"He didn't look any too happy just now, to judge from his back view," she remarked oracularly. "And when I was.... But there, miss, I'm thinking only of your comfort, and I'm not quite as comfortable as might be over that there Mrs Monnerie. Generous she may be, though not noticing it much perhaps from a purse with no bottom to it, judging from what I've seen. God bless you, one way or the other. And perhaps you'll sometimes remember the bits of Sundays we've shared up there—you and the old Dragon."
A smile and a tear battled for the dark eye that looked down on me. Indeed, seldom after came a Sunday evening with its clanking bells and empty, London hush, but it brought back to me with a pang my hymns and talks with "the old Dragon." Not that any one I ever saw at Mrs Monnerie's appeared to work so hard as to need a day of rest. There was merely a peculiar empty sensation on Sundays of there being nothing "to do."
A flight of stone steps and a pillared porch led up to her great ornamental door. Beyond was a hall compared with which the marbles of Brunswick House were mere mosaic. An alabaster fountain, its jet springing lightly from a gilded torch held by a crouching faun, cooled, and discreetly murmured a ceaseless Hush! in the air. On either hand, a wide, shallow staircase ascended to an enormous gilded drawing-room, with its chairs and pictures; and to the library. The dining-room stood opposite the portico. When Mrs Monnerie and I were alone, we usually shared a smaller room with her parrot, Chakka; her little Chinese dog, Cherry—whose whimper had a most uncomfortable resemblance to the wild and homesick cry of my seagulls at Lyme Regis—and her collections of the world's smaller rarities. It is only, I suppose, one more proof of how volatile a creature I used to be that I took an intense interest in the contents of these cabinets for a few days, and then found them nothing but a vexation. No doubt this was because of an uneasy suspicion that Mrs Monnerie had also collected me.
She could be extremely tactful in her private designs, yet she "showed me off" in a fashion that might have turned a far less giddy head than her protégée's, and perhaps cannot have been in the best of taste.
So sure had she been of me that, when I arrived, a room on the first floor of No. 2 had already been prepared for my reception. A wonderful piece of fantasticalness—like a miniature fairy palace, but without a vestige of any real make-believe in it. It was panelled and screened with carvings in wood, inlaid with silver and mother-of-pearl—dwarfs and apes and misshapen gods and goddesses leering and gaping out at one from amidst leafy branches, flowers, and fruits, and birds, and butterflies. The faintest sniff of that Indian wood—whatever it was—recalls to this day that nightmare scenery. Its hangings were of a silk so rich that they might have stood on edge on the floor. These screens and tapestries guarded a privacy that rarely, alas, contained a Miss M. worth being in private with.
The one piece of chagrin exhibited by Mrs Monnerie in those early days of our acquaintance was at my insistence on bringing at least a few of my familiar sticks of furniture and chattels with me from Mrs Bowater's. Their plain Sheraton design, she thought, was barbarously out of keeping with the rest. It was; but I had my way.
Not the least precious of these old possessions, though dismal for its memories, was the broken money chest which Fanny had pushed in under the yew in the garden at Wanderslore. Tacked up in canvas, its hinges and lock repaired, it had been sent on to me a week or two after my farewells to Beechwood, by Mr Anon. Inside it I found the nightgown I had buried in the rabbit's hole, Fanny's letter from under its stone, my Sense and Sensibility, and last, pinned on to a scrap of kingfisher coloured silk, a pair of ear-rings made out of two old gold coins. Apart from a few withered flowers, they are the only thing I possess that came from Wanderslore. Long afterwards, I showed these ear-rings to Sir W. P. He told me they were quarter Rose Nobles of Edward III.'s reign, and only a quarter of a quarter of an ounce in weight. They weigh pretty heavy for me now, however.
My arrangement with Mrs Monnerie had been that, however long I might stay with her, I should still be in the nature of a visitor; that No. 2, in fact, should be my town house, and Mrs Bowater's my country. But I was soon to realize that she intended Mrs Bowater to have a very small share in me. She pretended to be jealous of me, to love me for my own sweet sake; and even while I knew it was mere pretence, it left its flattery on my mind; and for the first time in my life I feigned to be even smaller than I was; would mince my speeches, affect to be clever, even ogle the old lady, until it might be supposed we were a pair of queerly-assorted characters in a charade.
Nevertheless, I had had the obstinacy to insist that I should be at liberty to stay with Mrs Bowater whenever I wished to do so; and I was free to invite any friend to visit me I chose. "And especially, my dear, any one an eighth as exquisite," Mrs Monnerie had kindly put it. It may seem a little strange that all these obligations should have been on her side. But Mrs Monnerie's whims were far more vigorous than most people's principles. The dews of her loving kindness descended on me in a shower, and it was some little time before I began to feel a chill.
Not the least remarkable feature of No. 2 was its back view. The window of my room came down almost to the floor. It "commanded" an immense zinc cistern—George, by name—a Virginia Creeper groping along a brick wall, similar cisterns smalling into the distance, other brick walls and scores of back windows. Once, after contemplating this odd landscape for some little time, it occurred to me to speculate what the back view from the House of Life was like; but I failed to conceive the smallest notion of it. I rarely drew my curtains, and, oddly enough, when I did so, was usually in a vacant or dismal mood. My lights were electric. One simply twisted a tiny ivory button. At first their clear and coloured globes, set like tiny tulips in a candelabra, charmed my fancy. But, such is custom, I soon wearied of them, and pined for the slim, living flame of candles—even for my coarse old night-light swimming in its grease in a chipped blue and white saucer.