Superseded Part 11

The Head, usually so eloquent at great moments, found actual difficulty in getting to the end of her next sentence.

"What I was thinking of--really again entirely for your own sake--was whether it would not be better for you to take a little longer holiday. I do feel in your case the imperative necessity for rest. Indeed if you found that you _wished_ to retire at the end of the holidays--of course receiving your salary for the term--"

Try as she would to speak as though she were conferring a benefit, the Head had the unmistakable air of asking a favour from her subordinate, of imploring her help in a delicate situation, of putting it to her honour.

Miss Quincey's honour was more than equal to the demand made on it. She had sunk so low in her own eyes lately that she was glad to gain some little foothold for her poor pride. She faced Miss Cursiter bravely with her innocent dim eyes as she answered: "I am ready to go, Miss Cursiter, whenever it is most convenient to you; but I cannot think of taking payment for work I have not done."

"My dear Miss Quincey, the rule is always a term's notice--or if--if any other arrangement is agreed upon, a term's salary. There can be no question--you must really allow me--"

There Miss Cursiter's address failed her and her voice faltered. She had extracted the thorn; but it had worked its way deeper than she knew, and the operation was a painful one. A few compliments on the part of the Head, and the hope that St. Sidwell's would not lose sight of Miss Quincey altogether, and the interview was closed.

It was understood by the end of the morning that Miss Quincey had sent in her resignation. The news spread from cla.s.s to cla.s.s--"Miss Quincey is going"--and was received by pupils and teachers with cries of incredulity. After all, Miss Quincey belonged to St. Sidwell's; she was part and parcel of the place; her blood and bones had been built into its very walls, and her removal was not to be contemplated without dismay.

Why, what would a procession be like without Miss Quincey to enliven it?

And so, as she went her last round, a score of hands that had never clasped hers in friendship were stretched out over the desks in a wild leave-taking; three girls had tears in their eyes; one, more emotional than the rest, sobbed audibly without shame. The staff were unanimous in their sympathy and regret. Rhoda withdrew hastily from the painful scene.

Only the Mad Hatter in her corner made no sign. She seemed to take the news of Miss Quincey's departure with a resigned philosophy.

"Well, little Cla.s.sical Mistress," said Miss Quincey, "we must say good-bye. You know I'm going."

The child nodded her small head. "Of course you're going. I might have known it. I did know it all along. You were booked to go."

"Why, Laura?" Miss Quincey was mystified and a little hurt.

"Because"--a sinister convulsion pa.s.sed over the ugly little pariah face--"because"--the Mad Hatter had learnt the force of under-statement--"because I _like_ you."

At that Miss Quincey broke down. "My dear little girl--I am going because I am too old to stay."

"Write to me, dear," she said at the last moment; "let me know how you are getting on."

But she never knew. The Mad Hatter did not write. In fact she never wrote anything again, not even verses. She was handed over next term to Miss Quincey's brilliant and efficient successor, who made her work hard, with the result that the Mad Hatter got ill of a brain fever just before the Christmas holidays and was never fit for any more work; and never became Cla.s.sical Mistress or anything else in the least distinguished. But this is by the way.

As the College clock struck one, Miss Quincey walked home as usual and went up into her bedroom without a word. She opened a drawer and took from it her Post Office Savings Bank book and looked over her account.

There stood to her credit the considerable sum of twenty-seven pounds four shillings and eight pence. No, not quite that, for the blouse, the abominable blouse, had been paid for out of her savings and it had cost a guinea. Twenty-six pounds three shillings and eight pence was all that she had saved in five-and-twenty years. This, with the term's salary which Miss Cursiter had insisted on, was enough to keep her going for a year. And a year is a long time. She came slowly downstairs to the drawing-room where her aunt was dozing and dreaming in her chair. There still hung about her figure the indefinable dignity that had awed Miss Cursiter. If she was afraid of Mrs. Moon she was too proud to show her fear.

"This morning," she said simply, "I received my dismissal."

The old lady looked up dazed, not with the news but with her dream. Miss Quincey repeated her statement.

"Do you mean you are not going back to that place there?" she asked mildly.

"I am never going back."

Still with dignity she waited for the burst of feeling she felt to be justifiable in the circ.u.mstances. None came; neither anger, nor indignation, nor contempt, not even surprise. In fact the Old Lady was smiling placidly, as she was wont to smile under the spell of the dream.

Slowly, very slowly, it was dawning upon her that the reproach had been taken away from the memory of Tollington Moon. Henceforth his niece Miss Quincey would be a gentlewoman at large. At the same time it struck her that after all poor Juliana did not look so very old.

"Very well then," said she, "if I were you I should put on that nice silk blouse in the evenings."

CHAPTER XI

Dr. Cautley Sends in his Bill

"I wonder," Mrs. Moon observed suddenly one morning, "if that man is going to let his bill run on to the day of judgment?"

The Old Lady had not even distantly alluded to Dr. Cautley for as many as ten months. After the great day of what she called Juliana's "resignation" she seemed to have tacitly agreed that since Juliana had spared her dream she would spare Juliana's. Did she not know, she too, that the dream is the reality? As Miss Quincey, gentlewoman at large, Juliana had a perfect right to set up a dream of her own; as to whether she was able to afford the luxury, Juliana was the best judge. Her present wonder, then, had no malignant reference; it was simply wrung from her by inexorable economy. Juliana's supplies were calculated to last a year; as it was the winter season that they had lately weathered, she was rather more than three-quarters of the way through her slender resources, and it behoved them to look out for bills ahead. And Mrs.

Moon had always suspected that young man, not only of a pa.s.sion for mare's-nesting, but of deliberately and systematically keeping back his accounts that he might revel in a larger haul.

The remark, falling with a shock all the greater for a silence of ten months, had the effect of driving Juliana out of the room. Out of the room and out of the house, down High Street, where Hunter's shop was already blossoming in another spring; up Park Street and past the long wall of St. Sidwell's, till she found herself alone in Primrose Hill Park.

The young day was so glorious that Miss Quincey had some thoughts of climbing Primrose Hill and sitting on the top; but after twenty yards or so of it she abandoned the attempt. For the last few months her heart had been the seat of certain curious sensations, so remarkably like those she had experienced in the summer that she took them for the same, and sternly resolved to suppress their existence by ignoring it. That, she understood, was the right treatment for hysteria.

But this morning Miss Quincey's heart protested so violently against her notion of ascending Primrose Hill, threatening indeed to strangle her if she persisted in it, that Miss Quincey unwillingly gave in and contented herself with a seat in one of the lower walks of the park. There she leaned back and looked about her, but with no permanent interest in one thing more than another.

Presently, as she settled down to quieter breathing, there came to her a strange sensation, that grew till it became an unusually vivid perception of the outer world; a perception mingled with a still stranger double vision, a sense that seemed to be born in the dark of the brain and to be moving there to a foregone conclusion. And all the time her eyes were busy, now with a bush of May in crimson blossom, now with the many-pointed leaves of a sycamore p.r.i.c.ked against the blue; now with the straight rectangular paths that made the park an immense mathematical diagram. From where she sat her eyes swept the length of the wide walk that cuts the green from east to west. Far down at the west end was a seat, and she could see two people, a man and a woman, sitting on it; they must have been there a quarter of an hour or more; she had noticed them ever since she came into the park.

They had risen, and her gaze left everything else to follow them; or rather, it went to meet them, for they had turned and were coming slowly eastward now. They had stopped; they were facing each other, and her gaze rested with them, fascinated yet uncertain. And now she could see nothing else; the park, with the regions beyond it and the sky above it, had become merely a setting for one man and one woman; the avenue, fresh strewn with red golden gravel, led up to them and ended there at their feet; a young poplar trembled in the wind and shook its silver green fans above them in delicate confusion. The next minute a light went up in that obscure and prophetic background of her brain; and she saw Rhoda Vivian and Bastian Cautley coming towards her, greeting her, with their kind faces shining.

She rose, turned from them, and went slowly home.

It was the last rent in the veil of illusion that Rhoda had spun so well.

Up till then Miss Quincey had seen only half the truth. Now she had seen the whole, with all that Rhoda had disguised and kept hidden from her; the truth that kills or cures.

Miss Quincey did not go out again that day, but sat all afternoon silent in her chair. Towards evening she became talkative and stayed up later than had been her wont since she recovered her freedom. She seemed to be trying to make up to her aunt for a want of sociability in the past.

At eleven she got up and stood before the Old Lady in the att.i.tude of a penitent. Apparently she had been seized with a mysterious impulse of confession.

"Aunt," she said, "there's something I want to say to you."

She paused, casting about in her mind for the sins she had committed.

They were three in all.

"I am afraid I have been very extravagant"--she was thinking of the blouse--"and--and very foolish"--she was thinking of Bastian Cautley--"and very selfish"--she was thinking of her momentary desire to die.

"Juliana, if you're worrying about that money"--the Old Lady was thinking of nothing else--"don't. I've plenty for us both. As long as we can keep together I don't care what I eat, nor what I drink, nor what I put on my poor back. And if the worst comes to the worst I'll sell the furniture."

It seemed to Miss Quincey that she had never known her aunt in all those five-and-twenty years; never known her until this minute. For perhaps, after all, being angry with Juliana was only Mrs. Moon's way of being sorry for her. But how was Juliana to know that?

"Only," continued the Old Lady, "I won't part with your uncle's picture.

Don't ask me to part with your uncle's picture."

"You won't have to part with anything. I'll--I'll get something to do.

I'm not worrying. There's nothing to worry about."

She stooped down and tenderly kissed the wrinkled forehead.