Simply because it seemed a meanness to play the spy on her in her solitude, I called her name. But her start of surprise was mere feigning. The silk of her parasol encircled her shoulders like an immense nimbus. Her eyes dwelt on me, as if gathering up the strands of an unpleasing memory.
“Ah, Midgetina,” she called softly, “it is you, is it, on your little stone? Are you better?” The very voice seemed conscious of its own cadences. “What a delicious old garden. The contrast!”
The contrast. With a cold gathering apprehension at my heart I glanced around me. Why was it that of all people only Fanny could so shrink me up like this into my body? And there floated back to remembrance the vast, dazzling room, the flower-clotted table, and, in that hideous vertigo, a face frenzied with disgust and rage, a hand flung out to cast me off. But I entered her trap none the less.
“Contrast, Fanny?”
“No, no, now, my dear! Not quite so disingenuous as all that, please. You can’t have quite forgotten the last time we met.”
“There was nothing in that, Fanny. Only that the midge was drunk. You should see the wasps over there in the nectarines.”
“Only?” she echoed lightly, raising her eyebrows. “I am not sure that everyone would put it quite like that. You couldn’t see yourself, you see. They call you little Miss Cassandra now. Woe! Woe! you know. Mrs. Monnerie asked me if I thought you were—you know—‘all there,’ as they say.”
“I don’t care what they say.”
“If I weren’t an old friend,” she returned with crooked lip, “you might be made to care. I have brought the money you were kind enough to lend me; I’ll give it you when I have unpacked—tomorrow night.”
My body sank into a stillness that might well have betrayed its mind’s confusion to a close observer. Had she lingered satirically, meaningly, on those two last words? “I don’t want the money, Fanny: aren’t you generous enough to accept a gift?”
“Well,” said she, “it needs a good deal of generosity sometimes. Surely, a gift depends upon the spirit in which it is given. That last little message, now—was that, shall we say, an acceptable gift?” Her tones lost their silkiness. “See here, Midgetina,” she went on harshly, “you and I are going to talk all this out. But I’m thirsty. I hate this spawning sun. Where are the nectarines?”
Much against my will I turned my back on her, and led her off to the beehives.
“One for you,” she said, stooping forward, balancing the sheeny toe of her shoe on the brown mould, “and the rest for me. Catch!” She dropped a wasp-bitten, pulpy fruit into my hands. “Now then. It’s shadier here. No eavesdroppers. Just you and me and God. Please sit down?”
There was no choice. Down I sat; and she on a low wooden seat opposite me in the shade, her folded parasol beside her, the leaf-hung wall behind. She bit daintily into the juicy nectarine poised between finger and thumb, and watched me with a peculiar fixed smile, as if of admiration, on her pale face.
“Tell me, pretty Binbin,” she began again, “what is the name of that spiked red and blue and violet thing behind your back? It colours the edges of your delicate china cheeks. Most becoming!”
It was viper’s bugloss—a stray, I told her, shifting my head uneasily beneath her scrutiny.
“Ah, yes, viper’s bugloss. Personally I prefer the common variety. Though no doubt that may stray, too. But fie, fie! You naughty thing,” she sprang up and plucked another nectarine, “you have been blacking your eyebrows. I shouldn’t have dreamt it of you. What would mother say?”
“Listen, Fanny,” I said, pronouncing the words as best I could with a tongue that seemed to be sticking to the roof of my mouth; “I am tired of the garden. What do you really want to say to me? I don’t much care for your—your fun.”
“And I just beginning to enjoy it! There’s contrariness!—To say? Well, now, a good deal, my dear. I thought of writing. But it’s better—safer to talk. The first thing is this. While you have been malingering down here I have had to face the whole Monnerie orchestra. It hasn’t been playing quite in tune; and you know why. That lovesick Susan, now, and her nice young man. But since you seem to be quite yourself again—more of yourself than ever, in fact: listen.” I gazed, almost hypnotized, through the sunshine into her shady face.
“What I am going to suggest,” she went on smoothly, “concerns only you and me. If you and I are to go on living in the same house—which heaven forbid—I give you fair warning that we shall have nothing more to do with one another than is absolutely inevitable. I am not so forgiving as I ought to be, Midgetina, and insults rankle. Treachery, still more.” The low voice trembled.
“Oh, yes, you may roll your innocent little eyes and look as harmless as a Chinese god, but answer me this: Am I a hypocrite? Am I? And while you are thinking it over, hadn’t you better tumble that absurd little pumpkin off your knee? It’s staining your charming frock.”
“I never said you were a hypocrite,” I choked.
“No?” The light gleamed on the whites of her eyes as they roved to and fro. “Then I say, you are. Fair to face, false to back. Who first trapped me out stargazing in the small hours, then played informer? Who wheedled her way on with her mincing humbug—poof! naivete!—and set my own mother against me? Who told someone—you know who—that I was not to be trusted, and far better cast-off? Who
