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Page 42
Scrap, after glancing round to see that no one was looking, got
up and carried her chair into this place, stealing away as carefully on
tiptoe as those steal whose purpose is sin. There was another
excrescence on the walls just like it at the north-east corner, but
this, though the view from it was almost more beautiful, for from it
you could see the bay and the lovely mountains behind Mezzago, was
exposed. No bushes grew near it, nor had it any shade. The north-west
loop then was where she would sit, and she settled into it, and
nestling her head in her cushion and putting her feet comfortably on
the parapet, from whence they appeared to the villagers on the piazza
below as two white doves, thought that now indeed she would be safe.
Mrs. Fisher found her there, guided by the smell of her
cigarette. The incautious Scrap had not thought of that. Mrs. Fisher
did not smoke herself, and all the more distinctly could she smell the
smoke of others. The virile smell met her directly she went out into
the garden from the dining-room after lunch in order to have her
coffee. She had bidden Francesca set the coffee in the shade of the
house just outside the glass door, and when Mrs. Wilkins, seeing a
table being carried there, reminded her, very officiously and
tactlessly Mrs. Fisher considered, that Lady Caroline wanted to be
alone, she retorted--and with what propriety--that the garden was for
everybody.
Into it accordingly she went, and was immediately aware that Lady
Caroline was smoking. She said to herself, "These modern young women,"
and proceeded to find her; her stick, now that lunch was over, being no
longer the hindrance to action that it was before her meal had been
securely, as Browning once said--surely it was Browning? Yes, she
remembered how much diverted she had been--roped in.
Nobody diverted her now, reflected Mrs. Fisher, making straight
for the clump of daphne; the world had grown very dull, and had
entirely lost its sense of humour. Probably they still had their
jokes, these people--in fact she knew they did, for Punch still went
on; but how differently it went on, and what jokes. Thackeray, in his
inimitable way, would have made mincemeat of this generation. Of how
much it needed the tonic properties of that astringent pen it was of
course unaware. It no longer even held him--at least, so she had been
informed--in any particular esteem. Well, she could not give it eyes
to see and ears to hear and a heart to understand, but she could and
would give it, represented and united in the form of Lady Caroline, a
good dose of honest medicine.
"I hear you are not well," she said, standing in the narrow
entrance of the loop and looking down with the inflexible face of one
who is determined to do good at the motionless and apparently sleeping
Scrap.
Mrs. Fisher had a deep voice, very like a man's, for she had been
overtaken by that strange masculinity that sometimes pursues a woman
during the last laps of her life.
Scrap tried to pretend that she was asleep, but if she had been
her cigarette would not have been held in her fingers but would have
been lying on the ground.
She forgot this. Mrs. Fisher did not, and coming inside the
loop, sat down on a narrow stone seat built out of the wall. For a
little she could sit on it; for a little, till the chill began to
penetrate.
She contemplated the figure before her. Undoubtedly a pretty
creature, and one that would have had a success at Farringford.
Strange how easily even the greatest men were moved by exteriors. She
had seen with her own eyes Tennyson turn away from everybody--turn,
positively, his back on a crowd of eminent people assembled to do him
honour, and withdraw to the window with a young person nobody had ever
heard of, who had been brought there by accident and whose one and only
merit--if it be a merit, that which is conferred by chance--was beauty.
Beauty! All over before you can turn round. An affair, one might
almost say, of minutes. Well, while it lasted it did seem able to do
what it liked with men. Even husbands were not immune. There had been
passages in the life of Mr. Fisher . . .
"I expect the journey has upset you," she said in her deep voice.
"What you want is a good dose of some simple medicine. I shall ask
Domenico if there is such a thing in the village as castor oil."
Scrap opened her eyes and looked straight at Mrs. Fisher.
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