The days melted away. We would sally out early, while yet many of Lyme’s kitchen chimneys were smokeless, and would return with the shadows of evening. How Mrs. Bowater managed to sustain so large a frame for so many hours together on a few hard biscuits and a bottle of cold tea, I cannot discover. Her mood, like our weather that April, was almost always “set fair,” and her temper never above a comfortable sixty degrees. We hired a goat-chaise, and with my flaxen hair down my back under a sunbonnet, I drove Reuben up and down the Esplanade—both of us passable ten-year-olds to a careless observer. My cheeks and hands were scorched by the sun; Mrs. Bowater added more and more lilac and white to her outdoor attire; and Mrs. Petrie lent her a striped, and once handsome parasol with a stork’s head for handle, which had been left behind by a visitor—otherwise unendeared.
On warm mornings we would choose some secluded spot on the beach, or on the fragrant, green-turfed cliffs, or in the Uplyme meadows. Though I could never persuade Mrs. Bowater to join me, I sometimes dabbled in the sun in some ice-cold, shallow, seaweedy pool between the rocks. Then, while she read the newspaper, or crocheted, I also, over book or needle, indulged in endless reverie. For hours together, with eyes fixed on the glass-green, tumbling water, I would listen to its enormous, far, phantom bells and voices, happier than words can tell. And I would lie at full length, basking in the heat, for it was a hot May, almost wishing that the huge furnace of the sun would melt me away into a little bit of glass: and what colour would that have been, I wonder? If a small heart can fall in love with the whole world, that heart was mine. But the very intensity of this greed and delight—and the tiniest shell or pebble on the beach seemed to be all but exploding with it—was a severe test of my strength.
One late twilight, I remember, as we idled homeward, the planet Venus floating like a luminous water-drop in the primrose of the western sky, we passed by a low white-walled house beneath trees. And from an open window came into the quiet the music of a fiddle. What secret decoy was in that air I cannot say. I stopped dead, looking about me as if for refuge, and drinking in the while the gliding, lamenting sounds.
Curiously perturbed, I caught at Mrs. Bowater’s skirt. Sky and darkening headland seemed to be spinning around me—melting out into a dream. “Oh, Mrs. Bowater,” I whispered, as if I were drowning, “it is strange for us to be here.”
She dropped herself on the grass beside me, brushing with her dress the scent of wild thyme into the dewy air, and caught my hands in hers. Her long face close to mine, she gently shook me; “Now, now; now, now!” she called. “Come back, my pretty one. See! It’s me, me, Mrs. Bowater. … The love she’s been to me!”
I smiled, groped with my hand, opened my eyes in the dimness to answer her. But a black cloud came over them; and the next thing I recall is waking to find myself being carried along in her arms, cold and half lifeless; and she actually breaking ever and again into a shambling run, as she searched my face in what seemed, even to my scarcely conscious brain, an extravagant anxiety.
Four days afterwards—and I completely restored—we found on the breakfast table of our quiet sea-room an unusually bountiful post: a broad, impressive-looking letter and a newspaper for Mrs. Bowater, and a parcel, from Fanny, for me. Time and distance had divided me from the past more than I had supposed. The very sight of her handwriting gave me a qualm. “Fanny! Oh, my Heavens,” cried a voice in me, “what’s wrong now?”
But removing the brown paper I found only a book, and it being near to my size as books go, I opened it with profound relief. My joy was premature. The book Fanny had sent me was by Bishop Jeremy Taylor, Holy Living and Dying: With Prayers Containing the Whole Duty of a Christian. I read over and over this title with a creeping misgiving and dismay, and almost in the same instant, detected, lightly fastened between its flyleaves, and above its inscription—“To Midgetina: In Memoriam”—an inch or two of paper, pencilled over in Fanny’s minutest characters.
A slow, furtive glance discovered Mrs. Bowater far too deeply absorbed to have noticed my small movements. She was sitting bolt upright, her forehead drawn crooked in an unusual frown. An open letter lay beside her plate. She was staring into, rather than at, her newspaper. With infinite stealth I slipped Fanny’s scrap of paper under the tablecloth, folded it small, and pushed it into my skirt pocket. “A present from Fanny,” I cried in a clear voice at last.
But Mrs. Bowater, with drooping, pallid face, and gaze now fixed deep on a glass-case containing three stuffed, aquatic birds, had not heard me. I waited, watching her. She folded the newspaper and removed her spectacles. “On our return,” she began inconsequently, “the honourable Mrs. Monnerie has invited you to stay in her London house—not for a week or two; for good. That’s all as
