Her skin had fallen into the queerest folds and puckers. Her black swimming eye under a thick eyebrow gazed down her fine, drooping nose at me with a dwelling expression at once indulgent, engrossed, and amused. With a gracious sweep of her hand she drew aside her voluminous silk skirts so that I could at once install myself by her side in a small, cane-seated chair that had once, I should fancy, accommodated a baby Pollacke, and had been brought down from the nursery for this occasion.
Thus, then, I found myself—the exquisitely self-conscious centre of attention—striving to nibble a biscuit, nurse my child-size handleless teacup, and respond to her advances at one and the same time.
Lady Pollacke hung like a cloud at sunset over us both, her cheek flushed with the effort to be amused at every sentence which Mrs. Monnerie uttered and to share it as far as possible with the rest of her guests.
“A little pale, eh?” mused Mrs. Monnerie, brooding at me with her great eye. “She wants sea-air; sea-air—just to tinge that rose-leaf porcelain. I must arrange it.”
I assured her that I was in the best of health.
“Not at all,” she replied. “All young people boast of their health. When I was your age every thought of illness was as black as a visitation of the devil. That’s the door where we must lay all such evils, isn’t it, Mr. Pellew?”
A lean, tall, birdlike figure, the hair on his head still showing traces of auburn, disengaged itself from a knot of charmed spectators.
“Ah,” he said. “But I doubt, now,” he continued, with a little deprecating wave of his teacup at me, “if Miss M. can remember me. When we first met we were precisely one week old, precisely one week old.”
Why, like Dr. Phelps, Mr. Pellew referred to me as we I had not time to consider, for he was already confiding to Mrs. Monnerie that he had never baptized an infant who more strenuously objected to holy water than had I. I looked at his long, fair eyelashes and the smile-line on his cheek as he bent with a sort of jocular urbanity over her chair, but could not recall his younger face, though during my christening I must, of course, have gazed at him even more absorbedly.
“ ‘Remember’ you—I’ll be bound she did,” cried Mrs. Monnerie with enthusiasm, “or was it the bachelor thumb? The mercy is you didn’t drop her into the font. Can you swim, my dear?”
“I couldn’t at a week,” I replied as archly as possible. “But I can swim; my father taught me.”
“But how wonderful!” broke our listeners into chorus.
“There we are, then,” asserted Mrs. Monnerie; “sea-bathing! And are we a swimmer, Mr. Pellew?”
Mr. Pellew seemed not to have caught her question. He was assuring me that Miss Fenne had kept him well informed—well informed of all my doings. He trusted I was comfortable with the excellent Mrs. Bowater, and hoped that some day I should be able to pay a visit to his rectory in Devonshire. “Mrs. Pellew, he knew. …” What he knew about Mrs. Pellew, however, was never divulged, for Mrs. Monnerie swallowed him up:—
“Devonshire, my dear Mr. Pellew! no, indeed. Penthouse lanes, red-hot fields, staring cows. Imagine it! She would be dried up like a leaf. What she wants is a mild but bracing sea-air. It shall be arranged. And who is this Mrs. Bowater?”
At this precise moment, among the strange faces far above me, I descried that of Mr. Crimble, modestly peering out of the background. He coughed, and in a voice I should scarcely have recognized as his, informed Mrs. Monnerie that my landlady was “a most res—an admirable woman.” He paused, coughed again, swept my soul with his glance—“I assure you, Mrs. Monnerie, in view of—of all the circumstances, one couldn’t be in better hands. Indeed the house is on the crest of the hill, well out of the town, yet not a quarter of an hour’s walk from my mother’s.”
“Hah!” remarked Mrs. Monnerie, with an inflection that I am sure need not have brought a warmth to my cheek, or a duskier pallor to Mr. Crimble’s.
“You have perhaps heard the tragic story of Wanderslore,” persisted Mr. Crimble; “Miss M.’s—er—lodgings are immediately adjacent to the park.”
“Hah!” repeated Mrs. Monnerie, even more emphatically. “Mrs. Bowater, eh? Well, I must see for myself. And I’m told, Miss M.,” she swept down at me, “that you have a beautiful gift for recitation.” She looked round, patted her lap imperiously, and cried, “Come, now, who’s to break the ice?”
In fact, no doubt, Mrs. Monnerie was not so arbitrary a mistress of Lady Pollacke’s little ceremony as this account of it may suggest. But that is how she impressed me at the time. She the sun, and I the least—but I hope not the least grateful—of her obsequious planets. Lady Pollacke at any rate set immediately to breaking the ice. She prevailed upon a Miss Templemaine to sing. And we all sat mute.
I liked Miss Templemaine’s appearance—brown hair, straight nose, dark eyelashes, pretty fringe beneath her peak-brimmed hat. But I was a little distressed by her song, which, so far as I could gather, was about two persons with more or less broken hearts who were compelled to part and said, “Ah” for a long time. Only physically distressed, however, for though I seemed to be shaken in its strains like a linnet in the wind, its adieux were protracted enough to enable me to examine the rest of the company at my leisure. Their eyes, I found, were far more politely engaged the while in gazing composedly down at the carpet or up at the ceiling. And when I did happen to intercept a gliding glance in my direction, it was almost as if with a tiny explosion that it collided
