When in good faith I occasionally ventured to share (or possibly to show off) some curious scrap of information with Mrs. Monnerie, I thought her eyes would goggle out of her head. It was perhaps my old mole habit that prevented me from dividing things up into the mentionable and unmentionable. Possibly I carried this habit to excess; and yet, of course, remained the slave of my own small pruderies. Still, I don’t think it was either Mrs. Monnerie’s or Percy’s pruderies that I had to be careful about. To make him laugh was one of the most hateful of my experiences at No. 2.
I have read somewhere that the human instincts are “unlike Apollyon, since they always degrade themselves by their disguises. They dress themselves up as apes and mandrills; he as a ringed, supple, self-flattering, seductive serpent.” Possibly that has something to do with it. Or is it that my instincts are also on a petty scale? I don’t know. I hate and fear pain even more than most people, and have fought pretty hard in the cause of self-preservation. On the other hand, I haven’t the faintest wish in the world to “perpetuate my species.” Not that I might not have been happy in a husband and in my children. I suppose that kind of thing comes on one just as naturally as breathing. Nevertheless, I suspect I was born to be an old maid. Calling up spirits from the vasty deep has always seemed to me to be a far more dreadful mystery than Death. It is not, indeed, the ghosts of the dead and the past which I think should oppress the people I see around me, but those of the children to come. I thank God from the bottom of my heart for the happiness and misery of having been alive, but my small mind reels when I brood on what the gift of it implies.
Well, well, well; of one burden at least I can absolve Mrs. Monnerie—that of making me so sententious. Somehow or other, but ever more sluggishly, those few crowded summer months of my twentieth year wore away. It is more of a mercy than a curse, I suppose, that Time never stands still.
Meanwhile two events occurred which, for the time being, sobered and alarmed me. A few days before I had actually planned to pay a second visit to Mrs. Bowater’s, the almost incredible news reached me that she was sailing for South America. It would hardly have surprised me more to hear that she was sailing for Sirius. She came to bid me goodbye. It was Mr. Bowater, she told me. She had been too confident of the “good nursing.” Far from mending in this world, his leg threatened “to carry him off into the next.” At these tidings Shame thrust out a very ugly head at me from her retreat. I had utterly forgotten the anxiety my poor old friend was in.
She put on her spectacles with trembling fingers, and pushed her husband’s letter across to me. The handwriting was bold and thick, yet I fancied it looked a little weak in the loops:—
“Dear Emily—The leg’s giving me the devil in this hole of a place. It looks as if I shouldn’t get through with it. I should be greatly obliged if you would come out to me. They’ll give you all the necessary information at the shipping office. Ask for Pullen. My love to Fanny. What’s she looking like now? I should like to see her before I go; but better say nothing about it. You’ve got about a month or three weeks, I should think; if that.
“Easy enough in appearance,” was Mrs. Bowater’s comment, as she folded up this stained and flimsy letter again, and stuffed it into her purse, “but it’s past even Mr. Bowater to control what can be read between the lines.”
She looked at me dumbly; the skin seemed to hang more loosely on her face. In vain I tried to think of a comforting speech. The tune of “Eternal Father,” one of the hymns we used to sing on windy winter Sunday evenings together, had begun droning in my head. The thought, too, was worrying me, though I did not put it into words, that Mr. Bowater, far rather than in Buenos Aires, would have preferred to find his last resting-place in Nero Deep or the Virgin’s Trough—those enormous pits of blue in the oceans which I myself had so often gloated on in his Atlas. We were old friends now, he and I. He was Fanny’s father. The very ferocity of his look had become a secret understanding between us. And now—at this very moment perhaps—he was dying. The jaunty “devil” in his letter, I am afraid, affected me far more than Mrs. Bowater’s troubled face or even her courage.
Without a moment’s hesitation she had made up her mind to face the Atlantic’s thousands of miles of wind and water to join the husband she had told me had long
