“I see.” Her voice had glided steadily up the scale of suavity. “It’s a bit more of the dead past, is it? And you don’t like the—the fragrance. But surely, if we are really talking about rights—and, according to my experience, there are none too many of them knocking about in this world—surely I have the right to ask what pulpy mysteries are enclosed in an envelope addressed to me in what appears to be a feigned ca—calligraphy? Look. I am putting the thing on the floor so that we shall be on—well—fairly equal terms. Even your sensitive Sukie could not be more considerate than that, could she? All I want to know is, what’s inside that envelope? If you refuse to say, well and good. I shall retire to my maidenly couch and feed on the blackest suppositions.”
It was a cul-de-sac; and the only thing to do was to turn back boldly and get out of it.
“Well, Fanny; I have told you that I thought better of sending it. But I am not ashamed. Even if I am wrong, I suppose you are at liberty to have your little jokes too, and so is Percy Maudlen. It’s a letter, torn up; that’s all.”
“A letter—so I guessed. Who from?”
I gazed at her silently.
“Yes?”
“It’s hateful of you, Fanny. … From the hunchback.”
Her astonishment, surely, could not have been pretence. “And what the devil, you dear, stammering little midgelet, has your miserable little hunchback to do with me? Why send his scrawls to me—and in bits?”
“Because,” said I, “I thought you had been making fun of him and me to—the others.”
The light hands lifted themselves; the dark head tilted a little back and askew. “What a roundabout route,” she sighed. But her face was false to the smooth, scornful accents. “So you suspected me of spying on you? I see. And gentle Susan Monnerie was kind enough to smear a little poison on the fangs. Well, Midgetina love, I tell you this. It’s safer sometimes to lose your reputation than your temper. But there’s a limit—”
“Hush,” I whispered, for I had sharper ears than Fanny even when rage had not deafened her own. I pounced on the envelope—but only just in time.
“It’s Mr. Percy, miss,” announced Fleming, “and may he come in?”
“Hallo!” said that young man, lounging greyly into view, “a bad penny, Miss M. I happened to be passing Buszard’s just now, and there was the very thing! Miss Bowater says you have a sweet tooth, and they really are rather neat.” He had brought me the daintiest little box of French doll bonbons. I glared at it; I glared at him—hardly in the mood for any more of his little jokes—not even one tied up with pale-blue ribbon.
“There’s another thing,” he went on. “Susan told us that your birthday was coming along—August 25th, isn’t it? And I have proposed a Grand Birthday Party, sort of general rag. Miss M. in the Chair. Don’t you think it’s a ripping idea of mine, Miss Bowater?”
“Most ripping,” said Fanny, meeting his long, slow, sneaking glance with a slight and seemingly involuntary lift of her narrow shoulder. A long look I could not share passed between them; I might have been a toy on the floor.
“But you don’t look positively in the pink,” he turned to me. “Now, does she? Late hours, eh? You look crumpled, doesn’t she? Cherry, too: we must have in another Vet.” The laugh died on his long lips. His eyes roved stealthily from point to point of the basking afternoon room, then once more sluggishly refastened on Fanny. I sat motionless, watching his every turn and twist, and repeating rapidly to myself, “Go away, my friend; go away, go away.” Some nerve in him must have taken the message at last, or he found Fanny’s silence uneasy. He squinnied a glinting, curious look at me, and as jauntily as self-consciousness permitted, took his departure.
The door shut. His presence fainted out into a phantasm, and that into nothing at all. And for sole evidence of him basked on my table, beneath a thread of sunlight, his blue-ribboned box.
“Isn’t he a ninny?” sighed Fanny. “And yet, my dear: there—but for the grace of God—goes Mr. Fanny Bowater.”
Her anger had evaporated. There stood my familiar Fanny again, slim as a mast, her light eyes coldly shining, her bearing, even the set of her foot showing already a faint gilding of Mrs. Monnerie. She laughed—looking straight across at me, as if with a challenge.
“Yes, my dear, it’s quite true. I’m not a bit cross now. Milk and Honey. So you see even a fool may be a lightning conductor. I forgive,” she pouted a kiss from the tips of her fingers, “I forget.”
And then she was gone too, and I alone. What an easy, consoling thing—not to care. But though Fanny might forgive, she must have found it unamusing to forget. The next evening’s post brought me an exquisitely written little fable, signed “F. B.,” and entitled Asteroida and the Yellow Dwarf. I couldn’t enjoy it very much; though no doubt it must have been exceedingly entertaining when read aloud.
Still Fanny did not care. While I myself was like those railway lines under the green bank I had seen on my journey to Lyme Regis. A day’s neglect, a night’s dews, and I was stained thick with rust. A dull and heedless wretchedness took possession of me. The one thought that kept recurring in every instant of solitude, and most sharply in those instants which pounced on me in the midst of strangers, was, how to escape.
I put away the envelope and its contents into my box again. And late that night, when I was secure from interruption, I wrote to Wanderslore. Nibbling a pen is no novelty to me, but never in all my life have I spent
