I would look at her just for pleasure’s sake. Her hair was of the colour of undyed silk, with darker strands in it; her skin pale; and she had an odd little stutter in her light young voice when she was excited. I would often compare her with Fanny. What curious differences there were between them. She was graceful, but as if she had been taught to be. Unlike Fanny, she was not so fascinatingly just a beautiful body—with that sometimes awful Someone looking out of its windows. There was a lovely delicacy in her, as if, absurd though it may sound, every bit of her had been selected, actually picked out, from the finest materials. Perhaps it was her food and drink that had helped to make her so; for I don’t think Miss Stebbings’s diet was more than wholesome, or that following the sea in early life makes a man rich enough to afford many dainties for his children. Anyhow, there was nothing man-made in Fanny; and if there are women-shaped mermaids I know what looks will be seen in their faces.
However that may be, a keen, roving spirit dwelt in Susan’s clear, blue eyes. I never discovered in her any malice or vanity, and this, I think, frequently irritated Mrs. Monnerie. Susan, too, used to ask me perfectly sane and ordinary questions; and I cannot describe what a flattery it was. I had always supposed that men and women were intended to talk openly to one another in this world; but it was an uncommonly rare luxury for me at Mrs. Monnerie’s. I could talk freely enough to Susan, and told her a good deal about my early days, though I kept my life at Beechwood Hill more or less to myself.
And that reminds me that Mrs. Bowater proved to have been a good prophet. It was one day at luncheon. Mrs. Monnerie happened to cast a glance at the Morning Post newspaper which lay open on a chair near by, showing in tall type at the top of the column, “Sudden Death of Sir Jasper Goodge.” Sir Jasper Goodge, whose family history, it seemed, was an open book to her, reminded her whimsically of another tragedy. She put back her head and, surveying me blandly as I sat up beside her, inquired if I had known at all intimately that unfortunate young man, Mr. Crimble.
“I remember him bobbing and sidling at me that delightful afternoon when—what do you think of it, Susan?—Poppet and I discovered in each other an unfashionable taste for the truth! A bazaar in aid of the Pollacke Blanket Fund, or something of the kind.”
The recollection seemed to have amused her so much that for the moment I held my breath and ignored her question.
“But why was Mr. Crimble unfortunate?” inquired Susan, attempting to make Cherry beg for a breadcrumb. I glanced in consternation at Marvell, who at the moment was bringing the coffee things into the room. But he appeared to be uninterested in Mr. Crimble.
“Mr. Crimble was unfortunate, my dear,” said Mrs. Monnerie complacently, “because he cut his throat.”
“Ach! how horrible. How can you say such things! Get down, you little silly! Please, Aunt Alice, there must be something pleasanter to talk about than that? Everybody knows about the hideous old Sir Jasper Goodge; so it doesn’t much matter what one says of him. But. …” In spite of her command the little dog still gloated on her fingers.
“There may be things pleasanter, my dear Susan,” returned Mrs. Monnerie complacently, “but there are few so illuminating. In Greek tragedy, I used to be told, all such horrors have the effect of what is called a purgation. Did Mr. Crimble seem that kind of young man, my dear? And why was he so impetuous?”
“I think, Mrs. Monnerie,” said I, “he was in trouble.”
“H’m,” said she. “He had a very sallow look, I remember. So he discussed his troubles? But not with you, my fairy?”
“Surely, Aunt Alice,” exclaimed Susan hotly, “it isn’t quite fair or nice to bring back such ghastly memories. Why,” she touched my hand with the tips of her light fingers, “she is quite cold already.”
“Poppet’s hands are always cold,” replied her aunt imperturbably. “And I suspect that she and I know more about this wicked world than has brought shadows to your young brow. We’ll return to Mr. Crimble, my dear, when Susan is butterflying elsewhere. She is so shockingly easily shocked.”
But it was Susan herself who returned to the subject. She came into my room where I sat reading—a collection of the tiniest little books in the most sumptuous gilt morocco had been yet another of Mrs. Monnerie’s kindnesses—and she stood for a moment musing out through my silk window blinds at the vast zinc tank on the roof.
“Was that true?” she said at last. “Did you really know someone who killed himself? Who was he? What was he like?”
“He was a young man—in his twenty-ninth year,” I replied automatically, “dark, short, with gold spectacles, a clergyman. He was the curate at St. Peter’s—Beechwood, you know.” I was speaking in a low voice, as if I might be overheard.
It was extraordinary how swiftly Mr. Crimble had faded into a vanishing shadow. From the very instant of his death the world had begun to adjust itself to his absence. And now nothing but a memory—a black, sad memory.
But Susan’s voice interrupted these faint musings. “A clergyman!” she was repeating. “But why—why did he—do that?”
“They said, melancholia. I suppose it was just impossible—or seemed impossible—for him to go on living.”
“But what made him melancholy? How awful. And how can Aunt Alice have said it like that?”
“But surely,” argued I, in my old contradictory fashion, and spying about for a path of evasion, “it’s better to call things by their proper names. What is the body, after all? Not that I mean
