But this was not the only reason for her black. Only a day or two before, she told me, a letter had come from her mother.... "My father is dead." The words dropped out as if they were quite accustomed to one another's company. But those which followed—"blood-poisoning," "mortification," hung up in my mind—in that interminable gallery—a hideous picture. I could only sit and stare at the motionless figure outlined against the sepulchral window.
"It is awful, awful, Fanny!" I managed to whisper at last. "It never stops. One after another they all go. Think how he must have longed to be home. And now to be buried—out there—nothing but strangers."
A vacancy came over my mind in which I seemed to see the dead Mr Bowater of my photograph rising like Lazarus in his grave-cloths out of his foreign tomb, and looking incredulously around him.
"And your mother, Fanny! Out there, too—those miles and miles of sea away!"
Fanny made no movement, though I fancied that her eyes wandered uneasily towards the door. "I quite agree, Midgetina; it's awful!" she said. "But really and truly, it's worse for me. I think I am like my father in some ways. Mother never really understood him. You can't talk a man different; and for that matter holding your tongue at him is not much good either. You must just lie in wait for him with—well, with your charms, I suppose."
The word sounded like a sneer. "Still, I don't mean to say that it was all pure filial bliss for me when he was at home, until, at least, I grew up. Then he and I quarrelled too; but that's pleasure itself by comparison with listening to other people at it. He did his best to spoil me, I suppose. He wanted to make a lady of me." She turned and smiled out of the window; her under-lip quivering and casting a faint shadow on the smooth skin beneath. "So here I am; though I fear you can't make ladies of quite the correct consistency out of dressmaker's clothes and a smatter of Latin. The salt will out. But there," she flung a little gesture with her glove, "as I say, here I am."
And as if for welcome, a gleam of lightning danced at the window, illumining us there, and a crackling peal of thunder rolled hollowly off over the roof-tops of the square. We listened until the sound had emptied itself into quiet; and only the rain in the gutters gurgled and babbled.
"Do you know," she went on, with a far-away challenging thrill in her low, mournful voice, "I don't think I have a solitary relation left in the world now—except mother. 'They are all gone into a world of light'—though I've now and then suspected that a few of the disreputable ones have been buried alive. There's nothing very dreadful in that. Life consists, of course, in shedding various kinds of skin—and tanning the remainder."
Fanny, then, was unaware that Mrs Bowater was not her real mother. And I think she never guessed it.
"Nor have I," I said, "not one." As I looked at it there, it seemed a fact more curious than tragic. Besides, in the brooding darkness of that room it was Fanny and I who were strange, external beings, not the memoried phantoms of my mother and father. We had still to go on, to live things out. "So you see, Fanny," I continued, after a pause, "I do know what it means—a little; and we must try more than ever to be really one another's friend, mustn't we? I mean, if you think I can be."