“Well,” she inquired at last, with motionless glance fixed on the distance. “Do you think you could honestly give me a testimonial, Miss Midget?”
It is strange. The Sphinx had spoken, yet without much enlightenment. “Now look at me,” I commanded. “If I went away, you couldn’t follow. When you go away, you cannot escape from me. I can go back and—and be where I was.” My own meaning was half-concealed from me; but a startled something that had not been there before peeped out of those eyes so close to mine.
“If,” she said, “I could care like that too, yet wanted nothing, then I should be free too.”
“What do you mean?” said I, lifting my hand from the unanswering fingers.
“I mean,” she exclaimed, leaping to her feet, “that I’m sick to death of the stars and am going home to bed. Hateful, listening old woods!”
I turned sharp round, as if in apprehension that some secret hearer might have caught her remark. But Fanny stretched out her arms, and, laughing a foolish tune, in affected abandonment began softly to dance in the crisp leaves, quite lost to me again. So twirling, she set off down the path by which she had come trespassing. A physical exhaustion came over me. I watched her no more, but stumbled along, with unheeding eyes, in her wake. What had I not given, I thought bitterly, and this my reward. Thus solitary, I had gone only a little distance, and had reached the outskirts of the woods, when a far from indifferent Fanny came hastening back to intercept me.
And no wonder. She had remembered to attire herself becomingly for her moonlight tryst, but had forgotten the door key. We stood looking at one another aghast, as, from eternity, I suppose, have all fellow-conspirators in danger of discovery. It was I who first awoke to action. There was but one thing to be done, and, warning Fanny that I had never before attempted to unlatch the big front door of her mother’s house, I set off resolutely down the hill.
“You walk so slowly!” she said suddenly, turning back on me. “I will carry you.”
Again we paused. I looked up at her with an inextricable medley of emotions struggling together in my mind, and shook my head.
“But why, why?” she repeated impatiently. “We could get there in half the time.”
“If you could fly, Fanny, I’d walk,” I replied stubbornly.
“You mean—” and her cold anger distorted her face. “Oh, pride! What childish nonsense! And you said we were to be friends. Do you suppose I care whether … ?” But the question remained unfinished.
“I am your friend,” said I, “and that is why I will not, I will not give way to you.” It was hardly friendship that gleamed out of the wide eyes then. But mine the victory—a victory in which only a tithe of the spoils, unrecognized by the vanquished, had fallen to the victor.
Without another word she turned on her heel, and for the rest of our dejected journey she might have been mistaken for a cross nurse trailing on pace for pace beside a rebellious child. My dignity was less ruffled than hers, however, and for a brief while I had earned my freedom.
Arrived at the house, dumbly hostile in the luminous night, Fanny concealed herself as best she could behind the gatepost and kept watch on the windows. Far away in the stillness we heard a footfall echoing on the hill. “There is someone coming,” she whispered, “you must hurry.” She might, I think, have serpented her way in by my own little door. Where the head leads, the heart may follow. But she did not suggest it. Nor did I.
I tugged and pushed as best I could, but the umbrella with which from a chair I at last managed to draw the upper bolt of the door was extremely cumbersome. The latch for a while resisted my efforts. And the knowledge that Fanny was fretting and fuming behind the gatepost hardly increased my skill. The house was sunken in quiet; Mrs. Bowater apparently was sleeping without her usual accompaniment; only Henry shared my labours, and he sat moodily at the foot of the stairs, refusing to draw near until at the same moment Fanny entered, and he leapt out.
Once safely within, and the door closed and bolted again, Fanny stood for a few moments listening. Then with a sigh and a curious gesture she bent herself and kissed the black veil that concealed my fair hair.
“I am sorry, Midgetina,” she whispered into its folds, “I was impatient. Mother wouldn’t have liked the astronomy, you know. That was all. And I am truly sorry for—for—”
“My dear,” I replied in firm, elderly tones, whose echo is in my ear to this very day; “My dear, it was my mind you hurt, not my feelings.” With that piece of sententiousness I scrambled blindly through my Bates’s doorway, shut the door behind me, and more disturbed at heart than I can tell, soon sank into the thronging slumber of the guilty and the obsessed.
XIV
When my eyes opened next morning, a strange, still glare lay over the ceiling, and I looked out of my window on a world mantled and cold with snow. For a while I forgot the fever of the last few days in watching the birds hopping and twittering among the crumbs that Mrs. Bowater scattered out on the windowsill for my pleasure. And yet—their every virtue, every grace, Fanny Bowater, all were thine! The very snow, in my girlish fantasy, was the fairness beneath which the unknown Self in her must, as I fondly believed, lie slumbering; a beauty that hid also from me for a while the restless, self-centred mind. How believe that such beauty is any the less a gift to its possessor than its bespeckled breast and song
