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 She must have withdrawn the kindly sheet from my face, and, with nightmare still babbling on my lips, I looked up into the familiar features, a little grey and anxious, but creased up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 absentmindedness, 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 must 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 forever 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 forever debating that old, old problem; what could be done by herself with herself?
The doves crooned; the cawing rooks flapped black 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
