
‘What’s meant kindly,’ she assured me, after a moment’s reflection, ‘even if taken amiss, which, to judge from his letter, it won’t be, is nothing to be thought of but only felt.’
This advice decided me, and early on my Friday morning I trimmed and freshened up as well as I could one of my grandfather’s dwarf cedar-trees which, in the old days, had stood on my window balcony. Its branches were now a little dishevelled, but it was still a fresh and pretty thing in its grey-green pot.
Chapter Twenty-Four
With this dwarf tree in my arms, when came the auspicious afternoon, I followed Lady Pollacke’s parlour-maid – her neat little bonnet tied with a bow under her ear – down my Bateses, and was lifted by Mrs. Bowater into the carriage. How demure a greeting we exchanged when, the maid and I having seated ourselves together under its hood, my glance fell upon the bloodstone brooch pinned conspicuously for the occasion near the topmost button of her trim, outdoor jacket. It gave me so much confidence that even the sudden clatter of conversation that gushed over me in the doorway of Lady Pollacke’s drawing-room failed to be disconcerting. The long, flowery room was thronged with company, and everybody was talking to everybody else. On my entry, as if a seraph had spoken, the busy tongues sank instantly to a hush. I stood stilettoed by a score of eyes. But Sir Walter had been keeping good watch for me, and I at once delivered my great pot into his pink, outstretched hands.
‘My dear, dear young lady,’ he cried, stooping plumply over me, ‘the pleasure you give me! A little masterpiece! and real old Nankin. Alas, my poor Hypnos!’
‘But it is me, me,’ I cried. ‘If I could only tell you!’
A murmur of admiration rippled across the room, in which I distinctly heard a quavering, nasal voice exclaim, ‘Touching, touching!’
The words – as if a pleasant sheep had bleated – came, I fancied, from a rather less fashionable lady with a lorgnette, who was sitting almost alone on the outskirts of the room, and who I afterwards discovered was only a widowed sister of Lady Pollacke’s. But I could spare her but one startled glance, for, at the same moment, I was being presented to the younger daughter of Lord B. Mrs. Monnerie sat amply reclining in an immense gilded chair – a lady with a large and surprising countenance. Lady Pollacke’s ‘younger’ had misled my fancy. Far from being the slim, fair, sylphlike thing of my expectations, Mrs. Monnerie cannot have been many years the junior of my godmother, Miss Fenne.
Her skin had fallen into the queerest folds and puckers. Her black swimming eye under a thick eyebrow gazed down her fine, drooping nose at me with a dwelling expression at once indulgent, engrossed, and amused. With a gracious sweep of her hand she drew aside her voluminous silk skirts so that I could at once instal myself by her side in a small, cane-seated chair that had once, I should fancy, accommodated a baby Pollacke, and had been brought down from the nursery for this occasion.
Thus, then, I found myself – the exquisitely self-conscious centre of attention – striving to nibble a biscuit, nurse my child-size handleless teacup, and respond to her advances at one and the same time.
Lady Pollacke hung like a cloud at sunset over us both, her cheek flushed with the effort to be amused at every sentence which Mrs. Monnerie uttered and to share it as far as possible with the rest of her guests.
‘A little pale, eh?’ mused Mrs. Monnerie, brooding at me with her great eye. ‘She wants sea-air; sea-air – just to tinge that roseleaf porcelain. I must arrange it.’
I assured her that I was in the best of health.
‘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 teacup 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, red-hot 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. Monneri
e 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.
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