“And do you really think like that?—the body of no importance? You? Why, Miss M., Aunt Alice calls you her ‘pocket Venus,’ and she means it, too, in her own sly way.”
“It’s very kind of her,” said I, breathing more freely. “Someone I know always calls me Midgetina, or Miss Midge, anything of that sort. I don’t mean, Miss Monnerie, that it doesn’t matter what we are called. Why, if that were so, there wouldn’t be any Society at all, would there? We should all be—well—anonymous.” Deep inside I felt myself smile. “Not that that makes much difference to good poetry.”
Susan sighed. “How zigzaggedly you talk. What has poetry to do with Mr. Crimble?—that was his name, wasn’t it?”
“Well, it hasn’t very much,” I confessed. “He hadn’t the time for it.”
Susan seated herself on a cushion on the floor—and with how sharp a stab reminded me of Fanny and the old, carefree days of Wuthering Heights.
Surely—in spite of Fanny—life had definitely taken a tinge of Miss Brontë’s imagination since then. But it was only the languor of Susan’s movements, and that because she seemed a little tired, rather than merely indolent. And if from Fanny’s eyes had now stooped a serpent and now a blinded angel; from these clear blue ones looked only a human being like myself. Even as I write that “like myself,” I ponder. But let it stay.
“So you really did know him?” Susan persisted. “And it doesn’t seem a nightmare even to think of him? And who, I say, made it impossible for him to go on living?” So intense was her absorption in these questions that when they ceased her hands tightened round her knees, and her small mouth remained ajar.
“You said ‘what’ just now,” I prevaricated, looking up at her.
At this her blue eyes opened so wide I broke into a little laugh.
“No, no, no, Miss Monnerie,” I hastened to explain, “not me. It isn’t my story, though I was in it—and to blame. But please, if you would be so kind, don’t mention it again to Mrs. Monnerie, and don’t think about it any more.”
“Not think about it! You must. Besides, thoughts sometimes think themselves. I always supposed that things like that only happened to quite—to different people, you know. Was he?”
“Different?” I couldn’t follow her. “He was the curate of St. Peter’s—a friend of the Pollackes.”
“Oh, yes, the Pollackes,” said she; and having glanced at me again, said no more.
The smallest confidence, I find, is a shortcut to friendship. And after this little conversation there was no ice to break between Susan Monnerie and myself, and she often championed me in my little difficulties—even if only by her silence.
XXXIV
Miss Monnerie’s visits were less punctual though more frequent than Percy Maudlen’s. “And where is the toadlet?” I heard him drawl one afternoon as I was being carried downstairs by the light-footed Fleming, on the padded tray which Mrs. Monnerie had had made for the purpose.
“The toadlet, my dear Percy, is about to take a little gentle exercise with me in the garden, and you shall accompany us. If you were the kind of fairytale hero I used to read of in my nursery, you would discover the charm, and live happy ever after. But I see nothing of the heroic in you, and little of the hereafter. Miss M. is a feast of mercies.”
“H’m. Providence packs his mercies into precious small quarters at times,” he yawned.
“Which suggests an uncivil speculation,” replied his aunt, “on the size of your hat.”
“But candidly, Aunt Alice,” he retorted, “is your little attachée quite all there—I mean, all of her that there is? Personally I wouldn’t touch her, if I could help it, with a pair of tongs. … A nasty trick!”
Then, “Hah!” cried Mrs. Monnerie in a large, pleasant voice, “here is Miss M. Percy has been exposing a wounded heart, precious one. He is hurt because you look at him as if there were positively nothing more of him than what is there to see.”
“Not at all, Aunt Alice,” Percy drawled, with a jerk of his cane. “It was for precisely the opposite reason. Who knows you ain’t a witch, Miss M.? Distilled? Heavens, Aunt Alice! you are not bringing Cherry too?”
Yes, Cherry was coming too, with his globular eye and sneering nose. And so poor Percy, with a cold little smile on his fine pale features, had to accommodate himself to Mrs. Monnerie’s leisurely pace, and she to mine, while Cherry disdainfully shuffled in our rear. We were a singular quartette, though there were only two or three small children in the palisaded garden to enjoy the spectacle; and they, after a few polite and muffled giggles, returned to their dolls.
It was a stifling afternoon. As I trod the yellow gravel the quivering atmosphere all but blinded me with its reflected glare. The only sounds to be heard were the clang of a milkman’s handcart, and the pirouettes of a distant piano.
“And what,” Mrs. Monnerie suddenly inquired, looking down on me, with mauve-tinted cheek, from under her beribanded, long-handled parasol, “what is Miss M. thinking about?”
As a matter of fact I was walking at that moment in imagination with Mrs. Bowater at Lyme Regis, but I seized the opportunity of hastening round from between aunt and nephew so that I could screen myself from the sun in Mrs. Monnerie’s ample shadow, and inquired why London gardeners were so much attached to geraniums, lobelias, calceolarias, and ice-plants? Mightn’t one just as well paint the border, Mrs. Monnerie, red, yellow, and blue? Then it would last—rain, snow, anything.
“Now I’ll wager, Percy, you hadn’t noticed that,” said Mrs. Monnerie in triumph.
“I make it a practice,” he replied, “never to notice the obvious. It is merely a kind of least common denominator, as I believe you call ’em, and,” he wafted away a yawn with his glove, “I take
