On the whole, ours had been a gloomy talk. Nevertheless, there, not on my generosity, but I hope on my understanding, he reposed himself, and so reposes to this day. When the door had closed behind him, I felt far more friendly towards Mr. Crimble than I had felt before. Even apart from the Almighty, he had made us as nearly as he could—equals. I tossed a pleasant little bow to his snowdrops, and, catching sight of Mr. Bowater’s fixed stare on me, hastily included him within its range.
Mr. Crimble, Mrs. Bowater informed me the following Sunday evening, lived with an aged mother, and in spite of his sociability and his “fun,” was a lonely young man. He hadn’t, my landlady thought, yet seen enough of the world to be of much service to those who had. “They,” and I think she meant clergymen in general, as well as Mr. Crimble in particular, “live a shut-in, complimentary life, and people treat them according. Though, of course, there’s those who have seen a bit of trouble and cheeseparing themselves, and the Church is the Church when all’s said and done.”
And all in a moment I caught my first real glimpse of the Church—no more just a number of St. Peterses than I was so many “organs,” or Beechwood was so many errand boys, or, for that matter, England so many counties. It was an idea; my attention wandered.
“But he was very anxious about the concert,” I ventured to protest.
“I’ve no doubt,” said Mrs. Bowater shortly.
“But then,” I remarked with a sigh, “Fanny seems to make friends wherever she goes.”
“It isn’t the making,” replied her mother, “but the keeping.”
The heavy weeks dragged slowly by, and a one-sided correspondence is like posting letters into a dream. My progress with Miss Austen was slow, because she made me think and argue with her. Apart from her, I devoured every fragment of print I could lay hands on. For when fiction palled I turned to facts, mastered the sheepshank, the running bowline, and the figure-of-eight; and wrestled on with my sea-craft. It was a hard task, and I thought it fair progress if in that I covered half a knot a day.
Besides which, Mrs. Bowater sometimes played with me at solitaire, draughts, or cards. In these she was a martinet, and would appropriate a fat pack at Beggar-my-neighbour with infinite gusto. How silent stood the little room, with just the click of the cards, the simmering of the kettle on the hob, and Mrs. Bowater’s occasional gruff “Four to pay.” We might have been on a desert island. I must confess this particular game soon grew a little wearisome; but I played on, thinking to please my partner, and that she had chosen it for her own sake. Until one evening, with a stifled sigh, she murmured the word, Cribbage! I was shuffling my own small pack at the moment, and paused, my eyes on their backs, in a rather wry amusement. But Fate has pretty frequently so turned the tables on me; and after that, “One for his nob,” sepulchrally broke the night-silence of Beechwood far more often than “Four to pay.”
Not all my letters to Fanny went into the post. My landlady looked a little askance at them, and many of the unposted ones were scrawled, if possible in moonlight, after she had gone to bed. To judge from my recollection of other letters written in my young days, I may be thankful that Fanny was one of those practical people who do not hoard the valueless. I can still recall the poignancy of my postscripts. On the one hand: “I beseech you to write to me, Fanny, I live to hear. Last night was full moon again. I saw you—you only in her glass.” On the other: “Henry has been fighting. There is a chip out of his ear. Nine centuries nearer now! And how is ‘Monsieur Crapaud’?”
Wanderslore
XVIII
At last there came a post which brought me, not a sermon from Miss Fenne, nor gossip from Pollie, but a message from the Islands of the Blest. All that evening and night it lay unopened under my pillow. I was saving it up. And never have I passed hours so studious yet so barren of result. It was the end of February. A sudden burst of light and sunshine had fallen on the world. There were green shining grass and new-fallen lambs in the meadows, and the almond tree beyond my window was in full, leafless bloom. As for the larks, they were singing of Fanny. The next morning early, about seven o’clock, her letter folded up in its small envelope in the bosom of my cloak, I was out of the house and making my way to the woods. It was the clear air of daybreak and only the large stars shook faint and silvery in the brightening sky.
Frost powdered the ground and edged the grasses. But now tufts of primroses were in blow among the withered mist of leaves. I came to my “observatory” just as the first beams of sunrise smote on its upper boughs. Yet even now I deferred the longed-for moment and hastened on between the trees, beech and brooding yew, by what seemed a faint foot-track, and at last came out on a kind of rising on the edge of the woods. From this green eminence for the first time I looked straight across its desolate garden to Wanderslore.
It was a long, dark, many-windowed house. It gloomed sullenly back at me beneath the last of night. From the alarm calls of the blackbirds it seemed that even so harmless a trespasser as I was a rare spectacle. A tangle of brier and bramble bushed frostily over its grey stone
