I grew a little weary of the beautiful snow in the days that followed my first talk with Mr Crimble, and fretted at the close air of the house. The last day of the year the wind was still in the north. It perplexed me that the pride which from my seed had sprung up in Fanny, and had prevented her from taking part in the parish concert, yet allowed her to attend it. She set off thickly veiled. Not even Mr Crimble's spectacles were likely to pierce her disguise. I had written a little letter the afternoon before and had myself handed it to Mrs Bowater with a large fork of mistletoe from my Christmas bunch. It was an invitation to herself and Fanny to sit with me and "see in" the New Year. She smiled at me over it—still her tranquil, though neglected self—and I was half-satisfied. Her best black dress was donned for the occasion. She had purchased a bottle of ginger wine, which she brought in with some glasses and placed in the middle of the red and black tablecloth. Its white-lettered, dark-green label "haunts me still." The hours drew on. Fanny returned from the concert—entering the room like a cloud of beauty. She beguiled the dwindling minutes of the year with mocking echoes of it. In a rich falsetto she repeated Mr Crimble's "few words" of sympathetic apology for her absence: "'I must ask your indulgence, ladies and gentlemen, for a lamentable hiatus in our programme.'" She gave us Miss Willett's and Mr Bangor's spirited rendering of "Oh, that we two"; and of the recitation which rather easily, it appeared, Mrs Bullace had been prevailed upon to give as an encore after her "Abt Vogler": "The Lady's 'Yes,'" by Elizabeth Barrett Browning. And what a glance of light and fire she cast me when she came to stanza six of the poem:— "Lead her from the festive boards, Point her to the starry skies!..." And she imitated Lady Pollacke's niece's—Miss Oran's—'cello obligato to "The Lost Chord," with a plangency that stirred even the soul of Henry as he lay curled up in my landlady's lap. The black head split like a pomegranate as he yawned his disgust. At this Mrs Bowater turned her bony face on me, her hands on her knees, and with a lift of her eyes disclosed the fact that she was amused, and that she hoped her amusement would remain a confidence between us. She got up and put the cat out: and on her return had regained her solemnity. "I suppose," she said stiffly, staring into the sparkling fire that was our only illumination, "I suppose, poor creatures, they did their best: and it isn't so many years ago, Fanny, since you were as put-about to be allowed to sing at one of the church concerts as a bird is to hop out of its cage." "Yes," said Fanny, "but in this world birds merely hop out of one cage into another; though I suppose the larger are the more comfortable." This retort set Mrs Bowater's countenance in an impassive mask—so impassive that every fitfully-lit photograph in the room seemed to have imitated her stare. "And, mother," added Fanny seductively, "who taught me to sing?" "The Lord knows," cried Mrs Bowater, with conviction, "I never did." "Yes," muttered Fanny in a low voice, for my information, "but does He care?" I hastily asked Mrs Bowater if she was glad of to-morrow's New Year. As if in reply the kitchen clock, always ten minutes fast, began to chime twelve, half-choking at every stroke. And once more the soul of poor Mr Hubbins sorrowfully took shape in a gaze at me out of vacancy. "To them going downhill, miss," my landlady was replying to my question, "it is not the milestones are the pleasantest company—nor that the journey's then of much account until it is over. By which I don't mean to suggest there need be gloom. But to you and Fanny here—well, I expect the little that's the present for you is mostly wasted on the future." With that, she rose, and poured out the syrupy brown wine from the green bottle, reserving a remarkably little glass which she had rummaged out of her years' hoardings for me. Fanny herself, with musing head—her mockings over—was sitting drawn-up on a stool by the fire. I doubt if she was Faintly out of the frosty air was wafted the knelling of midnight. I rose, stepped back from the firelight, drew the curtain, and stole a look into space. Away on the right flashed Sirius, and to east of him came gliding flat-headed Hydra with Alphard, the Red Bird, in his coil. So, for a moment in our history, I and the terrestrial globe were alone together. It seemed indeed that an intenser silence drew over reality as the earth faced yet one more fleeting revolution round her invisible lord and master. But no moon was risen yet. I turned towards the shape by the fire, and without her perceiving it, wafted kiss and prayer in her direction. Cold, careless Fanny—further than Uranus. We were alone, for at first stroke of St Peter's Mrs Bowater had left the room and had opened the front door. She was smiling; but was she smiling, or was that vague bewitchingness in her face merely an unmeaning guile of which she was unaware? It might have been a mermaid sitting there in the firelight. The bells broke in on our stillness; and fortunately, since there was no dark man in the house to bring us luck, Henry, already disgusted with the snow and blacker in hue than any whiskered human I have ever seen, seized his opportunity, and was the first living creature to cross our threshold from one year into another. This auspicious event renewed our spirits which, in waiting, had begun to flag. From far away came a jangling murmur of shouting and instruments and bells, which showed that the rest of the parish was sharing our solemn vigil; and then, with me on my table between them, a hand of each clasping mine, Mrs Bowater, Fanny, and I, after sipping each other's health, raised the strains of "Auld Lang Syne." There must have been Scottish blood in Mrs Bowater; she certainly made up for some little variation from the tune by a heartfelt pronunciation of the "Good-night, Midgetina; an immense happy New Year to you," whispered a voice to me about half an hour afterwards. I jumped out of bed, and peeped through my curtains. On some little errand Fanny had come down from her bedroom, and with a Paisley shawl over her shoulders stood with head and candle thrust in at the door. I gazed at her fairness. "Oh, Fanny!" I cried. "Oh, Fanny!" New Year's Day brought a change of weather. A slight mist rose over the fields, it began to thaw. A kind of listlessness now came over Fanny, which I tried in vain to dispel. Yet she seemed to seek my company; often to remain silent, and occasionally to ask me curious questions as if testing one answer against another. And one discovery I made in my efforts to keep her near me: that she liked being read to. Most of the volumes in Mrs Bowater's small library were of a nautical character, and though one of them, on the winds and tides and seas and coasts of the world, was to console me later in Fanny's absence, the majority defied even my obstinacy. Fanny hated stories of the sea, seemed to detest Crusoe; and smiled her slow, mysterious smile while she examined my own small literary treasures. By a flighty stroke of fortune, tacked up by an unskilled hand in the stained brown binding of a volume on Disorders of the Nerves, we discovered among her father's books a copy of Wuthering Heights, by Emily BrontË. The very first sentence of this strange, dwelling book, was a spell: "1801.—I have just returned from a visit to my landlord—the solitary neighbour that I shall be troubled with."... And when, a few lines farther on, I read: "He little imagined how my heart warmed towards him when I beheld his black eyes withdraw so suspiciously under their brows"—the apparition of who but Mr Crumble blinked at me out of the print, and the enchantment was complete. It was not only gaunt enormous Yorkshire with its fells and wastes of snow that seized on my imagination, not only that vast kitchen with its flagstones, green chairs, and firearms, but the mere music and aroma of And though in the wet and windy afternoons and evenings which Fanny and I thus shared, she, much more than poor Mr Crimble, resembled Heathcliff in being "rather morose," and in frequently expressing "an aversion to showing displays of feeling," she was more attracted by my discovery than she condescended to confess. Jane Eyre, she said, was a better story, "though Jane herself was a fool." What cared I? To me this book was like the kindling of a light in a strange house; and that house my mind. I gazed, watched, marvelled, and recognized, as I kneeled before its pages. But though my heart was torn, and my feelings were a little deranged by the scenes of violence, and my fancy was haunted by that stalking wolfish spectre, I took no part. I surveyed all with just that sense of aloofness and absorption with which as children Cathy and Heathcliff, barefoot in the darkness of the garden, had looked in that Sunday evening on the Lintons' crimson taper-lit drawing-room. If, in February, you put a newly gathered sprig of budding thorn into the fire; instantaneously, in the influence of the heat, it will break into bright-green tiny leaf. That is what Emily BrontË did for me. Not so for Fanny. In her "vapid listlessness" she often pretended to yawn over Wuthering Heights, and would shock me with mocking criticism, or cry "Ah!" at the poignant passages. But I believe it was pure concealment. She was really playing a part in the story. I have, at any rate, never seen her face so transfigured as when once she suddenly looked up in the firelight and caught my eye fixed on her over the book. It was at the passage where Cathy—in her grand plaid silk frock, white trousers, and burnished shoes—returns to the dreadful Grange; and, "dismally beclouded," Heathcliff stares out at her from his hiding-place. "'He might,'" I read on, "'well skulk behind the settle, at beholding such a bright, graceful damsel enter the house. "Is Heathcliff not here?" she demanded, pulling off her gloves, and displaying fingers wonderfully whitened with doing nothing and staying indoors.'" It was at this point that our eyes, as I say, Fanny's and mine, met. But she, bright, graceful damsel, was not thinking of me. "Do you like that kind of character, Fanny?" I inquired. My candle's flames gleamed lean and tiny in her eyes. "Whose?" she asked. "Why, Heathcliff's." She turned slowly away. "You take things so seriously, Midgetina. It's merely a story. He only wanted taming. You'll see by-and-by." But at that moment my ear caught the sound of footsteps, and when Mrs Bowater opened the door to contemplate idle Fanny, the book was under my bed. As the day drew near for Fanny's return to her "duties," her mood brightened. She displayed before me in all their stages, the new clothes which Mrs Bowater lavished on her—to a degree that, amateur though I was in domestic economy, filled me with astonishment. I had to feign delight in these fineries—"Ah!" whispered I to each, "when she wears you she will be far, far away." I envied the very buttons, and indeed pestered her with entreaties. I implored her to think of me at certain hours; to say good-night to herself for me; to write day by day in the first of the evening; to share the moon: "If we both look at her at the same moment," I argued, "it will be next to looking at one another. You cannot be utterly gone: and if you see even a flower, or hear the wind.... Oh, I hope and hope you will be happy." She promised everything with smiling ease, and would have sealed the compact in blood if I had thought to cut my thumb for it. Thursday in Holy Week—then she would be home again. I stared at the blessed day across the centuries as a condemned man stares in fancy at the scaffold awaiting him; but on mine hung all my hopes. Long evenings I never saw her at all; and voices in the kitchen, when she came in late, suggested that my landlady had also missed her. But Fanny never lost her self-control even when she lost her temper; and I dared not tax her with neglecting me. Her cold looks almost suffocated me. I besought her to spend one last hour of the eve of her departure alone with me and with the stars in the woods. She promised. I waited on until sick at heart I flung myself on my knees beside my bed and prayed that God would comfort her. Heathcliff had acquired a feeble pupil. The next afternoon she was gone. |