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 goodbye.
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 water-drops 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 dragonflies 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.
XLV
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 whistling 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 violent pantomime, and hair-plastered temples, was as good as a play.
He
