What was chiefly in my selfish mind was the happy conviction that I had better not give her Fanny’s letter just then.
“I do hope he’s not in great pain,” was all I found to say.
She continued to muse at me in her queer, sightless fashion, almost as if she were looking for help.
“Oh, dear me, miss,” the poor thing cried brokenly, “how should your young mind feel what an old woman feels: just grovelling in the past?”
She was gone; and, feeling very uncomfortable in my humiliation, I sat down and stared—at “the workbox.” Why, why indeed, I thought angrily, why should I be responsible? Well, I suppose it’s only when the poor fish—sturgeon or stickleback—struggles, that he really knows he’s in the net.
XIX
One of the many perplexing problems that now hemmed me in was brushed away by Fortune that afternoon. Between gloomy bursts of reflection on Fanny’s, Mr. Crimble’s, Mrs. Bowater’s, and my own account, I had been reading Miss Austen; and at about four o’clock was sharing Chapter XXIII with poor Elinor:—
“The youthful infatuation of nineteen would naturally blind her to everything but her beauty and good nature, but the four succeeding years—years which, if rationally spent, give such improvements to the understanding—must have opened her eyes to her defects of Education, which the same period of time, spent on her side in inferior society and more frivolous pursuits. …”
I say I was reading this passage, and had come to the words—“and more frivolous pursuits,” when an unusually imperative rat-tat-tat fell upon the outer door, and I emerged from my book to discover that an impressive white-horsed barouche was drawn up in the street beyond my window. The horse tossed its head and chawed its frothy bit; and the coachman sat up beside his whip in the sparkling frosty afternoon air. My heart gave a thump, and I was still seeking vaguely to connect this event with myself or with Mr. Bowater in Buenos Aires, when the door opened and a lady entered whose plumed and purple bonnet was as much too small for her head as she herself was too large for the room. Yet in sheer dimensions this was not a very large lady. It was her “presence” that augmented her.
She seemed, too, to be perfectly accustomed to these special proportions, and with a rather haughty, “Thank you,” to Mrs. Bowater, winningly announced that she was Lady Pollacke, “a friend, a mutual friend, as I understand, of dear Mr. Crimble’s.”
Though a mauvish pink in complexion, Lady Pollacke was so like her own white horse that whinnyingly rather than winningly would perhaps have been the apter word. I have read somewhere that this human resemblance to horses sometimes accompanies unusual intelligence. The poet, William Wordsworth, was like a horse; I have seen his portrait. And I should like to see Dean Swift’s. Whether or not, the unexpected arrival of this visitor betrayed me into some little gaucherie, and for a moment I still sat on, as she had discovered me, literally “floored” by my novel. Then I scrambled with what dignity I could to my feet, and chased after my manners.
“And not merely that,” continued my visitor, seating herself on a horsehair easy-chair, “but among my still older friends is Mr. Pellew. So you see—you see,” she repeated, apparently a little dazzled by the light of my window, “that we need no introduction, and that I know all—all the circumstances.” She lowered a plump, white-kidded hand to her lap, as if, providentially, there all the circumstances lay.
Unlike Mr. Crimble, Lady Pollacke had not come to make excuses, but to bring me an invitation—nothing less than to take tea with her on the following Thursday afternoon. But first she hoped—she was sure, in fact, and she satisfied herself with a candid gaze round my apartment—that I was comfortable with Mrs. Bowater; “a thoroughly trustworthy and sagacious woman, though, perhaps, a little eccentric in address.”
I assured her that I was so comfortable that some of my happiest hours were spent gossiping with my landlady over my supper.
“Ah, yes,” she said, “that class of person tells us such very interesting things occasionally, do they not? Yet I am convinced that the crying need in these days is for discrimination. Uplift, by all means, but we mustn’t confuse. What does the old proverb say: Festina lente: there’s still truth in that. Now, had I known your father—but there; we must not rake in old ashes. We are clean, I see; and quiet and secluded.”
Her equine glance made a rapid circuit of the photographs and ornaments that diversified the walls, and I simply couldn’t help thinking what a queer little cage they adorned for so large and handsome a bird, the kind of bird, as one might say, that is less weight than magnitude.
I was still casting my eye up and down her silk and laces when she abruptly turned upon me with a direct question: “You seldom, I suppose, go out?”
Possibly if Lady Pollacke had not at this so composedly turned her full face on me—with its exceedingly handsome nose—her bonnet might have remained only vaguely familiar. Now as I looked at her, it was as if the full moon had risen. She was, without the least doubt in the world, the lady who had bowed to Mr. Crimble from her carriage that fateful afternoon. A little countenance is not, perhaps, so telltale as a large one. (I remember, at any rate, the horrid shock I once experienced when my father set me up on his hand one day to show me my own face, many times magnified, in his dressing-room shaving-glass.) But my eyes must have narrowed a little, for Lady Pollacke’s at once seemed to set a little harder. And she was still awaiting an answer to her question.
“ ‘Go out’!”
