“My dear Miss M.,” said Mrs. Monnerie dryly, with an almost wicked ray of amusement in her deep-set eyes, “wherever the top of Beechwood Hill may be, and whatever supplies of food may be caught on its crest, there is no doubt that you have been provided with the means of defending yourself. But tell me now, what do you think, perhaps, Mr. Pellew’s little ‘instruments’ are? Or, better still—mine? Am I a mollusc with a hard shell, or a scorpion with a sting?”
Lady Pollacke rose to her feet and stood looking down on me like a hen, though not exactly a motherly one. But this was a serious question over which I must not be flustered, so I took my time. I folded my hands, and fixed a long, long look on Mrs. Monnerie. Even after all these years, I confess it moves me to recall it.
“Of course, really and truly,” I said at last, as deferentially as I could, “I haven’t known you long enough to say. But I should think, Mrs. Monnerie, you always knew the truth.”
I was glad I had not been too impetuous. My reply evidently pleased her. She chuckled all over.
“Ah,” she said reposefully, “the truth. And that is why, I suppose, like Sleeping Beauty, I am so thickly hedged in with the thorns and briers of affection. Well, well, there’s one little truth we’ll share alone, you and I.” She raised herself in her chair and stooped her great face close to my ear: “We must know more of one another, my dear,” she whispered. “I have taken a great fancy to you. We must meet again.” She hoisted herself up. Sir Walter Pollacke had hastened in and stood smiling, with arm hooked, and genial, beaming countenance in front of her. Mr. Crimble had already vanished. Mr. Pellew was talking earnestly with Lady Pollacke. Conversation broke out, like a storm-shower, on every side. For a while I was extraordinarily alone.
Into this derelict moment a fair-cheeked, breathless lady descended, and surreptitiously thrusting a crimson padded birthday book and a miniature pencil into my lap, entreated my autograph—“Just your signature, you know—for my small daughter. How she would have loved to be here!”
This lady cannot have been many years older than I, and one of those instantaneous, fleeting affections sprang up in me as I looked up at her for the first and only time, and seemed to see that small daughter smiling at me out of her face.
Alas, such is vanity. I turned over the leaves to August 30th and found printed there, for motto, a passage from Shakespeare:—
“He that has had a little tiny wit—
With hey, ho, the wind and the rain—
Must make content with his fortunes fit,
For the rain it raineth every day.”
The 29th was little less depressing, from Samuel Taylor Coleridge:—
“He prayeth best who loveth best
All creatures great and small.”
This would never do. I bent double over the volume, turned back hastily three or four leaves, and scrawled in my name under August 25th on a leaf that bore the quotation:—
“Fie on’t; ah, fie! ’tis an unweeded garden,
That grows to seed; things rank and gross in nature
Possess it merely. That it should come to this!”
and beneath the quotation, the signature of Josephine Mildred Spratte.
“Thank you, thank you, she will be overjoyed,” blushed the fair-haired lady. A sudden hunger for solitude seized upon me. I rose hastily, conscious for the first time of a headache, caused, no doubt, by the expensive and fumey perfumes in the air. Threading my way between the trains and flounces and trouser-legs around me, at last my adieux were over. I was in the porch—in the carriage. The breezes of heaven were on my cheek. My blessed parlourmaid was once more installed beside me. Yet even now the Pollacke faces were still flocking in my mind. The outside world was very sluggishly welling in. Looking up so long had stiffened my neck. I fixed my eyes on the crested back buttons of Lady Pollacke’s stiff-looking coachman, and committed myself to my thoughts.
It was to a Miss M., with one of her own handkerchiefs laid over her brows, and sprinkled with vinegar and lavender water, that Mrs. Bowater brought in supper that evening. We had one of our broken talks together, none the less. But she persisted in desultory accounts of Fanny’s ailments in her infancy; and I had to drag in Brunswick House by myself. At which she poked the fire and was mum. It was unamiable of her. I longed to share my little difficulties and triumphs. Surely she was showing rather too much of that discrimination which Lady Pollacke had recommended.
She snorted at Mr. Pellew, she snorted at my friendly parlourmaid and even at Mrs. Monnerie. Even when I repeated for her ear alone my nursery passage from The Observing Eye, her only comment was that to judge from some fine folk she knew of, there was no doubt at all that God watched closely over the pleasures of the meanest of His creatures, but as for their doing His will, she hadn’t much noticed it.
To my sigh of regret that Fanny had not been at home to accompany me, she retorted with yet another onslaught on the fire, and the apophthegm, that the world would be a far better place if people kept themselves to themselves.
“But Mrs. Bowater,” I argued fretfully, “if I did that, I should just—distil, as you might say, quite away. Besides, Fanny would have been far, far the—the gracefullest person there. Mrs. Monnerie would have taken a fancy to her, now, if you like.”
Mrs. Bowater drew in her lips and rubbed her nose.
