On the other hand, what real loss was mine—with so much to my advantage? These great spreading beech-trees were no less shady and companionable to me than to them. Nor, thought I, could moon or sun or star or ocean or mountain be any the less silvery, hot, lustrous, and remote, forlorn in beauty, or vast in strangeness, one way or the other, than they are to ordinary people. Could there be any doubt at all, too, that men had always coveted to make much finer and more delicate things than their clumsiness allowed?
What fantastic creatures they were!—with their vast mansions, pyramids, palaces, scores of sizes too large either for carcass or mind. Their Satan a monster on whose wrist the vulture of the Andes could perch like an aphis on my thumb; yet their Death but skeleton-high, and their Saviour of such a stature that well-nigh without stooping He could have laid His fingers on my head.
Time’s sands had been trickling fast while I thought these small thoughts that bright spring daybreak. So, though we had loitered on our way, it seemed we had reached our destination on the wings of the morning. Alas, Mrs. Bowater’s smile can have been only skin-deep; for, when, lifting my eyes from the ground I stopped all of a sudden, spread out my hands, and cried in triumph, “There! Mrs. Bowater”; she hardly shared my rapture.
She disapproved of the vast, blank “barn of a place,” with its blackshot windows and cold chimneys. The waste and ruination of the garden displeased her so much that I grew a little ashamed of my barbarism.
“It’s all going to wrack and ruin,” she exclaimed, snorting at my stone summerhouse no less emphatically than she had snorted at Mrs. Monnerie. “Not a walkable walk, nor the trace of a border; and was there ever such a miggle-maggle of weeds! A fine house in its prime, miss, but now, money melting away like butter in the sun.”
“But,” said I, standing before her in the lovely light amid the dwelling dewdrops, “really and truly, Mrs. Bowater, it is only going back to its own again. What you call a miggle-maggle is what these things were made to be. They are growing up now by themselves; and if you could look as close as I can, you’d see they breathe only what each can spare. They are just racing along to live as wildly as they possibly can. It’s the tameness,” I expostulated, flinging back my hood, “that would be shocking to me.”
Mrs. Bowater looked down at me, listening to this high-piped recitative with an unusual inquisitiveness.
“Well, that’s as it may be,” she retorted, “but what I’m asking is, Where’s the young fellow? He don’t seem to be as punctual as they were when I was a girl.”
My own eyes had long been busy, but as yet in vain.
“I did not come particularly to see him,” was my airy reply. “Besides, we said no time—any fine day. Shall we sit down?”
With a secretive smile Mrs. Bowater spread a square of waterproof sheeting over a flat stone that had fallen out of the coping of the house, unfolded a newspaper over the grass, and we began our breakfast. Neither of us betrayed much appetite for it; she, I fancy, having already fortified herself out of her brown teapot before leaving the house, and I because of the odour of india-rubber and newspaper—an odour presently intensified by the moisture and the sun. Paying no heed to my fastidious nibblings, she munched on reflectively, while I grew more and more ill at ease, first because the “young fellow” was almost visibly sinking in my old friend’s esteem, and next because her cloth-booted foot lay within a few inches of the stone beneath which was hidden Fanny’s letter.
“It’ll do you good, the sea,” she remarked presently, after sweeping yet one more comprehensive glance around her, “and we can only hope Mrs. Monnerie will be as good as her word. A spot like this—trespassing or not—is good for neither man nor beast. And when you are young the more human company you get, with proper supervising, the better.”
“Were you happy as a girl, Mrs. Bowater?” I inquired after a pause.
Our voices went up and up into the still, mild air. “Happy enough—for my own good,” she said, neatly screwing up her remaining biscuits in their paper bag. “In my days children were brought up. Taught to make themselves useful. I would as soon have lifted a hand against my mother as answer her back.”
“You mean she—she whipped you?”
“If need be,” my landlady replied complacently, folding her thread-gloved hands on her lap and contemplating the shiny toecaps of her boots. “She had large hands, my mother; and plenty of temper kept well under control. What’s more, if life isn’t a continual punishment for the stoopidities and wickedness of others, not to mention ourselves, then it must be even a darker story than was ever told me.”
“And was, Mrs. Bowater, Mr. Bowater your—your first—” I looked steadily at a flower at my foot in case she might be affected at so intimate a question, and not wish me to see her face.
“If Mr. Bowater was not the first,” was her easy response, “he may well live to boast of being the last. Which is neither here nor there, for we may be sure he’s enjoying attentive nursing. Broken bones are soon mended. It’s when things are disjointed from the root that the wrench comes.”
The storm-felled bole lay there beside us, as if for picture to her parable. I began to think rather more earnestly than I had intended to that morning. In my present state of conscience, it was never an easy matter to decide whether Mrs. Bowater’s comments on life referred openly to things in general or covertly to me in particular. How fortunate that the scent of Fanny’s notepaper was not potent enough to escape from its tomb. And whether
