CHAPTER VIII.
"As the wind
Sobs, an uncertain sweetness comes from out
The orange-trees.
Rise up, Olympia.--She sleeps soundly. Ho!
Stirring at last." BARRY CORNWALL.
The next day, Fanny was seen by Sarah counting the little hoard that she
had so long and so painfully saved for her benefactor's tomb. The money
was no longer wanted for that object. Fanny had found another; she said
nothing to Sarah or to Simon. But there was a strange complacent smile
upon her lip as she busied herself in her work, that puzzled the old
woman. Late at noon came the postman's unwonted knock at the door. A
letter!--a letter for Miss Fanny. A letter!--the first she had ever
received in her life! And it was from him!--and it began with "Dear
Fanny." Vaudemont had called her "dear Fanny" a hundred times, and the
expression had become a matter of course. But "Dear Fanny" seemed so
very different when it was written. The letter could not well be
shorter, nor, all things considered, colder. But the girl found no fault
with it. It began with "Dear Fanny," and it ended with "yours truly."
"--Yours truly--mine truly--and how kind to write at all!" Now it so
happened that Vaudemont, having never merged the art of the penman into
that rapid scrawl into which people, who are compelled to write hurriedly
and constantly, degenerate, wrote a remarkably good hand,--bold, clear,
symmetrical--almost too good a hand for one who was not to make money by
caligraphy. And after Fanny had got the words by heart, she stole gently
to a cupboard and took forth some specimens of her own hand, in the shape
of house and work memoranda, and extracts which, the better to help her
memory, she had made from the poem-book Vaudemont had given her. She
gravely laid his letter by the side of these specimens, and blushed at
the contrast; yet, after all, her own writing, though trembling and
irresolute, was far from a bad or vulgar hand. But emulation was now
fairly roused within her. Vaudemont, pre-occupied by more engrossing
thoughts, and indeed, forgetting a danger which had seemed so thoroughly
to have passed away, did not in his letter caution Fanny against going
out alone. She remarked this; and having completely recovered her own
alarm at the attempt that had been made on her liberty, she thought she
was now released from her promise to guard against a past and imaginary
peril. So after dinner she slipped out alone, and went to the mistress
of the school where she had received her elementary education. She had
ever since continued her acquaintance with that lady, who, kindhearted,
and touched by her situation, often employed her industry, and was far
from blind to the improvement that had for some time been silently
working in the mind of her old pupil.
Fanny had a long conversation with this lady, and she brought back a
bundle of books. The light might have been seen that night, and many
nights after, burning long and late from her little window. And having
recovered her old freedom of habits, which Simon, poor man, did not
notice, and which Sarah, thinking that anything was better than moping at
home, did not remonstrate against, Fanny went out regularly for two
hours, or sometimes for even a longer period, every evening after old
Simon had composed himself to the nap that filled up the interval between
dinner and tea.
In a very short time--a time that with ordinary stimulants would have
seemed marvellously short--Fanny's handwriting was not the same thing;
her manner of talking became different; she no longer called herself
"Fanny" when she spoke; the music of her voice was more quiet and
settled; her sweet expression of face was more thoughtful; the eyes
seemed to have deepened in their very colour; she was no longer heard
chaunting to herself as she tripped along. The books that she nightly
fed on had passed into her mind; the poetry that had ever unconsciously
sported round her young years began now to create poetry in herself.
Nay, it might almost have seemed as if that restless disorder of the
intellect, which the dullards had called Idiotcy, had been the wild
efforts, not of Folly, but of GENIUS seeking to find its path and outlet
from the cold and dreary solitude to which the circumstances of her early
life had compelled it.
Days, even weeks, passed--she never spoke of Vaudemont. And once, when
Sarah, astonished and bewildered by the change in her young mistress,
asked:
"When does the gentleman come back?"
Fanny answered, with a mysterious smile, "Not yet, I hope,--not quite
yet!"
