“Mock as you like at me,” was my miserable answer, “I have kept my word to you—all but: and it was I who helped—Oh yes, I know that.”
“Ah! ‘all but,’ ” her agile tongue caught up the words. “And what else, may I ask?”
I took a deep breath, with almost sightless eyes fixed on the beautiful, mysterious glades stretching beneath us. “He came again. Why, it was not very many days ago. And we talked and talked, and I grew tired, yes, and angry at last. I told him you were only making use of me. You were. I said that all we could do was just to go on loving you—and keep away. I know, Fanny, I cannot be of any account; I don’t understand very much. But that is true.”
She leaned nearer, as if incredulous, her face as tranquil in its absorption as the planet that hung in the russet-black sky in a rift of the leaves.
“Candid, and candid,” she scoffed brokenly, and all in a gasp.
The voice trailed off. Her mouth relaxed. And suddenly my old love for her seemed to gush back into my heart. A burning, inarticulate pity rose up in me.
“Listen, Midgetina,” she went on. “That was honest. And I can be honest, too. I don’t care what you said. If you had called me the vilest word they can set their tongue to, I’d still have forgiven you. But would you have me give in? Go under? Have you ever seen Mother Grundy? I tell you, he haunts me—the blackness, the deadness. That outhouse! Do you suppose I can’t see inside that? He sits by my bed. I eat his shadow with my food. At every corner in the street his black felt hat bobs and disappears. If even he hadn’t been so solemn, so insignificant! …” Her low, torturing laugh shook under the beechen hollow.
“And I say this”—she went on slowly, as if I sat at a distance, “if he’s not very careful I shall go the same way. I can’t bear that—that kind of spying on me. Don’t you suppose you can sin after death? If only he had given me away—betrayed me! We should at least have been square. But that,” she jerked back her head. “That’s only one thing. I had not meant to humble myself like this. You seem not to care what humiliations I have to endure. You sit there, oh, how absurd for me, watching and watching me, null and void and meaningless. Yet you are human: you feel. You said you loved me—oh, yes. But touch me, come here”—she laid her hand almost fondly on her breast—“and be humanly generous, no. That’s no more your nature than—than a changeling’s. Contamination, perhaps!”
Her eyes fretted round her, as if she had lost her sense of direction.
“And now there’s this tongueless, staring ghost.” She shuddered, hiding her face in her hands. “The misery of it all.”
“Fanny, Fanny,” I besought her. “You know I love you.” But the words sounded cold and distant, and some deadly disinclination held me where I was, though I longed to comfort her. “And at times, I confess it, I have hated you too. You haven’t always been very kind to me. I was trying to cure myself. You were curing me. But still I go on—a little.”
“It’s useless, useless,” she replied, dropping her hands into her lap and gazing vacantly on the ground. “I can’t care; I can’t even cry. And all you say is only pity. I don’t want that. Would you still pity me, I wonder, if you knew that even though I had come to take this wretched money from you, I meant to taunt you, to accuse you of lying to me?”
“Taunt,” “lying.” My cheek grew hot. I drew back my head with a jerk and stared at her. “I don’t understand you.”
“There. What did I say! She doesn’t understand me,” she cried with a sob, as if calling on the angels to bear witness to her amazement. “Well, then, let Fanny tell you, Miss M., whoever and whatever you may be, that she, yes, even she, can understand that unearthliness, too. Oh, these last days! I have had my fill of them. Take all: give nothing. There’s no other means of grace in a world like this.”
“But you said ‘taunt’ me,” I insisted, with eyes fixed on the box that lay between the blunt-headed fronds of the springing bracken. “What did you mean by that? I did my best. Your mother was ill. She fainted, Fanny, when the newspaper came. I couldn’t come back a single hour earlier. So I wrote to—to a friend, sending him my keys, and asking him to find the money for you. I know my letter reached him. Perhaps,” I hesitated, in dread of what might be hanging over our heads, “perhaps the box is empty.”
But I need not have wasted myself. The puzzle was not quite inexplicable. For the moment Fanny’s miseries seemed to have vanished. Animation came into her face and voice and movements as she told me how, the night before, thinking that her mother and I might have returned from Lyme Regis, she had come tapping. And suddenly as she stood in the garden, her face close to the glass, an utterly strange one had thrust itself into view, and the figure of “a ghastly gloating little dwarfish creature” had appeared in the porch.
At first she had supposed—but only for an instant—that it was myself. “Of course, mother had mentioned him in her letters, but”—and Fanny opened her eyes at me—“I never guessed he was, well, like that.”
Then in her folly, and without giving him the least opportunity to explain his presence there, she had begun railing at him, and had accused him of forcing his way in to rob the house: “And he stood there, hunched up, looking at me—out of my own house.”
