But it was her indifference to the impression that I myself had made on Mrs. Monnerie that nettled me the most. “Why, then, who is Lord B.?” I inquired impatiently at last, pushing back the bandage that had fallen over my eyes.
“From what I’ve heard of Lord B.,” said Mrs. Bowater shortly, “he was a gentleman of whom the less heard of’s the better.”
“But surely,” I protested, “that isn’t Mrs. Monnerie’s fault any more than Fanny’s being so lovely—I mean, than I being a midget was my father’s fault? Anyhow,” I hurried on, “Mrs. Monnerie says I look pale, and must go to the sea.”
Mrs. Bowater was still kneeling by the fire, just as Fanny used to kneel. And, like Fanny, when one most expected an answer, she remained silent; though, unlike Fanny, it seemed to be not because she was dreaming of something else. How shall I express it?—there fell a kind of loneliness between us. The severe face made no sign.
“Would you—would you miss me?” some silly self within piped out pathetically.
“Why, for the matter of that,” was her sardonic reply, “there’s not very much of you to miss.”
I rose from my bed, flung down the bandage, and ran down my little staircase. “Oh, Mrs. Bowater,” I said, burying my face in her camphory skirts, “be kind to me; be kind to me! I’ve nobody but you.”
The magnanimous creature stroked my vinegar-sodden hair with the tips of her horny fingers. “Why there, miss. I meant no harm. Isn’t all the gentry and nobility just gaping to snatch you up? You won’t want your old Mrs. Bowater very long. What’s more, you mustn’t get carried away by yourself. You never know where that journey ends. If sea it is, sea it must be. Though, Lord preserve us, the word’s no favourite of mine.”
“But suppose, suppose, Mrs. Bowater,” I cried, starting up and smiling enrapturedly into her face, “suppose we could go together!”
“That,” said she, with a look of astonishing benignity, “would be just what I was being led to suppose was the heighth of the impossible.”
At which, of course, we at once began discussing ways and means. But, delicious though this prospect seemed, I determined that nothing should persuade me to go unless all hope of Fanny’s coming home proved vain. Naturally, from Fanny memory darted to Wanderslore. I laughed up at my landlady, holding her finger, and suggested demurely that we should go off together on the morrow to see if my stranger were true to his word.
“We have kept him a very long time, and if, as you seem to think, Mrs. Monnerie isn’t such a wonderful lady, you may decide that after all he is a gentleman.”
She enjoyed my little joke, was pleased that I had been won over, but refused to accept my reasoning, though the topic itself was after her heart.
“The point is, miss, not whether your last conquest is a wonderful lady, or a grand lady, or even a perfect lady for the matter of that, but, well, a lady. It’s that’s the kind in my experience that comes nearest to being as uncommon a sort as any sort of a good woman.”
This was a wholly unexpected vista for me, and I peered down its smooth, green, aristocratic sward with some little awe.
“As for the young fellow who made himself so free in his manners,” she went on placidly, so that I had to scamper back to pick her up again, “I have no doubt seeing will be believing.”
“But what is the story of Wanderslore?” I pressed her none too honestly.
The story—and this time Mrs. Bowater poured it out quite freely—was precisely what I had been told already, but with the addition that the young woman who had hanged herself in one of its attics had done so for jealousy.
“Jealousy! But of whom?” I inquired.
“Her husband’s, not her own: driven wild by his.”
“You really mean,” I persisted, “that she couldn’t endure to live any longer because her husband loved her so much that he couldn’t bear anybody else to love her too?”
“In some such measure,” replied Mrs. Bowater, “though I don’t say he didn’t help the other way round. But she was a wild, scattering creature. It was just her way. The less she cared, the more they flocked. She couldn’t collect herself, and say, ‘Here I am; who are you?’ so to speak. Ah, miss, it’s a sickly and dangerous thing to be too much admired.”
“But you said ‘scattering’: was she mad a little?”
“No. Peculiar, perhaps, with her sidelong, startled look. A lovelier I’ve never seen.”
“You’ve seen her!”
“Thirty years ago, perhaps. Alive and dead.”
“Oh, Mrs. Bowater, poor thing, poor thing.”
“That you may well say, for lovely in the latter finding she was not.”
My eyes were fixed on the fire, but the picture conjured up was dark even amidst the red-hot coals. “And he? did he die too? At least his jealousy was broken away.”
“And I’m not so sure of that,” said Mrs. Bowater. “It’s like the men to go on wanting, even when it comes to scrabbling at a grave. And there’s a trashy sort of creature, though well-set-up enough from the outside, that a spark will put in a blaze. I’ve no doubt he was that kind.”
I thought of my own sparks, but questioned on: “Then there’s nothing else but—but her ghost there now?”
“Lor, ghosts, miss, it’s an hour, I see, when bed’s the proper place for you and me. I look to be scared by that kind of gentry when they come true.”
“You don’t believe, then, in Destroyers, Mrs. Bowater?”
“Miss, it’s those queer books you are reading,” was the evasive reply. “Destroyers! Why, wasn’t it cruel enough to drive that poor featherbrained creature into a noose!”
Candle and I and drowsing cinders kept company until St. Peter’s bell had told only the sleepless that midnight was over the world. It seemed to my young mind that there was not a day, scarcely an hour,
