Fenwick's Career Part 44

Trembling she left the room. The door of Miss Anna's was open. Phoebe stood on the threshold, looking in. It had been her room and John's in the old days. Their very furniture was still there--as in the parlour, too. For John had sold it all to their landlord, when he wound up affairs. Miss Anna knew even what he had got for it--poor John!

She dared not go in. She stood leaning against the door-post, looking from outside, like one in exile, at the low-raftered room, with its oak press, and its bed, and its bit of green carpet. Thoughts pa.s.sed through her mind--thoughts which shook her from head to foot.

The cottage was now enlarged. Miss Mason, when she took it on lease three years before this date, had built two new rooms, or got the Hawkshead landlord to build them. She had retired now, on her savings; and there lived with her an old friend, a tired teacher like herself.

It was one of those spinster marriages--honourable and seemly _menages_--for which the Lakes have always been famous. But Miss Wetherby was now away, visiting her relations in the South. Had she been there, Phoebe could never have made up her mind to accept Miss Anna's urgent invitation. She shrank from everybody--strangers, or old acquaintance--it was all one. The terror which ranked, in her mind, next to the disabling, heart-arresting terror of the first meeting with her husband, was that of the first moment when she must discover herself to her old acquaintance in Langdale or Elterwater--in Kendal or Keswick--as Phoebe Fenwick. She had arrived, closely veiled, as 'Mrs. Wilson,' and she had never yet left the cottage door.

Then again she caught her breath, remembering that at that very moment Carrie was learning her true name from Miss Anna--was realising that she had seen her father without knowing it--was hearing the story of what her mother had done.

'Perhaps she'll hate me!' thought Phoebe, miserably. Through the window came the soft spring air. The big sycamore opposite was nearly in full leaf, and in the field below sprawled the helpless, new-born lambs, so white beside their dingy mothers. The voice of the river murmured through the valley, and sometimes, as the west wind blew stronger, Phoebe's fine and long-practised ear could distinguish other and more distant sounds, wafted from the leaping waterfalls which threaded the ghyll, perhaps even from the stream of Dungeon Ghyll itself, thundering in its prison of rocks. It was a characteristic Westmoreland day, with high grey cloud and interlacing sun, the fells clear from base to top, their green or reddish sides marked with white farms or bold clumps of fir; with the blackness of scattered yews, landmarks through generations; or the purple-grey of the emerging limestone. Fresh, lonely, cheerful--a land at once of mountain solitude, and of a long-settled, long-humanised life--it breathed kindly on this penitent, anxious woman; it seemed to bid her take courage.

Ah! the sound of a horn echoing along the fell. Phoebe flew down to the porch; then, remembering she might be seen, perhaps recognised, by the postman, she stepped back into the parlour, listening, but out of sight.

The servant, who had run down to fetch the letters, seemed to be having something of an argument with the postman. In a few minutes she reappeared, breathless.

'There's no letters, mum,' she said, seeing Phoebe at the parlour window--'and I doan't think this has owt to do here.' She held up a telegram, doubtfully--yet with an evident curiosity and excitement in her look. It was addressed to 'Mrs. John Fenwick.' The postman had clearly made some remark upon it.

Phoebe took it.

'It's all right. Tell him to leave it.'

The girl, noticing her agitation and her shaking fingers, ran down the hill again to give the message. Phoebe carried the telegram upstairs to her room, and locked the door.

For some moments she dared not open it. If it said that he refused to come?--that he would never see her again? Phoebe felt that she should die of grief--that life must stop.

At last she tore it open:

Sending messenger to-day. Hope to follow immediately. Welcome.

She gasped over the words, feeling them in the first instance as a blow--a repulse. She had feared--but also she had hoped--she scarcely knew for what--yet at least for something more, something different from this.

He was not coming, then, at once! A messenger! What messenger could a man send to his wife in such a case? Who knew them both well enough to dare to come between them? Old fiercenesses woke up in her. Had the word been merely cold and unforgiving it would have crushed her indeed; but there was that in her which would have scarcely dared complain. An eye for an eye--no conscience-stricken creature but admits the wild justice of that.

But a 'messenger'!--when she that was lost is found, when a man's wife comes back to him from the dead! Phoebe sat voiceless, the telegram on her lap, a kind of scorn trembling on her lip.

Then her eye caught the word 'welcome,' and it struck home. She began to sob, her angry pride melting. And suddenly the door of her room opened, and there on the threshold stood Carrie--Carrie, who had been crying, too--with wide, startled eyes and flushed cheeks. She looked at her mother, then flew to her, while Phoebe instinctively covered the telegram with her hand.

'Oh, mother! mother!--how could you? And I _laughed_ at him--I did--I _did_!' she cried, wringing her hands. 'And he looked so tired! And on the way home Amelie mimicked him--and his voice--and his queer ways; and I laughed. Oh, what a beast I was! Oh, mother, and I told you his name, and you never--never--said a word!'

The child flung herself on the floor, her feet tucked under her, her hands clasped round her knees, swaying backwards and forwards in a tempest of excited feeling, hardly knowing what she said.

Phoebe looked at her, bewildered; then she removed her hand, and Carrie saw the telegram. She threw herself on it, read the address, gulping, then the words:

'A messenger!' She understood that no more than her mother. It meant a letter, perhaps? But she fastened on 'immediately'--'welcome.'

And presently--all in a moment--she leapt to her feet, and began to dance and spring about the room. And as Phoebe watched her, startled and open-mouthed, wondering if this was all the reproach that Carrie was ever going to make her, the flushed and joyous creature came and flung her arms round Phoebe's neck, so that the fair hair and the brown were all in a confusion together, and the child's cheek was on her mother's.

'Mummy!--and I was only five, and you weren't so very old--only seven years older than I am now--and you thought father was tired of you--and you went off to Canada right away. My!--it was plucky of you--I will say that for you. And if you hadn't gone, I should never have seen George. But--oh, mummy, mummy!'--this between laughing and crying--'I do guess you were just a little fool! I guess you were!'

Miss Anna sat downstairs listening to the murmur of those hurrying voices above her in Phoebe's room. She was darning a tablecloth, with the Manchester paper beside her; and she sat peculiarly erect, a little stern and pinched,--breathing protest.

It was extraordinary how Carrie had taken it. These were your Canadian ways, she supposed. No horror of anything--no shyness. Looking a thing straight in the face, at a moment's notice--with a kind of humorous common sense--refusing altogether to cry over spilt milk, even such spilt milk as this--in a hurry, simply, to clear it up! A mere metaphorical refusal to cry, this--for, after all, there had been tears. But the immediate rebound, the determination to be cheerful, though the heavens fell, had been so amazing! The child had begun to laugh before her tears were dry--letting loose a flood of sharp, shrewd questions on her companion; wondering, with sparkling looks, how 'George' would take it; and quite refusing to provide that fine-drawn or shrinking sentiment, that 'moral sense,' in short, with which, as it seemed to the elder woman, half-hours of this quality in life should be decently accompanied. Little heathen! Miss Anna thought grimly of all the precautions she had taken to spare the young lady's feelings--of her own emotions--her sense of a solemn and epoch-making experience. She might have saved her pains!

But at this point the door upstairs opened, and the 'little heathen'

descended presently to the parlour, bringing the telegram. She came in shyly, and it might perhaps have been seen that she was conscious of her disgrace with Miss Anna. But she said nothing; she merely held out the piece of pink paper; and Miss Anna, surprised out of her own 'moral sense,' fell upon it, hastily adjusting her spectacles to a large and characteristic nose.

She read it frowning. A messenger! What on earth did they want with such a person? Just like John!--putting the disagreeables on other people. She said to herself that one saw where the child's levity came from.

'It's nice of father, isn't it?' said Carrie, rather timidly, touching the telegram.

'He'd better have come himself,' said Miss Anna, sharply.

'But he is coming!' cried Carrie. 'He's only sending a letter--or a present--or something--to smooth the way--just as George does with me.

Well, now then'--she bent down and brought her resolute little face close to Miss Anna's--'where's he to sleep?'

Miss Anna jumped, pushed back her chair, and said, coldly, 'I'll see to that.'

'Because, if he's going into my room,' said Carrie, thoughtfully, 'something'll have to be done to lengthen that bed. The pillow slips down, and even I hung my feet out last night. But, if you'll let me, I could fix it up--I could make that room real nice.'

Miss Anna told her to do what she liked. 'And where'll you sleep to-night, pray?'

'Oh, I'll go in to mother.'

'There's a second bed in my room,' said Miss Anna, stiffly.

'Ah! but that would crowd you up,' said the girl, softly; and off she went.

Presently there was a commotion upstairs--hammering, pulling, pushing.

Miss Anna wondered what on earth she was doing to the bed.

Then, Phoebe came down, white and fluttered enough to satisfy the most exacting canons. Miss Anna tried not to show that she was dissatisfied with the terms of the telegram, and Phoebe did not complain. But her despondency was very evident, and Miss Anna was extremely sorry for her. In her restlessness she presently said that she would go out to the ghyll and sit by the water a little. If anybody came, they were to shout for her. She would only be a stone's throw from the house.

She went away along the fell-side, her head drooping--so tall and thin, in her plain dress of grey Carmelite and her mushroom hat trimmed with black.

Miss Anna looked after her. She knew very little indeed, as yet, of what it was that had really brought the poor thing home. Her own fault, no doubt. Phoebe would have poured out her soul, without reserve, on that first night of her return to her old home. But Miss Anna had entirely refused to allow it. 'No, no!' she had said, even putting her hand on the wife's trembling lips; 'you shan't tell me.

Keep that for John--it's his right. If you've got a confession--it belongs to _John_!'

On the other hand, of the original crisis--of the scene in Bernard Street, the spoilt picture, and the letters of Madame de Pastourelles--Miss Anna had let Phoebe tell her what she pleased; and in truth--although Phoebe seemed to be no longer of a similar opinion--it appeared to the ex-schoolmistress that John had a good deal to explain--John and the French lady. If people are not married, and not relations, they have no reasonable call whatever to write each other long and interesting letters. In spite of her education and her reading, Miss Anna's standards in these respects were the small, Puritanical standards of the English country town.

The gate leading to the steep pitch of lane opened and shut. Miss Anna rose hastily and looked out.

A lady in black entered the little garden, walked up to the door, and knocked timidly. Was this the 'messenger'? Miss Anna hurried into the little hall.

'Is Mrs. Fenwick in?' asked a very musical voice.

'Mrs. Fenwick is sitting a little way off on the fell,' said Miss Anna, advancing. 'But I can call her directly. What name, please?'

The lady took out her card.