Gradually, however, the quiet night received me into its peace (just as, poor soul, did the Moor Desdemona), and its influence stole into my darkened mind. The smooth, columnar boughs of the beeches lifted themselves archingly into the sky. Soon I was climbing over the moss-bound roots of my customary observatory. But this night the stars were left for a while unsignalled and unadmired. The crisped, frost-lined leaves scattered between the snakelike roots sparkled faintly. Years seemed to have passed away, dwindled in Time’s hourglass, since my previous visit. That Miss M. had ghosted herself away forever. In my reverie the vision of Fanny re-arose into my imagination—that secret still fountain—of herself. Asleep now. … I could no more free myself from her sorcery than I could disclaim the two hands that lay in my lap. She was indeed more closely mine than they—and nearer in actuality than I had imagined.
A faint stir in the woods suddenly caught my attention. The sound neared. I pressed my hand to my breast, torn now between two incentives, two desires—to fly, to stay. And on the path by which I had come, appeared, some yards distant, in the faint trickling light, the dark figure of my dreams.
She was dressed in a black cloak, its peaked old-fashioned hood drawn over her head. The moonbeams struck its folds as she moved. Her face was bowed down a little, her hand from within clutching her cloak together. And I realized instinctively and with joy that the silence and solitude of the woods alarmed her. It was I who was calm and self-contained. She paused and looked around her—stood listening with lips divided that yet could not persuade themselves to call me by name. For my part, I softly gathered myself closer together and continued to gloat. And suddenly out of the faraway of the woods a nightbird loosed its cry: “A-hoo. … Ahoo-oo-oo-hooh!”
There is a hunter in us all. I laughed inwardly as I watched. A few months more and I was to watch a lion-tamer … but let me keep to one thing at a time. I needled myself in, and, almost hooting the sound through my mouth, as if in echo of the bird, I heard myself call stealthily across the air, “Fanny!—Fanny Bowater!”
The cloaked figure recoiled, with lifted head, like the picture of a fawn I have seen, and gazed in my direction. Seeing nothing of me amidst the leaves and shadows, she was about to flee, when I called again:—
“It is I, Fanny. Here: here!”
Instantly she woke to herself, came near, and looked down on me. No movement welcomed her. “I was tired of waiting,” I yawned. “There is nothing to be frightened about.”
Many of her fellow creatures, I fancy, have in their day wearied of waiting for Fanny Bowater, but few have had the courage or sagacity to tell her so. She had not recovered her equanimity fully enough to refrain from excuses.
“Surely you did not expect me while mother was moving? I am not accustomed, Miss M., to midnight wanderings.”
“I gave up expecting you, and was glad to be alone.”
The barb fell short. She looked stilly around her. The solemn beeches were like mute giants overarching with their starry, sky-hung boughs the dark, slim figure. What consciousness had they, I wonder, of those odd humans at their roots?
“Alone! Here!” she returned. “But no wonder. It’s what you are all about.”
A peculiar elation sprang up in me at this none too intelligible remark.
“I wonder, though,” she added, “you are not frozen like—like a pebble, sitting there.”
“But I am,” I said, laughing softly. “It doesn’t matter in me, because I’m so easy to thaw. You ought to know that. Oh, Miss Bowater, think if this were summer time and the dew and the first burning heat! Are you wrapped up? And shall we sit here, just—just for one dance of the Sisters: thou lost dove, Merope?”
For there on high—and I had murmured the last words all but inaudibly to myself—there played the spangling Pleiads, clear above her head in the twig-swept sky.
“What sisters?” she inquired, merely humouring me, perhaps.
“The Six, Fanny, look! You cannot see their Seventh—yet she is all that that is about.” South to north I swept my hand across the powdery firmament. “And I myself trudge along down Watling Street; that’s the Milky Way. I don’t think, Fanny, I shall ever, ever be weaned. Please, may I call you that?”
She frowned up a moment into the emptiness, hesitated, then—just like a white peacock I had once seen when a child from my godmother’s ancient carriage as we rolled by an old low house with terraces smooth as velvet beneath its cedars—she disposed her black draperies upon the ground at a little distance, disclosing, in so doing, beneath their folds the moon-blanched flounces of her party gown. I gazed spellbound. I looked at the white and black, and thought of what there was within their folds, and of the heart within that, and of the spirit of man. Such was my foolish fashion, following idly like a butterfly the scents of the air, flitting on from thought to thought, and so missing the full richness of the one blossom on which I might have hovered.
“Tell me some more,” broke suddenly the curious voice into the midst of this reverie.
“Well, there,” I cried, “is fickle Algol; the Demon. And over there where the Crab crawls, is the little Beehive between the Roses.”
“Praesepe,” drawled Fanny.
“Yes,” said I, unabashed, “the Beehive. And crane back your neck, Fanny—there’s little Jack-by-the-Middle-Horse; and far down, oh, far down, Berenice’s Hair, which would have been Fanny Bowater’s Hair, if you
