All this my new friend (and yet not so very new, it seemed)—all this he poured out to me in the garden, though I can only faintly recall his actual words, as if, like Moses, I had smitten the rock. And I listened weariedly, with little hope of understanding him, and with the suspicion that it was nothing but a Tom o’ Bedlam’s dream he was recounting. Yet, as if in disproof of my own incredulity, there sat I; and over the trees yonder stood Mrs. Bowater’s ugly little brick house; and beyond that, the stony, tapering spire of St. Peter’s, the High Street. And I looked at him without any affection in my thoughts, and wished fretfully to be gone. What use to be lulled with fantastic pictures of Paradise when I might have died of fear and hatred on Mrs. Stocks’s doorstep; when everything I said was “touching, touching”?
“Well,” I mockingly interposed at last, “the farthing dip’s guttering. And what if it’s all true, and there is such a place, what then? How am I going to get there, pray? Would you like to mummy me and shut me up in a box and carry me there, as they used to in Basman? Years and years ago my father told me of the pygmy men and horses—the same size as yours, I suppose—who lived in caves on the banks of the Nile. But I doubt if I believed in them much, even then. I am not so ignorant as all that.”
The life died out of his face, just as, because of a cloud carried up into the sky, the sunlight at that moment fled from Wanderslore. He coughed, leaning on his hands, and looked in a scared, empty, hunted fashion to right and left. “Only that you might stay,” he scarcely whispered. “ … I love you.”
Instinctively I drew away, lips dry, and heart numbly, heavily beating. An influence more secret than the shadow of a cloud had suddenly chilled and darkened the garden and robbed it of its beauty. I shrank into myself, cold and awkward, and did not dare even to glance at my companion.
“A fine thing,” was all I found to reply, “for a toy, as you call me. I don’t know what you mean.”
Miserable enough that memory is when I think of what came after, for now my only dread was that he might really be out of his wits, and might make my beloved, solitary garden forever hateful to me. I drew close my cape, and lifted my book.
“There is a private letter of mine hidden under that stone,” I said coldly. “Will you please be so good as to fetch it out for me? And you are never, never to say that again.”
The poor thing looked so desperately ill and forsaken with his humped shoulders—and that fine, fantastic story still ringing in my ears!—that a kind of sadness came over me, and I hid my face in my hands.
“The letter is not there,” said his voice.
I drew my fingers from my face, and glared at him from between them; then scrambled to my feet. Out swam the sun again, drenching all around us with its light and heat.
“Next time I come,” I shrilled at him, “the letter will be there. The thief will have put it back again! Oh, how unhappy you have made me!”
XXVII
I stumbled off, feeling smaller and smaller as I went, more and more ridiculous and insignificant, as indeed I must have appeared; for distance can hardly lend enchantment to any view of me. Not one single look did I cast behind; but now that my feelings began to quiet down, I began also to think. And a pretty muddle of mind it was. What had enraged and embittered me so? If only I had remained calm. Was it that my pride, my vanity, had in some vague fashion been a punishment of him for Fanny’s unkindness to me?
“But he stole, he stole my letter,” I said aloud, stamping my foot on a budding violet; and—there was Mrs. Bowater. Evidently she had been watching my approach, and now smiled benignly.
“Why, you are quite out of breath, miss; and your cheeks! … I hope you haven’t been having words. A better-spoken young fellow than I had fancied; and I’m sure I ask his pardon for the ‘gentleman.’ ”
“Ach,” I swept up at my beech-tree, now cautiously unsheathing its first green buds in the lower branches, “I think he must be light in his head.”
“And that often comes,” replied Mrs. Bowater, with undisguised bonhomie, “from being heavy at the heart. Why, miss, he may be a young nobleman in disguise. There’s unlikelier things even than that, to judge from that trash of Fanny’s. While, as for fish in the sea—it’s sometimes wise to be contented with what we can catch.”
Who had been talking to me about fish in the sea—quite lately? I thought contemptuously of Pollie and the Dream Book. “I am sorry,” I replied, nose in air, “but I cannot follow the allusion.”
The charge of vulgarity was the very last, I think, which Mrs. Bowater would have lifted a finger to refute. My cheeks flamed hotter to know that she was quietly smiling up there. We walked
