“No, no. Not your lesson, miss. I didn’t mean that. It’s not for you to fret yourself, though I must say—I have always made it a habit, though without prying, please God, to be aware of more than interference could set right. Fanny and I have talked the affair over till we couldn’t look in each other’s faces for fear of what we might say. But she’s Mr. Bowater’s child, through and through, and my firm hand was not firm enough, maybe. You did what you could. It’s not in human conscience to ask more than the natural frame can bear.”
Did what I could. … I cowered, staring at my knuckles, and it seemed that a little concourse of strangers, heads close together, were talking in my mind. My eyes were dry; I think the spectre of a smile had dragged up my lips. Mrs. Bowater raised herself in her bed, and peered over at me.
“It’s the letters,” she whispered at me. “If he hasn’t destroyed them, they’ll be read to the whole parish.”
I crouched lower. “You’ll be thankful to be rid of me. I shall be thankful to be rid of myself, Mrs. Bowater.”
She thrust a long, skinny arm clean out of the bed. “Come away, there; come away,” she cried.
“Oh,” I said, “take me away, take me away. I can’t bear it, Mrs. Bowater. I don’t want to be alive.”
“There, miss, rest now, and think no more.” She smoothed my hair, clucked a little low, whistling tune, as if for lullaby. “Why, there now,” she muttered sardonically, “you might almost suppose I had been a mother myself!”
There was silence between us for a while, then, quietly raising herself, she looked down at me on the pillow, and, finding me to be still awake, a long smile spread over her face: “Why, we don’t seem neither of us to be much good at daytime sleeping.”
XXXI
A morning or two afterwards we set out on our homeward journey—the sea curdling softly into foam on its stones, a solitary ship in the distance on its dim, blue horizon. We were a dejected pair of travellers, keeping each a solemn face turned aside at the window, thinking our thoughts, and avoiding, as far as we could, any interchange of looks that might betray them one to the other. For the first time in our friendship Mrs. Bowater was a little short and impatient with me over difficulties and inconveniences which I could not avoid, owing to my size.
Her key in the lock of the door, she looked down on me in the porch, a thin smile between nose and cheek. “No place like home there mayn’t be, miss,” she began, “but—” The dark passage was certainly uninviting; the clock had stopped. “I think I’ll be calling round for Henry,” she added abruptly.
I entered the stagnant room, ran up my stairs, my heart with me—and paused. Not merely my own ghost was there to meet me; but a past that seemed to mutter, Never again, never again, from every object on shelf and wall. Yet a faint, sweet, unfamiliar odour lay on the chilly air. I drew aside the curtain and looked in. Fading on the coverlet of my bed lay a few limp violets, ivory white and faintly rosy.
I was alone in the house, concealed now even from Mr. Bowater’s frigid stare. Yet at sight of these flowers a slight vertigo came over me, and I had to sit on my bed for a moment to recover myself.
Then I knelt down, my heart knocking against my side, and dragged from out its hiding-place the box in which I kept my money. Gritty with the undisturbed dust of our absence, it was locked. I drew back, my hand on my mouth. What could be the meaning of this? My stranger had come and gone. Had he been so stupidly punctilious that, having taken out the twenty pounds, he had relocked an almost empty box?
Or had he, at the last moment … ? This riddle distressed me so much that instantly I was seized with a violent headache. But nothing could be done for the present. I laid by the violets in a drawer, pushed back the box, and, making as good a pretence at eating my supper as I could, prepared for the night.
One by one the clocks in hall and kitchen struck out the hours, and, the wind being in the East, borne on it came the chimes of St. Peter’s. Automatically I counted the strokes, turning this way and that, as if my life depended on this foolish arithmetic, yet ready, like Job, to curse the day I was born. What had my existence been but a blind futility, my thought for others but a mask of egotism and selfishness? Yet, in all this turmoil of mind, I must have slept, for suddenly I found myself stiff, drawn-up, and wide awake—listening to a cautious, reiterated tapping against my windowpane. A tallow night-light burned beside me in a saucer of water. For the first time in my life—at least since childhood—I had been afraid to face the dark. Why, I know not; but I at once leapt out of bed and blew out that light. The night was moonless, but high and starry. I peered through the curtains, and a shrouded figure became visible in the garden—Fanny’s.
Curtain withdrawn, we looked each at each through the cold, dividing glass in the gloom—her eyes, in the night-spread pallor of her skin, as if congealed. The dark lips, with an exaggerated attempt at articulation, murmured words, but I could catch no meaning. The face looked almost idiotic in these contortions. I shuddered, shook my head violently. She drew back.
Terrified that she would be gone—in my dressing-gown and slippers I groped my way across the room and was soon, with my door open, in the night air. She had heard me, and with a beckon of her finger, turned as if
