Superseded Part 8

I shall only have to know Greek, and isn't it a shame, Miss Quincey, they won't let me learn it till I'm in the Fourth, and I never shall be.

But--don't tell any one--they've stuck me here, behind her now, and when she's coaching that young idiot Susie Parker--"

"Laura, that is not the way to speak of your school-fellows."

"I know it isn't, but she _is_, you know. I've bought the books, and I get behind them and I listen hard, and I can read now. What's more, I've done a bit of a chorus. Look--" The pariah took a dirty bit of paper from the breast of her gown. "It goes, 'Oh Love unconquered in battle,' and it's simply splend_if_erous. Miss Quincey--when you like anything very much--or any_body_--it doesn't matter which--do you turn red all over? Do you have creeps all down your back? And do you feel it just here?" The child clapped her yellow claw to Miss Quincey's heart. "You _do_, you do, Miss Quincey; I can see it go thump, I can feel it go thud!"

She gazed into the teacher's face, and again the power of divination was upon her.

"Laura!" Miss Quincey gasped; for the Head had been looming in their neighbourhood, a deadly peril, and now she was sweeping down on them, smiling a dangerous smile.

"Miss Quincey, I hope you've been making that child work," said she and pa.s.sed on.

"I _say_! She didn't see my verses, did she? You _won't_ let on that I wrote them?"

"You'll never write verses," said Miss Quincey, deftly improving a bad occasion, "if you don't understand arithmetic. Why, it's the science of numbers. Come now, if ninety hogsheads--"

"Oh-h! I'm so tired of hogsheads; mayn't it be firkins this time?"

And, for fancy's sake, firkins Miss Quincey permitted it to be.

Now Rhoda was responsible for much, but for what followed the Mad Hatter must, strictly speaking, be held accountable.

Miss Quincey had never been greatly interested in the movements of her heart; but now that her attention had been drawn to them she admitted that it was beating in a very extraordinary way; there was a decided palpitation, a flutter.

That night she lay awake and listened to it.

It was going diddledy, diddledy, like the triplets in a Beethoven sonata (only that it had no idea of time); then it suddenly left off till she put her hand over it, when it gave a terrifying succession of runaway knocks. Then it pretended that it was going to stop altogether, and Miss Quincey implicitly believed it and prepared to die. Then its tactics changed; it seemed to have shifted its habitation; to be rising and rising, to be entangled with her collar-bone and struggling in her throat. Then it sank suddenly and lay like a lump of lead, dragging her down through the mattress, and through the bedstead, and through the floor, down to the bottom of all things. Miss Quincey did not mind much; she had been so unhappy. And then it gave an alarming double-knock at her ribs, and Miss Quincey came to life again as unhappy as ever.

And of what it all meant Miss Quincey had no more idea than the man in the moon, though even the Mad Hatter could have told her. Her heart went through the same performance a second and a third night, and Miss Quincey said to herself that if it happened again she would have to send for Dr.

Cautley. Nothing would have induced her to see him for a mere trifle, but pride was one thing and prudence was another.

It did happen again, and she sent.

She may have hoped that he would discover something wrong, being dimly conscious that her chance lay there, that suffering const.i.tuted the incontestable claim on his sympathy; most distinctly she felt the desire (monstrous of course in a woman of no account) to wear the aureole of pain for its own sake; to walk for a little while in the glory and glamour of death. She did not want or mean to give any trouble, to be a source of expense; she had saved a little money for the supreme luxury.

But she had hardly entertained the idea for a moment when she dismissed it as selfish. It was her duty to live, for the sake of St. Sidwell's and of Mrs. Moon; and she was only calling Dr. Cautley in to help her to do it. But through it all the feeling uppermost was joy in the certainty that she would see him on an honourable pretext, and would be able to set right that terrible misunderstanding.

She hardly expected him till late in the day; so she was a little startled, when she came in after morning school, to find Mrs. Moon waiting for her at the stairs, quivering with indignation that could have but one cause.

He had lost no time in answering her summons.

The drawing-room door was ajar; the Old Lady closed it mysteriously, and pushed her niece into the bedroom behind.

"Will you tell me the meaning of this? _That man_ has been cooling his heels in there for the last ten minutes, and he says you sent for him. Is that the case?"

Miss Quincey meekly admitted that it was, and entered upon a vague description of her trouble.

"It's all capers and nonsense," said the Old Lady, "there's nothing the matter with your heart. You're just hysterical, and you just want--?"

"I want to _know_, and Dr. Cautley will tell me."

"Oh ho! I daresay he'll find some mare's nest fast enough, if you tell him where to look."

Miss Quincey took off her hat and cape and laid them down with a sigh.

She gave a terrified glance at the looking-gla.s.s and smoothed her thin hair with her hand.

"Auntie--I must go. I can't keep him waiting any longer."

"Go then--I won't stop you."

She went trembling, followed so closely by Mrs. Moon that she looked like a prisoner conducted to the dock.

"How will he receive me?" she wondered.

He received her coldly and curtly. There was a hurry and abstraction in his manner utterly unlike his former leisurely sympathy. Many causes contributed to this effect; he was still all bruised and bleeding from the blow dealt to him by Rhoda's strong young arm; an epidemic had kept him on his legs all day and a great part of the night; his time had never been so valuable, and he had been obliged to waste ten minutes of it contemplating the furniture in that detestable drawing-room. He was worried and overworked, and Miss Quincey thought he was still offended; his very appearance made her argue the worst. No hope to-day of clearing up that terrible misunderstanding.

She tremulously obeyed his first brief order, one by one undoing the b.u.t.tons of her dress, laying bare her poor chest, all flat and formless as a child's. A momentary gentleness came over him as he adjusted the tubes of his stethoscope and began the sounding, backwards and forwards from heart to lungs, and from lungs to heart again; while the Old Lady looked on as merry as Destiny, and nodded her head and smiled, as much to say, "Tchee-tchee, what a farce it is!"

He put up the stethoscope with a click.

"There is nothing the matter with you."

Mrs. Moon gave out a subdued ironical chuckle.

Miss Quincey looked anxiously into his face. "Do you not think the heart--the heart is a little--?"

He smiled and at the same time he sighed. "Heart's all right. But you've left off your tonic."

She had, she was afraid that so much poison--

"Poison?" (He was not in the least offended.) "Do you mean the a.r.s.enic?

There are some poisons you can't live without; but you must take them in moderation."

"Will you--will you want to see me again?"

"It will not be necessary."

At that Mrs. Moon's chuckle broke all bounds and burst into a triumphant "Tchee-tchee-chee!" He went away under cover of it. It was her way of putting a pleasant face on the matter.

She hardly waited till his back was turned before she delivered herself of that which was working within her.

"I tell you what it is, Juliana; you're a silly woman."

Miss Quincey looked up with a faint premonitory fear. Her fingers began nervously b.u.t.toning and unb.u.t.toning her dress bodice; while half-dressed and shivering she waited the attack.

"And a pretty exhibition you've made of yourself this day. Anybody might have thought you _wanted_ to let that young man see what was the matter with you."

"So I did. He says there is nothing the matter with me."

"Nothing the matter with you, indeed! _He_ knows well enough what's the matter with you."