“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 underlip 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 rooftops 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 faraway 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 Aires; and that swiftly back again to Mr. Crimble. For an instant or two I looked away. Perhaps it was my
