“Oh, Mrs. Bowater! Not at all?”
Cold fogs of disappointment swept in, blotting out my fool’s paradise. That inward light without which life is dark indeed died in eclipse. The one thought and desire which I now realized I had been feeding on from hour to hour, had been snatched away. To think that they had been nothing but waste. “Oh, Fanny,” I whispered bitterly to myself, “oh, Fanny!” But the face I lifted to her mother showed only defiance.
“Well,” I muttered, “who cares? Let’s hope she will enjoy herself better than mooning about in this dingy old place.”
Mrs. Bowater merely continued to look quietly over the envelope at me.
“Oh, but you know, Mrs. Bowater,” I quaked miserably, “it’s not dingy to me. Surely a promise is a promise, whoever you make it to!”
With that I stooped my face over the stuffy-smelling brown paper, and attacked the last knot with my teeth. With eyes still a little asquint with resentment I smoothed away the wrappings from the shape within. Then every thought evaporated in a sigh. For there, of a delicate veined fairness against the white paper, lay a minute copy in ivory of none but lovely Hypnos. Half-blindly I stared at it—lost in a serenity beyond all hope of my poor, foolish life—then lifted it with both hands away from my face: “A present—to me! Look!” I cried, “look!”
Mrs. Bowater settled her face over the image as if it had been some tropical and noxious insect I was offering for her inspection. But I thrust it into her hand and opened my letter:—
“My Dear Young Lady—I am no poet, and therefore cannot hope to share with you the music of ‘the flaming drake,’ but we did share my Hypnos. Only a replica, as I told you, but none the less one of the most beautiful things I possess. Will you, then, give me the pleasure of accepting the contents of the little package I am having posted with this—as a small token of the delight your enthusiasm gave. Yours most sincerely—
But I did acknowledge it, not with that guardedness of the feelings which Miss Austen seemed to recommend, but from the very depths of my heart. Next morning came Lady Pollacke’s invitation:—
“Dear Miss M.—I hasten to renew my invitation of last Thursday. Will you give us the pleasure of your company at tea on Friday afternoon? Mrs. Monnerie—the younger daughter, as you will remember, of Lord B.—has expressed an exceedingly warm wish to make your acquaintance, and Mr. Pellew, who is giving us a course of sermons at St. Peter’s during Holy Week, will also be with us. May we, perhaps, share yet another of those delightful recitations?
I searched my memory for memorial of Lord B.; alas, in vain. This lapse made the thought of meeting his younger daughter a little alarming. Yet I must confess to having been pleasantly flattered by these attentions. Even the black draught administered by Fanny, who had not even thought it worth her while to send me a word of excuse or explanation, lost much of its bitterness. I asked Mrs. Bowater if she supposed I might make Sir Walter a little present in return for his. Would it be a proper thing to do, would it be ladylike?
“What’s meant kindly,” she assured me, after a moment’s reflection, “even if taken amiss, which, to judge from his letter, it won’t be, is nothing to be thought of but only felt.”
This advice decided me, and early on my Friday morning I trimmed and freshened up as well as I could one of my grandfather’s dwarf cedar-trees which, in the old days, had stood on my window balcony. Its branches were now a little dishevelled, but it was still a fresh and pretty thing in its grey-green pot.
XXIV
With this dwarf tree in my arms, when came the auspicious afternoon, I followed Lady Pollacke’s parlourmaid—her neat little bonnet tied with a bow under her ear—down my Bateses, and was lifted by Mrs. Bowater into the carriage. How demure a greeting we exchanged when, the maid and I having seated ourselves together under its hood, my glance fell upon the bloodstone brooch pinned conspicuously for the occasion near the topmost button of her trim, outdoor jacket. It gave me so much confidence that even the sudden clatter of conversation that gushed out over me in the doorway of Lady Pollacke’s drawing-room failed to be disconcerting. The long, flowery room was thronged with company, and everybody was talking to everybody else. On my entry, as if a seraph had spoken, the busy tongues sank instantly to a hush. I stood stilettoed by a score of eyes. But Sir Walter had been keeping good watch for me, and I at once delivered my great pot into his pink, outstretched hands.
“My dear, dear young lady,” he cried, stooping plumply over me, “the pleasure you give me! A little masterpiece: and real old Nankin. Alas, my poor Hypnos!”
“But it is me, me,” I cried. “If I could only tell you!”
A murmur of admiration rippled across the room, in which I distinctly heard a quavering, nasal voice exclaim, “Touching, touching!”
The words—as if a pleasant sheep had bleated—came, I fancied, from a rather less fashionable lady with a lorgnette, who was sitting almost alone on the outskirts of the room, and who I afterwards discovered was only a widowed sister of Lady Pollacke’s. But I could spare her but one startled glance, for, at the same moment, I was being presented to the younger daughter of Lord B. Mrs. Monnerie sat amply reclining in an immense gilded chair—a lady with a large and surprising countenance. Lady Pollacke’s “younger” had misled my
