Not all my letters to Fanny went into the post. My landlady looked a little askance at them, and many of the unposted ones were scrawled, if possible in moonlight, after she had gone to bed. To judge from my recollection of other letters written in my young days, I may be thankful that Fanny was one of those practical people who do not hoard the valueless. I can still recall the poignancy of my postscripts. On the one hand: "I beseech you to write to me, Fanny, I live to hear. Last night was full moon again. I saw you—you only in her glass." On the other: "Henry has been fighting. There is a chip out of his ear. Nine centuries nearer now! And how is 'Monsieur Crapaud'?"
Wanderslore
Chapter Eighteen
At last there came a post which brought me, not a sermon from Miss Fenne, nor gossip from Pollie, but a message from the Islands of the Blest. All that evening and night it lay unopened under my pillow. I was saving it up. And never have I passed hours so studious yet so barren of result. It was the end of February. A sudden burst of light and sunshine had fallen on the world. There were green shining grass and new-fallen lambs in the meadows, and the almond tree beyond my window was in full, leafless bloom. As for the larks, they were singing of Fanny. The next morning early, about seven o'clock, her letter folded up in its small envelope in the bosom of my cloak, I was out of the house and making my way to the woods. It was the clear air of daybreak and only the large stars shook faint and silvery in the brightening sky.
Frost powdered the ground and edged the grasses. But now tufts of primroses were in blow among the withered mist of leaves. I came to my "observatory" just as the first beams of sunrise smote on its upper boughs. Yet even now I deferred the longed-for moment and hastened on between the trees, beech and brooding yew, by what seemed a faint foot-track, and at last came out on a kind of rising on the edge of the woods. From this green eminence for the first time I looked straight across its desolate garden to Wanderslore.
It was a long, dark, many-windowed house. It gloomed sullenly back at me beneath the last of night. From the alarm calls of the blackbirds it seemed that even so harmless a trespasser as I was a rare spectacle. A tangle of brier and bramble bushed frostily over its grey stone terraces. Nearer at hand in the hollow stood an angled house, also of stone—and as small compared with Wanderslore as a little child compared with its mother. It had been shattered at one corner by a falling tree, whose bole still lay among the undergrowth. The faint track I was following led on, and apparently past it. Breathless and triumphant, I presently found myself seated on a low mossy stone beside it, monarch of all I surveyed. With a profound sigh I opened my letter:—