Mrs Monnerie, I remember, was in an unusually vivacious humour at that meal; and devoured immense quantities of salmon mayonnaise. One might have supposed that Fanny's influence had added a slim crescent of silvery light to her habitual earthshine. None the less, when our guest was gone, she seemed to subside into a shallow dejection; and I into a much deeper. We sate on together in an uneasy silence, she pushing out her lips, restlessly prodding Cherry with her foot, and occasionally uttering some inarticulate sound that was certainly not intended as conversation.
I think Mrs Monnerie was in secret a more remarkable woman than she affected to be. However thronged a room might be, you could never be unaware that she was in it. And in the gentle syllabub of polite conversation her silence was like that of an ancient rock with the whispering of the wavelets on the sands at its base. I remember once seeing a comic picture of an old lady with a large feather in her bonnet placidly sitting on a camp-stool beneath a pollard willow on one side of a stream, while a furious, frothing bull stood snorting and rampaging on the other. I think the old lady in the picture was meant to be Britannia; but, whoever or whatever the bull might represent, Mrs Monnerie reminded me of her. She sat more heavily, more passively, in her chair than any one I have ever seen.
Of course—quite apart from intelligence—there must be many, many layers in society, and I cannot say at all how far Mrs Monnerie was from the topmost. But I am sure she was able to look down on a good many of them; while I was born always to be "looking up." I was looking up at Mrs Monnerie now from my stool. Widespread in her chair, she had closed her eyes, and to judge from her face, she was dreaming. It looked more faded than usual. The puckers gave it a prunish look. Queer, contorting expressions were floating across her features. Her soul seemed gently to rock in them, like an empty boat at night on a dark river. In the pride of my youth—and a little uneasy over my confidences with Sir Walter—I examined my patroness with a slight stirring of dismay.
"Oh, no, no! never to grow old, not me," a voice was saying in me. Yet, after all, I reminded myself, I was looking only at Mrs Monnerie's outer case. But then, after all, was it only that? "The Resurrection of the body." One may see day at a little hole; says an old proverb—I hope a Kentish proverb. And from Mrs Monnerie, my thoughts drifted away to Fanny. She would grow old too. Should we know one another then? Should we understand, and remember what it was to be young? We had had our secrets.
I came out of these reflections to find Mrs Monnerie's sleepy eyes fixed full upon me; and herself marvellously cheered up by her nap. She had thought very well of Miss Bowater, she told me. So well that she not only very soon found her a charming engagement as a morning governess to the two little girls of a rich fashionable widow—just Fanny's "sinecure"—but invited her to stay at No. 2 as a "companion" to herself, until a more permanent post offered itself.
"You and I want more company," she assured me; "otherwise the flint will use up all the tinder, or vice versa, my dear. A pretty creature and no fool. She sings a little, too, she tells me. So we shall have music wherever she goes."
That afternoon both flint and tinder—whichever of us was which—were kept very busy. Mrs Monnerie fell into one of her long monologues, broken only by Chakka's griding on his bars, and Cherry's whimpering in his dreams. It was another kind of "white meat" for me: and though, no doubt, I was incapable of digesting all Mrs Monnerie's views on life, society, and the world at large, I realized that if in the course of time it might be my fate to wither and wizen away, I should still have my own company and plenty of internal entertainment. I actually saw myself a little bent-up, old, midget woman creeping down some stone steps out of a porch, with a fanlight, under a street lamp. It curdled my blood, that picture. And yet, I thought, what must be, must be. I will endure to be a little, bent-up, old, midget woman, creeping down stone steps out of a porch with a fanlight. And I even nodded up at the street lamp.
In response to a high-spirited scrawl from Fanny, I sent her all that was left of my savings to purchase "those horrible little etceteras that just feather down the scales, Midgetina. It would be saintlike of you, and you won't miss it there." It was a desperate wrench to me to see the last of my money disappear. I knew no more than the Man in the Moon where the next was to come from.
I counted the days to Fanny's coming; and dressed myself for the occasion in the most expensive gold and blue afternoon gown I possessed. It must have been with a queer, mixed motive in my head. I sat waiting for her, while beyond the gloom-hung window raged a London thunderstorm, with dense torrents of rain. My little silver clock struck three, and she entered my room like a black swan, tossing from her small, velveted head, as she did so, a few beads of rain. From top to toe in deadest black. She must have noticed my glance of wonderment.
"When you want to make a favourable impression on your social superiors, Midgetina, the meeker you look the better," she said.