Could I not still be loyal in heart and mind to Fanny, even though now I knew how little she cared whether I was loyal or not? I even climbed up behind Mr. Crimble’s thick spectacles and looked down again at myself from that point of vantage. Whether or not I was his affair, I could try to make him mine—perhaps even persuade Fanny to love him.
Oh, dear; was not every singing bird in that wilderness, every unfolding flower and sunlit March leaf welcoming the spirit within me to their quiet habitation? As if in response to this naive thought, welled up in my memory the two last stanzas of my “Tom o’ Bedlam,” which, either for pride or shame, had stuck in my throat on the skin mat in Lady Pollacke’s sky-lit drawing-room:⸺
“With a heart of furious fancies,
Whereof I am commander:
With a burning spear,
And a horse of air,
To the wilderness I wander.With a knight of ghosts and shadows,
I summoned am to tourney:
Ten leagues beyond
The wide world’s end;
Methinks it is no journey.”
Parasol for spear, the youngest Miss Shanks’s pony for horse of air, there was I (even though common-sized boots might reckon it a mere mile or so), ten leagues at least beyond—Mrs. Bowater’s. Nor, like her husband, had I broken my leg; nor had Fanny broken my heart. All would come right again. Why, what a waste of Fanny it would be to make her Mrs. Crimble. My bishop, according to Miss Fenne, had had quite a homely helpmate, “little short of a frump, Caroline, as I remember her thirty years ago.” Perhaps if I left off my fine colours and bought a nice brown stuff dress and a bonnet, might not Mr. Crimble change his mind … ? I have noticed that as soon as I begin to laugh at myself, the whole world seems to smile in return.
Absurd, contrary, volatile creature that I was—a kind of thankfulness spread over my mind. I turned on to my knees where I sat and repeated the prayers which in my haste to be off I had neglected before coming out. And thus kneeling, I opened my eyes on the garden again, bathed delicately in the eastern sunshine. There was my old friend, Mr. Clodd’s Nature, pranking herself under the nimble fingers of spring; and in her sight as well as in the sight of my godmother’s God, and Mr. Crimble’s Almighty, and, possibly, of Dr. Phelps’s Norm, were not, in deed and in truth, all men equal? How mysterious and how entrancing! If “sight,” then eyes: but whose? where? I gazed round me dazzledly, and if wings had been mine, would have darted through the thin, blue-green veil and been out into the morning.
Poor she-knight! romantical Miss Midge! she had no desire to hunt Big Game, or turn steeplejack; her fancies were not dangerously “furious”; but, as she knelt there, environed about by that untended garden, and not so ridiculously pygmy either, even in the ladder of the world’s proportion—saw-edged blade of grass, gold-cupped moss, starry stonecrop, green musky moschatel, close-packed pebble, wax-winged fly—well, I know not how to complete the sentence except by remarking that I am exceedingly glad I began to write my Life.
I realized too that it is less flattering to compare oneself with the very little things of the world than with the great. Given time, I might scale an Alp; I could only kill an ant. Besides, I am beginning to think that one of the pleasantest ways of living is in one’s memory. How much less afflicting at times would my present have been if I had had the foresight to remind myself how beguiling it would appear as the past. Even my old sharpest sorrows have now hushed themselves to sleep, and those for whom I have sorrowed are as quiet.
Having come to a pause in my reflections, I opened my Sense and Sensibility at Chapter XXXV. Yet attend to Miss Austen I could not. She is one of those compact and cautious writers that will not feed a wandering mind; and at last, after three times rereading the same paragraph, an uneasy conviction began to steal over me. There was no doubt now in my mind. I was being watched. Softly, stealthily, I raised my eyes from my book and with not the least motion of head or body, glanced around me. Whereupon, as if it had been playing sentinel out of the thicket near at hand, a blackbird suddenly jangled its challenge, and with warning cries fled away on its wings towards the house.
XXII
Then instantly I discovered the cause of the bird’s alarm. At first I fancied that this strange figure was at some little distance. Then I realized that his stature had misled me, and that he could not be more than twenty or thirty yards away. Standing there, with fixed, white face and black hair, under a flowering blackthorn, he remained as motionless and as intent as I. He was not more than a few inches, apparently, superior in height to myself.
“So,” I seemed to whisper, as gaze met gaze, “there!” hardly certain the while if he was real or an illusion. Indeed, if, even then before my eyes, he had faded out into the tangle of thorn, twig, and thin-spun blossom above and around him, it would not have greatly astonished, though it would have deeply disappointed me. With a peculiar, trembling curiosity, I held him with my gaze. If he would not disclose himself, then must I.
Slowly and deliberately my cold hand crept out and grasped my parasol. Without for a moment removing my eyes from this interloper’s face,
