Memoirs of a Midget. Walter de la Mare
cup of tea,” said Mrs Bowater shortly. A curious happiness took possession of me.
“She is very young to be teaching; not much older than I am.”
“The danger was to keep her back,” was the obscure reply. “We don’t always see eye to eye.”
For an instant the dark, cavernous face above me was mated by that other of birdlike lightness and beauty. “Isn’t it funny?” I observed, “I had made quite, quite a different picture of her.”
“Looks are looks, and brains are brains; and between them you must tread very wary.”
* * * *
About eleven o’clock a solemn-looking young man of about thirty, with a large pair of reddish leather gloves in his hand, entered the room. For a moment he did not see my bed, then, remarking circumspectly in a cheerful, hollow voice, “So this is our patient,” he bade me good-morning, and took a seat beside my bed. A deep blush mounted up into the fair, smooth-downed cheeks as he returned my scrutiny and asked me to exhibit my tongue. I put it out, and he blushed even deeper.
“And the pulse, please,” he murmured, rising. I drew back the crimson sleeve of Fanny’s jacket, and with extreme nicety he placed the tip of a square, icy forefinger on my wrist. Once more his fair-lashed eyelids began to blink. He extracted a fine gold watch from his waistcoat pocket, compared beat with beat, frowned, and turned to Mrs Bowater.
“You are not, I assume, aware of the—the young lady’s normal pulse?”
“There being no cause before to consider it, I am not,” Mrs Bowater returned.
“Any pain?” said Dr Phelps.
“Headache,” replied Mrs Bowater on my behalf, “and shoots in the limbs.”
At that Dr Phelps took a metal case out of his waistcoat, glanced at it, glanced at me, and put it back again. He leaned over so close to catch the whisper of my breathing that there seemed a danger of my losing myself in the labyrinth of his downy ear.
“H’m, a little fever,” he said musingly. “Have we any reason to suppose that we can have taken a chill?”
The head on the pillow stirred gently to and fro, and I think its cheek was dyed with an even sprightlier red than had coloured his. After one or two further questions, and a low colloquy with Mrs Bowater in the passage, Dr Phelps withdrew, and his carriage rolled away.
“A painstaking young man,” Mrs Bowater summed him up in the doorway, “but not the kind I should choose to die under. You are to keep quiet and warm, miss; have plenty of light nourishment; and physic to follow. Which, except for the last-mentioned, and that mainly water, one don’t have to ride in a carriage to know for one’s self.”
But “peace and goodwill”: I liked Dr Phelps, and felt so much better for his skill that before his wheels had rolled out of hearing I had leapt out of bed, dragged out the trunk that lay beneath it, and fetched out from it a treasured ivory box. On removal of the lid, this ingenious work disclosed an Oriental Temple, with a spreading tree, a pool, a long-legged bird, and a mountain. And all these exquisitely tinted in their natural colours. It had come from China, and had belonged to my mother’s brother, Andrew, who was an officer in the Navy and had died at sea. This I wrapped up in a square of silk and tied with a green thread. During the whole of his visit my head had been so hotly in chase of this one stratagem that it is a marvel Dr Phelps had not deciphered it in my pulse.
When Mrs Bowater brought in my Christmas dinner—little but bread sauce and a sprig of holly!—I dipped in the spoon, and, as innocently as I knew how, inquired if her daughter would like to see some really fine sewing.
The black eyes stood fast, then the ghost of a smile vanished over her features; “I’ll be bound she would, miss. I’ll give her your message.” Alone again, I turned over on my pillow and laughed until tears all but came into my eyes.
All that afternoon I waited on, the coals of fire that I had prepared for my enemy’s head the night before now ashes of penitence on my own. A dense smell of cooking pervaded the house; and it was not until the evening that Fanny Bowater appeared.
She was dressed in a white muslin gown with a wreath of pale green leaves in her hair. “I am going to a party,” she said, “so I can’t waste much time.”
“Mrs Bowater thought you would like to see some really beautiful needlework,” I replied suavely.
“Well,” she said, “where is it?”
“Won’t you come a little closer?”
That figure, as nearly like the silver slip of the new moon as ever I have seen, seemed to float in my direction. I held my breath and looked up into the light, dwelling eyes. “It is this,” I whispered, drawing my two hands down the bosom of her crimson dressing-jacket. “It is only, Thank you, I wanted to say.”
In a flash her lips broke into a low clear laughter. “Why, that’s nothing. Really and truly I hate that kind of work; but mother often wrote of you; there was nothing better to do; and the smallness of the thing amused me.”
I nodded humbly. “Yes, yes,” I muttered, “Midget is as Midget wears. I know that. And—and here, Miss Bowater, is a little Christmas present from me.”
Voraciously I watched her smooth face as she untied the thread. “A little ivory box!” she exclaimed, pushing back the lid, “and a Buddhist temple, how very pretty. Thank you.”
“Yes, Miss Bowater, and, do you see, in the corner there? a moon. ‘She enchants’ you.”
“So it is,” she laughed, closing the box. “I was supposing,” she went on solemnly, “that I had been put in the corner in positively everlasting disgrace.”
“Please don’t say that,” I entreated. “We may be friends, mayn’t we? I am better now.”
Her eyes wandered over my bed, my wardrobe, and all my possessions. “But yes,” she said, “of course”; and laughed again.
“And you believe me?”
“Believe you?”
“That it was the stars? I thought Mrs Bowater might be anxious if she knew. It was quite, quite safe, really; and I’m going to tell her.”
“Oh, dear,” she replied in a cold, small voice, “so you are still worrying about that. I—I envied you.” With a glance over her shoulder, she leaned closer. “Next time you go,” she breathed out to me, “we’ll go together.”
My heart gave a furious leap; my lips closed tight. “I could tell you the names of some of the stars now,” I said, in a last wrestle with conscience.
“No, no,” said Fanny Bowater, “it isn’t the stars I’m after. The first fine night we’ll go to the woods. You shall wait for me till everything is quiet. It will be good practise in practical astronomy.” She watched my face, and began silently laughing as if she were reading my thoughts. “That’s a bargain, then. What is life, Miss M., but experience? And what is experience, but knowing thyself? And what’s knowing thyself but the very apex of wisdom? Anyhow it’s a good deal more interesting than the Prince of Denmark.”
“Yes”, I agreed. “And there’s still all but a full moon.”
“Aha!” said she. “But what a world with only one! Jupiter has scores, hasn’t he? Just think of his Love Lanes!” She rose to her feet with a sigh of boredom, and smoothed out her skirts with her long, narrow hands. I stared at her beauty in amazement.
“I hate these parties here,” she said. “They are not worth while.”
“You look lov—you look all right.”
“H’m; but what’s that when there’s no one to see.”
“But you see yourself. You live in it.”
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