“Indeed, indeed, I will,” I said.
“You see, miss,” Mrs. Bowater monotoned on, “I’m nothing much better than an aunt for Fanny, with no children of my own for guidance; and him there helpless with his broken leg in Buenos Aires.” The long, bonneted face moved round towards me. “Do you feel any smouldering affections for the young gentleman that’s just gone?”
This was an unexpected twist to our talk, but, in some little confusion, I met it as candidly as I could.
“I am fonder of Fanny—and, of course, of you, Mrs. Bowater; oh, far, far. But—I don’t quite know how to express it—I am, as you might say, in my own mind with him. I think he knows a little what I am, in myself I mean. And besides, oh, well, it isn’t a miserable thing to feel that just one’s company makes anybody happy.”
Mrs. Bowater considered this reply for some little time.
“He didn’t look any too happy just now, to judge from his back view,” she remarked oracularly. “And when I was. … But there, miss, I’m thinking only of your comfort, and I’m not quite as comfortable as might be over that there Mrs. Monnerie. Generous she may be, though not noticing it much perhaps from a purse with no bottom to it, judging from what I’ve seen. God bless you, one way or the other. And perhaps you’ll sometimes remember the bits of Sundays we’ve shared up there—you and the old Dragon.”
A smile and a tear battled for the dark eye that looked down on me. Indeed, seldom after came a Sunday evening with its clanking bells and empty, London hush, but it brought back to me with a pang my hymns and talks with “the old Dragon.” Not that anyone I ever saw at Mrs. Monnerie’s appeared to work so hard as to need a day of rest. There was merely a peculiar empty sensation on Sundays of there being nothing “to do.”
A flight of stone steps and a pillared porch led up to her great ornamental door. Beyond was a hall compared with which the marbles of Brunswick House were mere mosaic. An alabaster fountain, its jet springing lightly from a gilded torch held by a crouching faun, cooled, and discreetly murmured a ceaseless Hush! in the air. On either hand, a wide, shallow staircase ascended to an enormous gilded drawing-room, with its chairs and pictures; and to the library. The dining-room stood opposite the portico. When Mrs. Monnerie and I were alone, we usually shared a smaller room with her parrot, Chakka; her little Chinese dog, Cherry—whose whimper had a most uncomfortable resemblance to the wild and homesick cry of my seagulls at Lyme Regis—and her collections of the world’s smaller rarities. It is only, I suppose, one more proof of how volatile a creature I used to be that I took an intense interest in the contents of these cabinets for a few days, and then found them nothing but a vexation. No doubt this was because of an uneasy suspicion that Mrs. Monnerie had also collected me.
She could be extremely tactful in her private designs, yet she “showed me off” in a fashion that might have turned a far less giddy head than her protégée’s, and perhaps cannot have been in the best of taste.
So sure had she been of me that, when I arrived, a room on the first floor of No. 2 had already been prepared for my reception. A wonderful piece of fantasticalness—like a miniature fairy palace, but without a vestige of any real make-believe in it. It was panelled and screened with carvings in wood, inlaid with silver and mother-of-pearl—dwarfs and apes and misshapen gods and goddesses leering and gaping out at one from amidst leafy branches, flowers, and fruits, and birds, and butterflies. The faintest sniff of that Indian wood—whatever it was—recalls to this day that nightmare scenery. Its hangings were of a silk so rich that they might have stood on edge on the floor. These screens and tapestries guarded a privacy that rarely, alas, contained a Miss M. worth being in private with.
The one piece of chagrin exhibited by Mrs. Monnerie in those early days of our acquaintance was at my insistence on bringing at least a few of my familiar sticks of furniture and chattels with me from Mrs. Bowater’s. Their plain Sheraton design, she thought, was barbarously out of keeping with the rest. It was; but I had my way.
Not the least precious of these old possessions, though dismal for its memories, was the broken money chest which Fanny had pushed in under the yew in the garden at Wanderslore. Tacked up in canvas, its hinges and lock repaired, it had been sent on to me a week or two after my farewells to Beechwood, by Mr. Anon. Inside it I found the nightgown I had buried in the rabbit’s hole, Fanny’s letter from under its stone, my Sense and Sensibility, and last, pinned on to a scrap of kingfisher coloured silk, a pair of earrings made out of two old gold coins. Apart from a few withered flowers, they
