“But I can’t. I ask you: Can you see Fanny Bowater a Right Reverendissima? No, nor can I. And not even gaiters or an apron here and now would settle the question offhand. Why I confide all this in you (why, for that matter, it has all been confided in me), I know not. You want nothing, and if you did, you wouldn’t want it long. Now, would you? Perhaps that is the secret. But Fanny wants a good deal. She cannot even guess how much. So, while Miss Stebbings and Beechwood Hill forever and ever would be hell before purgatory, H. C. and St. Peter’s would be merely the same thing, with the fires out. And I am quite sure that, given a chance, heaven is our home.
“Oh, Midgetina, I listen to all this; mumbling my heart like a dog a bone. What the devil has it got to do with me, I ask myself? Who set the infernal trap? If only I could stop thinking and mocking and find someone—not ‘to love me’ (between ourselves, there are far too many of them already), but capable of making me love him. They say a woman can’t be driven. I disagree. She can be driven—mad. And apart from that, though twenty men only succeed in giving me hydrophobia, one could persuade me to drink, if only his name was Mr. Right, as mother succinctly puts it.
“But first and last, I am having a real, if not a particularly sagacious, holiday, and can take care of myself. And next and last, play, I beseech you, the tiny good Samaritan between me and poor, plodding, blinded H. C.—even if he does eventually have to go on to Jericho.
“And I shall ever remain, your most affec.—F.”
How all this baffled me. I tried, but dismally failed, to pour a trickle of wine and oil into Mr. Crimble’s wounded heart, for his sake and for mine, not for Fanny’s, for I knew in myself that his “Jericho” was already within view.
“I don’t understand her; I don’t understand her,” he kept repeating, crushing his soft hat in his small, square hands. “I cannot reach her; I am not in touch with her.”
Out of the fount of my womanly wisdom I reminded him how young she was, how clever, and how much flattered.
“You know, then, there are—others?” he gulped, darkly meeting me.
“That, surely, is what makes her so precious,” I falsely insinuated.
He gazed at me, his eyes like an immense, empty shopwindow. “That thought puts—I can’t,” and he twisted his head on his shoulders as if shadows were around him; “I can’t bear to think of her and—with—others. It unbalances me. But how can you understand? … A sealed book. Last night I sat at my window. It was raining. I know not the hour: and Spring!” He clutched at his knees, stooping forward. “I repudiated myself, thrust myself out. Oh, believe me, we are not alone. And there and then I resolved to lay the whole matter before”—his glance groped towards the door—“before, in fact, her mother. She is a woman of sagacity, of proper feeling in her station, though how she came to be the mother of—But that’s neither here nor there. We mustn’t probe. Probably she thinks—but what use to consider it? One word to her—and Fanny would be lost to me forever.” For a moment it seemed his eyes closed on me. “How can I bring myself to speak of it?” a remote voice murmured from beneath them.
I looked at the figure seated there in its long black coat; and far away in my mind whistled an ecstatic bird—“The sea! the sea! You are going away—out, out of all this.”
So, too, was Mr. Crimble, if only I had known it. It was my weak and cowardly acquiescence in Fanny’s deceits that was speeding him on his dreadful journey. None the less, a wretched heartless impatience fretted me at being thus helplessly hemmed in by my fellow creatures. How clumsily they groped on. Why couldn’t they be happy in just living free from the clouds and trammels of each other and of themselves? The selfish helplessness of it all. It was, indeed, as though the strange fires which Fanny had burnt me in—which any sudden thought of her could still fan into a flickering blaze—had utterly died down. Whether or not, I was hardened; a poor little earthenware pot fresh from the furnace. And with what elixir was it brimmed.
I rose from my chair, walked away from my visitor, and peered through my muslin curtains at the green and shine and blue. A nursemaid was lagging along with a sleeping infant—its mild face to the sky—in a perambulator. A faint drift of dandelions showed in the stretching meadow. Kent’s blue hems lay calm; my thoughts drew far away.
“Mr. Crimble,” I cried in a low voice: “is she worth all our care for her?”
“ ‘Our’—‘our’?” he expostulated.
“Mine, then. When I gave her, just to be friends, because—because I loved her, a little ivory box, nothing of any value, of course, but which I have loved and treasured since childhood, she left it without a thought. It’s in my wardrobe drawer—shall I show it to you? I say it was nothing in itself; but what I mean is that she just makes use of me, and with far less generosity than—than other people do. Her eyes, her voice, when she moves her hand, turns her head, looks back—oh, I know! But,” and I turned on him in the light, “does it mean anything? Let us just help her all we can, and—keep away.”
It was a treachery past all forgiveness: I see that now. If only I had said, “Love on, love
