Memoirs of a Midget Part 30

Curiously perturbed, I caught at Mrs Bowater's skirt. Sky and darkening headland seemed to be spinning around me--melting out into a dream. "Oh, Mrs Bowater," I whispered, as if I were drowning, "it is strange for us to be here."

She dropped herself on the gra.s.s beside me, brushing with her dress the scent of wild thyme into the dewy air, and caught my hands in hers. Her long face close to mine, she gently shook me; "Now, now; now, now!" she called. "Come back, my pretty one. See! It's me, me, Mrs Bowater.... The love she's been to me!"

I smiled, groped with my hand, opened my eyes in the dimness to answer her. But a black cloud came over them; and the next thing I recall is waking to find myself being carried along in her arms, cold and half lifeless; and she actually breaking ever and again into a shambling run, as she searched my face in what seemed, even to my scarcely conscious brain, an extravagant anxiety.

Four days afterwards--and I completely restored--we found on the breakfast table of our quiet sea-room an unusually bountiful post: a broad, impressive-looking letter and a newspaper for Mrs Bowater, and a parcel, from f.a.n.n.y, for me. Time and distance had divided me from the past more than I had supposed. The very sight of her handwriting gave me a qualm. "f.a.n.n.y! Oh, my Heavens," cried a voice in me, "what's wrong now?"

But removing the brown paper I found only a book, and it being near to my size as books go, I opened it with profound relief. My joy was premature. The book f.a.n.n.y had sent me was by Bishop Jeremy Taylor, _Holy Living and Dying: with Prayers containing the Whole Duty of a Christian_. I read over and over this t.i.tle with a creeping misgiving and dismay, and almost in the same instant, detected, lightly fastened between its fly-leaves, and above its inscription--"To Midgetina: In Memoriam"--an inch or two of paper, pencilled over in f.a.n.n.y's minutest characters.

A slow, furtive glance discovered Mrs Bowater far too deeply absorbed to have noticed my small movements. She was sitting bolt upright, her forehead drawn crooked in an unusual frown. An open letter lay beside her plate. She was staring into, rather than at, her newspaper. With infinite stealth I slipped f.a.n.n.y's sc.r.a.p of paper under the tablecloth, folded it small, and pushed it into my skirt pocket. "A present from f.a.n.n.y," I cried in a clear voice at last.

But Mrs Bowater, with drooping, pallid face, and gaze now fixed deep on a gla.s.s-case containing three stuffed, aquatic birds, had not heard me.

I waited, watching her. She folded the newspaper and removed her spectacles. "On our return," she began inconsequently, "the honourable Mrs Monnerie has invited you to stay in her London house--not for a week or two; for good. That's all as it should be, I suppose, seeing that pay's pay and mine is no other call on you."

The automatic voice ceased with a gasp. Her thoughts appeared to be astray. She pushed her knotted fingers up her cheeks almost to her eyes.

"It's said," she added with long, straight mouth, "that that unfortunate young man, Mr Crimble--is ill." She gave a glance at me without appearing to see me, and left the room.

What was amiss? Oh, this world! I sat trembling in empty dread, listening to her heavy, m.u.f.fled footfall in the room above. The newspaper, with a scrawling cross on its margin, lay beside Mrs Monnerie's large, rough-edged envelope. I could bear the suspense no longer. On hands and knees I craned soundlessly forward over the white tablecloth, across the rank dish of coagulating bacon fat, and stole one or two of the last few lines of grey-black print at the foot of the column: "The reverend gentleman leaves a widowed mother. He was an only son, and was in his twenty-ninth year."

"Leaves"; "was"--the dingy letters blurred my sight. Footsteps were approaching. I huddled back to my carpet stool on the chair. Mrs Petrie had come to clear away the breakfast things. Stonily I listened while she cheerfully informed me that the gla.s.s was still rising, that she didn't recollect such weather not for the month for ten years or more.

"You must be what I've heard called an 'alcyon, miss." She nodded her congratulations at me, and squinnied at the untasted bacon.

"I am going for a breath of air, Mrs Petrie," came Mrs Bowater's voice through the crack of the door. "Will you kindly be ready for your walk, miss, in half an hour?"

Left once more to myself, I heard the "alarm" clock on the mantelpiece ticking as if every beat were being forced out of its works, and might be its last. An early fly or two--my strange, familiar friends--darted soundlessly beneath the ceiling. The sea was shimmering like an immense looking-gla.s.s. More pungent than I had ever remembered it, the refreshing smell of seaweed eddied in at the open window.

With dry mouth and a heart that jerked my body with its beatings, I unfolded f.a.n.n.y's sc.r.a.p of paper:--

"WISE M.,--I have thrown the stone. And now I am fey for my own poor head. Could you--and--will you absolutely secretly send me any money you can spare? 15 if possible. I'm in a hole--full fathom five--but mean to get out of it. I ask _you_, rather than mother, because I remember you said once you were putting money by out of that young lady's independence of yours. Notes would be best: if not, a Post Office Order to this address, _somehow_. I must trust to luck, and to your wonderful enterprise, if you would be truly a dear. It's only until my next salary. If you can't--or won't--help me, d.a.m.nation is over my head: but I bequeathe you a kiss all honey and roses none the less, and am, _pro tem._, your desperate F.

"PS.--Be sure not to give M. this address: and in a week or two we shall all be laughing and weeping together over the Prodigal Daughter."

f.a.n.n.y, then, had not heard our morning news. I read her scribble again and again for the least inkling of it, my thoughts in disorder. That sprawling cross on the newspaper; this gibbering and dancing as of a skeleton before my eyes; and "the stone," "the stone." What did it mean?

The word echoed on in my head as if it had been shouted in a vault. I was deadly frightened and sick, stood up as if to escape, and found only my own distorted face in Mrs Petrie's flower-and-b.u.t.terfly-painted chimney gla.s.s.

"You, you!" my eyes cried out on me. And a furious storm--remorse, grief, horror-broke within. I knew the whole awful truth. Like a Shade in the bright light, Mr Crimble stood there beyond the table, not looking at me, its face turned away. Unspeakable misery bowed my shoulders, chilled my skin.

"But you said 'ill,'" I whispered angrily up at last at Mrs Bowater's bonneted figure in the doorway. "I have looked where the cross is. He is dead!"

She closed the door with both hands and seated herself on a chair beside it.

"I've trapsed that Front, miss--striving to pick up the ends. It doesn't bear thinking of: that poor, misguided young man. It's hid away...."

"What did he die of, Mrs Bowater?" I demanded.

She caught at the newspaper, folded it close, nodded, shook her head.

"Four nights ago," she said. And still, some one last shred of devotion--not of fidelity, not of fear, for I longed to pour out my heart to her--sealed my lips. _Holy Living and Dying: Holy Living and Dying:_ I read over and over the faded gilt letters on the cover of f.a.n.n.y's gift, and she in her mockery, desperate, too. "d.a.m.nation"--the word echoed on in my brain.

But poor Mrs Bowater was awaiting no confession from me. She had out-trapsed her strength. When next I looked round at her, the bonneted head lay back against the rose-garlanded wallpaper, the mouth ajar, the eyelids fluttering. It was my turn now--to implore her to "come back": and failing to do so, I managed at last to clamber up and tug at the bell-pull.

Chapter Thirty

I surveyed with horror the rec.u.mbent, angular figure stretched out on the long, narrow, horsehair sofa. The shut eyes--it was selfish to leave me like this.

"There, miss, don't take on," Mrs Petrie was saying. "The poor thing's coming round now. Slipping dead off out of things--many's the time I've wished I could--even though you _have_ come down for a bit of pleasuring."

But it was Lyme Regis's solemn, round-shouldered doctor who rea.s.sured me. At first sight of him I knew Mrs Bowater was not going to die. He looked down on her, politely protesting that she must not attempt to get up. "This unseasonable heat, perhaps. The heart, of course, not so strong as it might be." He ordered her complete rest in bed for a few days--light nourishment, no worry, and he would look in again. Me he had not detected under the serge window-curtain, though he cast an uneasy glance around him, I fancied, on leaving the room.

After remaining alone under the still, sunshiny window until I could endure it no longer, I climbed up the steep, narrow stairs to Mrs Bowater's bedroom, and sat a while clasping the hand that hung down from the bed. The blind gently ballooned in the breeze. Raying lights circled across the ceiling, as carriage and cart glided by on the esplanade.

Fearful lest even my finger-tips should betray me to the flat shape beneath the counterpane, I tried hard to think. My mind was in a whirl of fears and forebodings; but there was but one thing, supremely urgent, facing me now. I must forget my own miseries, and somehow contrive to send f.a.n.n.y the money she needed.

_Somehow_; but how? The poor little h.o.a.rd which I had saved from my quarterly allowances lay locked up on Beechwood Hill in my box beneath my bed. By what conceivable means could I regain possession of it, unknown to Mrs Bowater?

Conscience muttered harsh words in my ear as I sat there holding that cold, limp hand with mine, while these inward schemings shuttled softly to and fro.

When my patient had fallen asleep, I got downstairs again--a more resolute, if not a better woman. Removing latch and box keys from their ribbon round my neck, I enclosed them in an envelope with a letter:--

"DEAR MR. ANON,--I want you, please, to help me. The large one of these two keys unlocks my little house door: the smaller one a box under my bed. Would you please let yourself in at Mrs Bowater's to-morrow evening when it's dark--there will be n.o.body there--take out Twenty Pounds which you will find in the box, and send them to _Miss f.a.n.n.y Bowater, the Crown and Anchor Hotel, B----_. I will thank you when I come.

"Believe me, yours very sincerely,

"M. M."

It is curious. Many a false, pandering word had sprung to my tongue when I was concocting this letter in my mind beside Mrs Bowater's bed, and even with Mrs Petrie's stubby, ink-corroded pen in my hand. Yet some last shred of honesty compelled me to be brief and frigid. I was simply determined to be utterly open with _him_, even though I seemed to myself like the dark picture of a man in a bog struggling to grope his way out.

I dipped my fingers into a vase of wallflowers, wetted the gum, sealed down the envelope, and wrote on it this address: Mr ----, Lodging at a cottage near the Farm, North-west of Wanderslore, Beechwood, Kent. And I prayed heaven for its safe delivery.

For f.a.n.n.y no words would come--nothing but a mere bare promise that I would help her as soon as I could--an idiot's message. The next three days were an almost insupportable solitude. From Mr Anon no answer could be expected, since in my haste I had forgotten to give him Mrs Petrie's address. I brooded in horror of what the failure of my letter to reach him might entail. I shared f.a.n.n.y's d.a.m.nation. Wherever I went, a silent Mr Crimble dogged my footsteps. Meanwhile, Mrs Bowater's newspaper, I discovered, lay concealed beneath her pillow.

At length I could bear myself no longer, and standing beside her bed, asked if I might read it. Until that moment we had neither of us even referred to the subject. Propped up on her pillows, her long face looking a strange colour against their whiteness, she considered my request.

"Well, miss," she said at last, "you know too much to know no more."

I spread out the creased sheets on the worn carpet, and read slowly the smudged, matter-of-fact account from beginning to end. There were pa.s.sages in it that imprinted themselves on my memory like a photograph.

Mr Crimble had taken the evening Service that last day looking "ill and worn, though never in what may be described as robust health, owing to his indefatigable devotion to his ecclesiastical and parochial duties."

The Service over, and the scanty congregation dispersed, he had sate alone in the vestry for so unusual a time that the verger of St Peter's, a Mr Soames, anxious to get home to his supper, had at length looked in on him at the door, to ask if his services were required any further. Mr Crimble had "raised his head as if startled," and "had smiled in the negative," and then, "closing the eastern door behind him," had "hastened" out of the church. No other human eye had encountered him until he was found at 11.27 p.m. in an outhouse at the foot of his mother's garden. "The head of the unfortunate gentleman was wellnigh severed from the body." "He was an only son, and was in his twenty-ninth year. Universal sympathy will be extended by all to the aged lady who is prostrated by this tragic occurrence."

Propped on my hands and knees, fearful that Mrs Bowater might interrupt me before I was prepared, I stared fixedly at the newspaper. I understood all that it said, yet it was as strange to me as if it had been written in Hebrew. I had seen, I had known, Mr Crimble. Who, then, was this? My throat drew together as I turned my head a little and managed to inquire, "What is an inquest, Mrs Bowater?"