Long before the dark day of her departure—a day which stood in my thoughts like a barrier at the world’s end—I had very foolishly poured out most of my memories for her profit and amusement, though so immobile was she when seated in a chair beside my table, or standing foot on fender at the chimneypiece, that it was difficult at times to decide whether she was listening to me or not. What is more important, she told me in return in her curious tortuous and contradictory fashion, a good deal about herself, and of her childhood, which—because of the endless violent roarings of her nautical father, and the taciturn discipline of poor Mrs. Bowater—filled me with compassion and heaped fuel on my love. And not least of these bonds was the secret which, in spite of endless temptation, I managed to withhold from her in a last instinctive loyalty to Mrs. Bowater—the discovery that her own mother was long since dead and gone.
She possessed more brains than she cared to exhibit to visitors like Dr. Phelps and Mr. Crimble. Even to this day I cannot believe that Mr. Crimble even so much as guessed how clever she was. It was just part of herself, like the bloom on a plum. Hers was not one of those gesticulating minds. Her efforts only intensified her Fannyishness. Oh dear, how simple things are if only you leave them unexplained. Her very knowledge, too (which for the most part she kept to herself) was to me like finding chain armour when one is in search of a beating heart. She could shed it all, and her cleverness too, as easily as a swan water-drops. What could she not shed, and yet remain Fanny? And with all her confidences, she was extremely reticent. A lift of the light shoulders, or of the flat arched eyebrows, a sarcasm, a faraway smile, at the same time illuminated and obscured her talk. These are feminine gifts, and yet past my mastery. Perhaps for this reason I admired them the more in Fanny—just as, in reading my childhood’s beloved volume, The Observing Eye, I had admired the crab’s cuirass and the scorpion’s horny rings—because, being, after all, myself a woman, I faintly understood their purpose.
Thus, when Fanny told me of the school she taught in; and of the smooth-haired drawing-master who attended it with his skill, on Mondays, Wednesdays, and Fridays; and of the vivacious and saturnine “Monsieur Crapaud,” who, poked up in a room under the gables, lived in the house; or of that other parish curate who was a nephew of the headmistress’s, the implacable Miss Stebbings, and who, apparently, preached Sunday after Sunday, with peculiar pertinacity, on such texts as “God is love”—when Fanny recounted to me these afflictions, graces, and mockeries of her daily routine as “literature” mistress, I could as easily bestow on her the vivifying particulars she left out, as a painter can send his portraits to be framed.
Once and again—just as I have seen a blackbird drop plumb from the upper boughs of a tree on a worm disporting itself in the dewy mould—once I did ask a question which produced in her one of those curious reactions which made her, rather than immaterial, an exceedingly vigilant image of her very self. “What will you do, Fanny, when you can’t mock at him?”
“Him?” she inquired in a breath.
“The him!” I said.
“What him?” she replied.
“Well,” I said, stumbling along down what was a rather black and unfamiliar alley to me, “my father was not, I suppose, particularly wise in anything, but my mother loved him very much.”
“And my father,” she retorted, in words so carefully pronounced that I knew they must be dangerous, “my father was a first mate in the mercantile marine when he married your landlady.”
“Well,” I repeated, “what would you do, if—if you fell in love?”
Fanny sat quite still, all the light at the window gently beating on her face, with its half-closed eyes. Her foot stirred, and with an almost imperceptible movement of her shoulder, she replied, “I shall go blind.”
I looked at her, dumbfounded. All the days of her company were shrivelled up in that small sentence. “Oh, Fanny,” I whispered hopelessly, “then you know?”
“ ‘Know’?” echoed the smooth lips.
“Why, I mean,” I expostulated, rushing for shelter fully as rapidly as my old friend the lobster must have done when it was time to change his shell, “I mean that’s what that absurd little Frenchman is—‘Monsieur Crapaud.’ ”
“Oh, no,” said Fanny calmly, “he is not blind, he only has his eyes shut. Mine,” she added, as if the whole light of the wintry sky she faced were the mirror of her prediction, “mine will be wide open.”
How did I know that for once the serene, theatrical creature was being mortally serious?
XV
I grew a little weary of the beautiful snow in the days that followed my first talk with Mr. Crimble, and fretted at the close air of the house. The last day of the year the wind was still in the north. It perplexed me that the pride which from my seed had sprung up in Fanny, and had prevented her from taking part in the parish concert, yet allowed her to attend it. She set off thickly veiled. Not even Mr. Crimble’s spectacles were likely to pierce her disguise. I had written a little letter the afternoon before and had myself handed it to Mrs. Bowater with a large fork of mistletoe from my Christmas bunch. It was an invitation to herself and Fanny to sit with me and “see in” the New Year. She smiled at me over it—still her tranquil, though neglected self—and I was half-satisfied.
Her best black dress was donned for the occasion. She had purchased a bottle of ginger wine, which she brought in with some glasses and placed in the middle of the
