But two moments stand vividly out of its unreality – and each of them to my shame. A small, wreathed, silver-gilt dish was placed before me. Automatically I thrust my spoon into its jelly, and pecked at the flavourless morsels. Sheer nervousness had deprived me of my sense of taste. But there was something in Mrs. Monnerie’s sly silence, and Lord Chiltern’s solemn monocle, and Percy’s snigger, that set me speculating.
‘Angelic Tomtitiska!’ sighed Mrs. Monnerie, ‘I wager when she returns to Paradise, she will sit in a corner and forget to tune her harp.’
There was no shade of vexation in her voice, only amiable amusement; but those sitting near had overheard her little pleasantry, and smilingly watched me as, casting my eye down the menu – Consommé aux Nids d’ Hirondelles, Filets de Blanchailles à la Diable, Ailes de Caille aux petits pois Minnie Stratton, Sauterelles aux Caroubes Saint Jean, it was caught at last by a pretty gilt flourishing around the words, Suprême de Langues de Rossignols. This, then, was the dainty jest, the clou du repas. The faint gold words shimmered back at me. In an instant I was a child again at Lyndsey, lulling to sleep on my pillow amid the echoing songs of the nightingales that used to nest in its pleasant lanes. I sat flaming, my tongue clotted with disgust. I simply couldn’t swallow; and didn’t. But never mind.
This was my first mishap. Though her own appetite was capricious, ranging from an almost incredible voracity to a scrap of dry toast, nothing vexed Mrs. Monnerie so much as to see my poor, squeamish stomach revolting at the sight of meat. She drew up a naked shoulder against me, and the feast proceeded with its chief guest in the shade. Once I could soon have regained my composure. Now I languished, careless even of the expression on my face. Not even the little mincing smile Fanny always reserved for me in company could restore me, and it was at her whisper that Percy stole down and filled my acorn glass with a translucent green liquid which he had himself secured from the sideboard. I watched the slow, green flow of it from the lip of the decanter without a thought in my head. Lord Chiltern endeavoured to restore my drooping spirits. I had outrageously misjudged him. He was not one of Mrs. Monnerie’s stupid friends, and he really did his utmost to be kind to me. If he should ever read these words, may he be sure that Miss M. is grateful. But his kindness fell on stony ground. And when, at length, he rose to propose my health, I crouched beneath him, shameful, haggard, and woebegone.
It was as minute a speech as was she whom it flattered, and far more graceful. Nothing, of course, would satisfy its audience when the toast had been honoured, but that Miss M. should reply. One single, desperate glance I cast at Mrs. Monnerie. She sat immovable as the Sphinx. There was no help for it. Knees knocking together, utterly tongue-tied, I stood up in my chair, and surveyed the two converging rows of smiling, curious faces. Despair gave me counsel. I stooped, raised my glass, and half in dread, half in bravado, tossed down its burning contents at a gulp.
The green syrup coursed along vein and artery like molten lead. A horrifying transparency began to spread over my mind. It seemed it had become in that instant empty and radiant as a dome of glass. All sounds hushed away. Things near faded into an infinite distance. Every face, glossed with light as if varnished, became lifeless, brutal and inhuman, the grotesque caricature of a shadowy countenance that hung somewhere remote in memory, yet was invisible and irrevocable. In this dead moment – the whole blazing scene like a nowhere of the imagination – my wandering eyes met Fanny’s. She was softly languishing up at Captain Valentine, her fingers toying with a rose. And it seemed as though her once loved spirit cried homelessly out at me from space, as if for refuge and recognition; and a long-hidden flood broke bounds in my heart. All else forgotten, and obeying mechanically the force of long habit, I stepped up from my chair on to the table, and staggered towards her, upsetting, as I went, a shallow glass of bubbling wine. It reeked up in the air around me.
‘Fanny, Fanny,’ I called to her out of my swoon, ‘Ah, Fanny. Holy Dying, Holy Dying! Sauve qui peut!’ With empty, shocking face, she started back, appalled, like a wounded snake.
‘Oh!’ she cried in horror into the sleep that was now mounting my body like a cloud, ‘oh!’ Her hand swept out blindly in my direction as if to fend me off. At best my balance was insecure; and though the velvet petals of her rose scarcely grazed my cheek, the insane glaze of my mind was already darkening, I toppled and fell in a heap beside her plate.
___________
1 To be truthful, this is not my family motto (nor crest); but the real motto seemed a little too satirical to share with Mrs. Monnerie; and however overweening its substitute may appear, I have now hopes, and now misgivings, that it is true.
Monk’s House
* * *
Chapter Forty-Four
Thus, then, I came of age, though not on St. Rosa’s day. However dramatic and memorable, I grant it was not a courteous method of acknowledging Lord Chiltern’s courtesy. In the good old days the drunken dwarf would have been jovially tossed from hand to hand. From mind to mind was my much milder penalty. And yet this poor little contretemps was of a sort that required ‘hushing up’; so it kept tongues wagging for many a day. It was little comfort that Percy shared my disgrace, and even Susan, for ‘giving way’.
She it was who had lifted my body from the table and carried it up into darkness and quiet. In the half light of my bedroom I remember I opened my eyes for a moment – eyes which refused to stay still in their sockets, but were yet capable of noticing that the left hand which clasped mine had lost its ring. I tried to point it out to her. She was crying.
Philippina sober was awakened the next morning by the fingers of Mrs. Monnerie herself. She must have withdrawn the kindly sheet from my face, and, with nightmare still babbling on my lips, I looked up into the familiar features, a little grey and anxious, but creased up into every appearance of goodwill.
‘Not so excessively unwisely, then,’ she rallied me, ‘and only the least little thought too well. We have been quite anxious about Bébé, haven’t we, Fleming?’
‘Quite, madam. A little indigestion, that’s all.’
‘Yes, yes; a little indigestion, that’s all,’ Mrs. Monnerie agreed: ‘and I am sure Poppet doesn’t want those tiresome doctors with their horrid physic.’
I sat up, blinking from one to the other. ‘I think it was the green stuff,’ I muttered, tongue and throat as dry as paper. I could scarcely see out of my eyes for the racking stabs of pain beneath my skull.
‘Yes, yes,’ was the soothing response. ‘But you mustn’t agitate yourself, silly child. Don’t open your eyes like that. The heat of the room, the excitement, some little obstinate dainty. Now, one of those darling little pills, and a cooling draught, perhaps. Thank you, Fleming.’
The door closed, we were left alone. Mrs. Monnerie’s scrutiny drifted away. Their shutters all but closed down on the black-brown pupils. My head pined for its pillows, my shoulders for some vestige of defence but pined in vain. For the first time I felt afraid of Mrs. Monnerie. She was thinking so densely and heavily.
Yet, as if out of a cloud of pure absent-mindedness, dropped softly her next remark. ‘Does pretty Pusskin remember what she said to Miss Bowater? … No? … Well, then, if she can’t, it’s quite certain nobody else can – or wishes to. I inquired merely because the poor thing, who has been really nobly devoting herself to her duties, seems so hurt. Well, it shall be a little lesson – to us all. Though one swallow does not make a summer, my child, one hornet can make things extremely unpleasant. Not that I –’ A vast shrug of the shoulders completed the sentence. ‘A little talk and tact will soon set that right; and I am perfectly satisfied, perfectly satisfied with things as they are. So that’s settled. Some day you must tell me a little more about your family history. Meanwhile, rest and quiet. No more excitement, no more company, and no more’ – she bent low over me with wagging head – ‘no more green stuff. And then’ – her eyes rested on me with a peculiar zest rather than with any actual animosity – ‘then we mu
st see what can be done for you.’
There came a tap – and Percy showed in the doorway.
‘I thought, Aunt Alice, I thought –’ he began, but at sight of the morose, heavy countenance lifted up to him, he shut his mouth.
‘Thank you,’ said Mrs. Monnerie, ‘thank you, Sir Galahad; you did nothing of the kind.’
Whereupon her nephew wheeled himself out of the room so swiftly that I could not detect what kind of exotics he was carrying in a little posy in his hand.
So the invalid, now a burden on the mind of her caretaker many times her own weight, was exiled for ever from No. 2. Poor Fleming, sniffier and more disgusted than ever, was deputed to carry me off to the smaller of Mrs. Monnerie’s country retreats, a long, low-roofed, shallow-staired house lying in the green under the downs at Croomham. There I was to vegetate for a time and repent of my sins.
Percy’s fiery syrup took longer to withdraw its sweet influences than might have been foreseen. Indeed, whenever I think of him, its effects are faintly renewed, though not, I trust, to the detriment of my style! None too strong physically the Miss M. that sat up at her latticed window at Monk’s House during those few last interminable August days, was very busy with her thoughts. As she looked down for hours together on the gnarled, thick-leafed old mulberry-tree in the corner of the lawn that swept up to the very stones of the house, and on the walled, sun-drugged garden beyond, she was for ever debating that old, old problem: what could be done by herself with herself?
The doves crooned; the cawing rooks flapped back into the blue above the neighbouring woods; the earth drowsed on. It was a scene of peace and decay. But I seemed to have lost the charm that could have made it mine. I was an Ishmael. And worse – I was still a prisoner. No criminal at death’s door can have brooded more laboriously on his chances of escape. No wonder the voices of childhood had whispered ‘Away!’
There came a long night of rain. I lay listening to the whisper and clucking of its waters. Far away the lapwings called: ‘Ee-ooeet! Ee-ooeet!’ What follies I had been guilty of. How wilily circumstance had connived at them. Yet I was no true penitent. My heart was empty, so parched up that neither love nor remorse had any place in it. Revenge seemed far sweeter. Driven into this corner, I sent a desperate word to Sir W. It remained unanswered, and this friend followed the rest into the wilderness of my ingratitude.
But that brought me no relief. For of all the sins I have ever committed, envy and hatred seem to me the most unpleasant to practise. I was to learn also that ‘he who sows hatred shall gather rue’, and ‘bed with thistles’. With eyes at last as anxious as Jezebel’s, I resumed my watch at the window. But even if Percy had ridden from London solely to order Fleming to throw me down, she would not have ‘demeaned’ herself to set hands on me. She might be bold, but she, too, was fastidious.
Then Fleming herself one afternoon softly and suddenly vanished away – on her summer’s holiday. Poor thing; so acute was the chronic indigestion caused by her obstinate little dainty that she did not even bid me good-bye.
She left me in charge of the housekeeper, Mrs. French, a stout, flushed, horse-faced woman, who now and then came in and bawled good-humouredly at me as if I were deaf, but otherwise ignored me altogether. I now spent most of my time in the garden, listlessly wandering out of sight of the windows (and gardeners), along its lank-flowered, rose-petalled walks, hating its beauty. Or I would sit where I could hear the waterdrops in a well. The very thought of company was detestable. I sat there half-dead, without book or needle, with scarcely a thought in my head. In my library days at No. 2 I had become a perfect slave to pleasures of the intellect. But now dyspepsia had set in there too.
My nights were pestered with dreams and my days with their vanishing spectres; and I had no Pollie to tell me what they forecast. I suppose one must be more miserable and hunted in mind even than I was, never to be a little sentimental when alone. I would lean over the cold mouth of the well, just able to discern in the cold mirror of water, far beneath, the face I was almost astonished to find reflected there. ‘Shall I come too?’ I would morbidly whisper, and dart away.
Still, just as with a weed in winter, life was beginning to renew the sap within me; and Monk’s House was not only drowsy with age but gentle with whispers. Once at least in every twenty-four hours I would make a pilgrimage to its wrought-iron gates beside the square white lodge, to gloat out between the metal floriations at the dusty country lane beyond – with its swallows and wagtails and dragon-flies beneath the heat-parched tranquil elms. A slim, stilted greyhound on one such visit stalked out from the lodge. Quite unaware of his company, I turned about suddenly and stared clean down his arched throat – white teeth and lolling tongue. It was as if I had glanced into the jaws of destiny. He turned his head, whiningly yawned, and stalked back into the shade.
A day or two afterwards I made the acquaintance of the lodge-keeper’s daughter, a child named Rose, about five years of age, with a mop of copper-coloured curls bound up with a pale blue bow. At first glimpse of me she had hopped back as if on springs into the house. A moment after, her white-aproned mother appeared in the porch, and with a pleasant nod at me bade the child smile at the pretty little lady. Finger in mouth, Rose wriggled and stared. In a few days she grew accustomed to my small figure. And though I would sometimes discover her saucer-blue eyes fixed on me with a peculiar intensity, we almost came to be friends. She was not a very bright little girl; yet I found myself wooing her with all the arts I knew – in a scarcely conscious attempt, I suppose, to creep back by this small lane into the world’s and my own esteem.
I made her wristlets of little flowers, hacked her out cockle boats from the acorns, told her half-forgotten stories, and once had to trespass into the kitchen at the back of the lodge to tell her mother that she was fallen asleep. Was it mere fancy that read in the scared face she twisted round on the pretty little lady from over her saucepan: ‘Avaunt, Evil Eye!’ I had become abominably self-conscious.
Chapter Forty-Five
One such afternoon Rose and I were sitting quietly together in the sunshine on the green grass bank when a smart, short step sounded in the lane, and who should come springily pacing out of the country through the gates but Adam Waggett – red hands, black boots, and Londonish billycock hat all complete. Adam must have been born in a fit of astonishment; and when he dies, so he will enter Paradise. He halted abruptly, a ring of shifting sunshine through the leaves playing on his purple face, and, after one long glance of theatrical astonishment, he burst into his familiar guffaw.
This time the roar of him in the open air was nothing but a pleasure, and the mere sound and sight of him set Rose off laughing, too. Her pink mouth was as clustered about with milk-teeth as a fragment of honeycomb is with cells.
‘Well, there I never, miss,’ he said at last, with a slow, friendly wink at the child. ‘Where shall us three meet again, I wonder?’ He flicked the dust off his black button boots with his pocket-handkerchief, mopped his high, bald forehead, and then positively exploded into fragments of information – like my father’s fireworks on Guy Fawkes Day.
He talked of young Mr. Percy’s ‘goings-on’, of the august Mr. Marvell, of life at No. 2. ‘That Miss Bowater, now, she’s a bit of all right, she’s toffee, she is.’ But, his hat! there had been a row. And the Captain, too. Not that there was anything in that – ‘just a bit of silly jealousy; like the women!’ He could make a better guess than that. He didn’t know what ‘the old lady’ would do without that Miss Bowater – the old lady whose carriage would in a few days be rolling in between these very gates. And then – He began this thing a Highland Reel.
The country air had evidently got into his head. Hand over hand he was swarming up the ladder of success. His ‘joie de vivre’ gleamed at every pore. And I? – I just sat there, passively drinking in this kitchen-talk, without attempting to stop him. After all, he was out of my past; we were children of Israel in a strange land; and that hot face, with its vio
lent pantomime, and hair-plastered temples, was as good as a play.
He was once more settling his hat on his head and opening his mouth in preparation for a last bray of farewell, when suddenly in the sunny afternoon hush a peculiar, melancholy, whining cry rose over the treetops, and slowly stilled away. As if shot from a bow, Rose’s greyhound leapt out of the lodge and was gone. With head twisted over his shoulder, Adam stood listening. Somewhere – where? when? – that sound had stirred the shadows of my imagination. The day seemed to gather itself about me, as if in a plot.
In the silence that followed I heard the dust-muffled grinding of heavy wheels approaching, and the low, refreshing talk of homely, Kentish, country voices. Adam stepped to the gate. I clutched Rose’s soft, cool fingers. And spongily, ponderously there, beyond the bars, debouched into view a huge-shouldered, mole-coloured elephant, its trunk sagging towards the dust, its small, lash-fringed eye gleaming in the sun, its bald, stumpy, tufted tail stiff and still behind it.
On and on, one after another, in the elm-shaded beams of the first of evening, the outlandish animals, the wheeled dens, the gaudy, piled-up vans of pasteboard scenery, the horses and ponies and riff-raff of a travelling circus wound into, and out of, view before my eyes. It was as if the lane itself were moving, and all the rest of the world, with Rose and myself clutched hand in hand on our green bank, had remained stark still. Probably the staring child supposed that this was one of my fairy-tales come true. My own mind was humming with a thought far more fantastic. Ever and again a swarthy face had glanced in on our quiet garden. The lion had glared into Africa beyond my head. But I was partly screened from view by Rose, and it was a woman, and she all but the last of the dusty, bedraggled company, that alone caught a full, clear sight of me.
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