“It seems to me, Mrs. Bowater,” I began rather hastily, “at least to judge from my own father and mother, that a man depends very much on a woman. Men don’t seem to grow up in the same way, though I suppose they are practical enough as men.”
“If it were one female,” was the reply, “there’d be less to be found fault with. That poor young creature over there took her life for no better reason, even though the reason was turned inside out as you may say.”
I met the frightful, louring stare of the house. “What was her name?” I whispered—but into nothing, for, bolt upright as she was, Mrs. Bowater had shut her eyes, as if in preparation for a nap.
A threadlike tangle of song netted the air. We were, indeed, trespassers. I darted my glance this way and that, in and out of the pale green whispering shadows in this wild haunt. Then, realizing by some faint stir in my mind that the stiff, still, shut-away figure beside me was only feigning to be asleep, I opened the rain-warped covers of my Sense and Sensibility, and began plotting how to be rid of her for a while, so that my solitude might summon my stranger, and I might recover Fanny’s letter.
Then once more I knew. Raising my eyes, I looked straight across at him, scowling there beneath his stunted thorn in a drift of flowers like fool’s parsley. He was making signs, too, with his hands. I watched him pensively, in secret amusement. Then swifter than Daphne into her laurel, instantaneously he vanished, and I became aware that its black eyes were staring out from the long face of the motionless figure beside me, as might an owl’s into an aviary.
“Did you hear a bird, Mrs. Bowater?” I inquired innocently.
“When I was a girl,” said the mouth, “sparrowhawks were a common sight, but I never heard one sing.”
“But isn’t a sparrowhawk quite a large bird?”
“We must judge,” said Mrs. Bowater, “not by the size, but the kind. Elseways, miss, your old friend might have been found sleeping, as they say, at her box.” She pretended to yawn, gathered her legs under her, and rose up and up. “I’ll be taking a little walk round. And you shall tell your young acquaintance that I mean him no harm, but that I mean you the reverse; and if show himself he won’t, well, here I sit till the Day of Judgment.”
An angry speech curled the tip of my tongue. But the simple-faced flowers were slowly making obeisance to Mrs. Bowater’s black, dragging skirts, and when she was nearly out of sight I sallied out to confront my stranger.
His face was black with rage and contempt. “That contaminating scarecrow; who’s she?” was his greeting. “The days I have waited!”
The resentment that had simmered up in me on his behalf now boiled over against him. I looked at him in silence.
“That contaminating scarecrow, as you are pleased to call her, is the best friend I have in the world. I need no other.”
“And I,” he said harshly, “have no friend in this world, and need you.”
“Then,” said I, “you have lost your opportunity. Do you suppose I am a child—to be insulted and domineered over only because I am alone? Possibly,” and my lips so trembled that I could hardly frame the words, “it is your face I shall see when I think of those windows.”
I was speaking wiselier than I knew. He turned sharply, and by a play of light it seemed that at one of them there stood looking down on us out of the distance a shape that so had watched forever, leering darkly out of the void. And there awoke in me the sense of this stranger’s extremity of solitude, of his unhappy disguise, of his animal-like patience.
“Why,” I said, “Mrs. Bowater! You might far rather be thanking her for—for—”
“Curses on her,” he choked, turning away. “There was everything to tell you.”
“What everything?”
“Call her back now,” he muttered furiously.
“That,” I said smoothly, “is easily done. But, forgive me, I don’t know your name.”
His eyes wandered over the turf beneath me, mounted slowly up, my foot to my head, and looked into mine. In their intense regard I seemed to be but a bubble floating away into the air. I shivered, and turned my back on him, without waiting for an answer. He followed me as quietly as a sheep.
Mrs. Bowater had already come sauntering back to our breakfast table, and with gaze impassively fixed on the horizon, pretended not to be aware of our approach.
I smiled back at my companion as we drew near. “This, Mrs. Bowater,” said I, “is Mr. Anon. Would you please present him to Miss Thomasina of Bedlam?”
For a moment or two they stood facing one another, just as I have seen two insects stand—motionless, regardful, exchanging each other’s presences. Then, after one lightning snap at him from her eye, she rose to my bait like a fish. “A pleasant morning, sir,” she remarked affably, though in her Bible voice. “My young lady and I were enjoying the spring air.”
Back to memory comes the darkness of a theatre, and Mrs. Monnerie breathing and sighing beside me, and there on the limelit green of the stage lolls ass-headed Bottom the Weaver cracking jokes with the Fairies.
My Oberon addressed Mrs. Bowater as urbanely as St. George must have addressed the Dragon—or any other customary monster.
He seemed to pass muster, none the less, for she rose, patted her sheet, pushed forward her bonnet on to her rounded temples, and bade him a composed good morning. She would be awaiting me, she announced, in an hour’s time under my beech tree.
“I think, perhaps, two, Mrs. Bowater,” I said firmly.
She gave me a look—all our long slow evening firelit talks together seemed to be swimming in its smile; and withdrew.
The air eddied into quiet again. The stretched-out blue of the sky
