The Triumph of Jill Part 9

"If it is not worth discussion," he said, "we'll let it slide for to-day at any rate. I have got so much to say that is worth discussing, that I want to say it at once. I give you fair warning that I haven't come to work."

As a matter of fact there was no work put ready for him; but he had not time to notice that. He was so boyish and impulsive, so gay and self-complacent that her anger gathered strength from his sheer light-heartedness.

"Come and sit beside me on the stool by the window, Jill," he said, "and then we can talk at our ease."

It was the first time that he had addressed her by her Christian name, and he glanced at her half smiling, half diffident, to see how she would take it.

"No," she answered coldly, "what I have to say can very well be said where I am, and it will be as well to get through with it at once. You will think it rather sudden no doubt after my note of Wednesday, but, as I told you, I have been subjected to a great deal of annoyance lately and what I experienced yesterday has decided me to put an end to the existing state of affairs. I regret having to spring this upon you so abruptly, and in the middle of a quarter too, but I wish you to understand that I cannot teach you any longer, I wish you to leave this Art School."

St. John looked mystified and incredulous, he was astounded at her request, at the cold precision of her voice, and the apathy of her expression. He felt annoyed with her and not a little hurt.

"May I enquire why you dismiss me thus suddenly?" he asked schooling himself to keep his vexation in check. "I should like to know what has induced you to act so precipitately."

"No, you may not," Jill answered crossly; "I only took you on trial, remember."

"For a quarter yes, but then the probation was over, and it is hardly etiquette to dismiss a pupil in the middle of a term without vouchsafing any reason."

"I consider it quite sufficient that I do dismiss you," Miss Erskine responded. "We will not discuss the matter further, if you please."

"Oh! yes, we will," he answered, his temper like her own beginning to get the upper hand. "In fact I refuse to leave without an alleged complaint before my term is expired; you are bound to give a proper notice."

"Not if I expel you," Jill retorted.

"Expel me!" he scoffed. "What would you expel me for? You couldn't do that without a reason."

"But I have a reason."

"A reason!" he repeated aghast, "a reason sufficient to expel me? What reason pray?"

"Making love to me."

Silence followed--a depressing silence during which neither of them moved. She had spoken in the heat of the moment, the next she could have bitten out her tongue for her indiscretion. St. John stared at her fully a minute. Then he smiled rudely.

"Making love to you!" he repeated. "Absurd! I have never spoken a word of love to you in my life."

It was true; he had not, and Jill's cup of humiliation was full. What had induced her to make such an egregious error?

"You'll be running me in for breach of promise, I suppose?" he continued ruthlessly. "Don't you think that you're a little--a little--well, conceited to be so premature?"

Jill turned upon him wrathfully.

"How dare you speak to me like that?" she cried. "It is only what people think. For myself it wouldn't have mattered whether you had made love to me or not; I should soon have settled that."

He changed from angry crimson to dead white, and gazed at her in hurt displeasure.

"You mean that?" he asked.

"Certainly," she answered with vindictive and unnecessary emphasis, "I am not in the habit of prevaricating."

"Very well," he said in a tone of forced calm which contrasted ill with the pained expression of his face, "I believe you. And under the circ.u.mstances am quite of your opinion that further acquaintance had better cease. It was a mistake my coming at all both for you and for me. Good morning, Miss Erskine, and good-bye."

He paused, thinking that perhaps her mood had been prompted by caprice, and that she might relent yet and call him back; but she made no movement at all beyond a bend of the head, and her voice was no kinder when she wished him farewell. Then he went, striding down the stairs and out into the street, resentful, angry, heartsore, little guessing how very much greater was the unhappiness he had left behind him where Jill, alone now in every sense of the word, stood battling with her grief and her emotion, and trying to face the difficulties which seemed crowding upon her on every side. She got out her satin work when he had gone and started upon the sachets with eager haste, glad of the miserable order now; for it kept her employed, and diverted the train of her thoughts. And all that day she sat working, working feverishly, dining, when the light failed so that she could see to paint no longer, off a crust of bread, the best her larder had to offer--indeed the only thing.

The next morning by the early post she received a letter from St. John.

Her hand trembled so violently as she took it up that she could hardly unfasten the envelope, but, finally tearing it open she withdrew the contents, a sheet of notepaper with St. John's compliments inscribed thereon, and enclosed within a cheque for the fee paid in full up to the end of the present quarter. The cheque fell to the ground unheeded but the sheet of paper Jill spread out on the table before her and then sat staring at it as though she could not take it in. It was the first brief missive of the sort that she had received; its very brevity chilled her. "With Mr St. John's compliments." So he had accepted his dismissal? It was better so, of course; but it was very hard to bear all the same.

CHAPTER EIGHT.

It was the Tuesday following that miserable and never to be forgotten Friday. Jill had been out in the morning to take back two of the sachets which she had finished, but had brought them back to make some alterations that the oily individual had pointed out to her in a playfully amorous fashion; a circ.u.mstance that had put her into as bad a temper as her grief stricken soul would allow. She sat on the red stool before her easel working, not at the sachets--she was too disgusted to touch them--but at her last canvas, with a lay figure posed in lieu of the model she could no longer employ. When the sound of someone mounting the stairs caused her heart to quicken its beating, and the tell-tale colour to come and go in her cheeks. It was St. John, she knew at once; very few men ascended those stairs, and only one with that quick decision born of familiarity. He knocked before entering, a ceremony that he had dispensed with altogether on cla.s.s days when he had been a student; he did not, however, wait for permission to enter, but opened the door for himself. Jill's mouth hardened obstinately as she glanced casually over her shoulder, and then, feigning not to see the bunch of flowers that he brought and laid humbly on the table as a peace-offering, went unmoved on with her work. She did not rise, did not even offer a word of greeting. St. John spoke first, awkwardly, deprecatingly, uncertain, what to make of her mood.

"Good morning," he said hesitatingly, "I--I was pa.s.sing and thought I would call."

"Pa.s.sing here?" interposed Jill incredulously, "what a circuitous route you must have taken to accomplish that."

"Not at all," he answered, "you aren't so very out of the way. Besides I wanted to come."

"So I supposed," she retorted disagreeably. "But you might have saved yourself the trouble; you were quite safe paying by cheque, you know."

"What do you mean?" he asked.

"Mean! Why haven't you called for your receipt? I own to having been remiss in not sending it, but I had my reasons; and after all it was only three days since, and a cheque is always pretty safe."

"You know that I haven't called for that," he said angrily. "If I thought you really believed me capable of such an act I would--"

"Well, what?" she asked derisively.

"I don't know," he answered lamely, "clear perhaps. I had forgotten even that a receipt was customary, and certainly never looked for one from you."

"Nothing so business like, I suppose?" snapped Jill. "I should have sent one though if I had not intended returning the cheque instead. I have no right to that money; I turned you away at a moment's notice, you did not leave of your own accord."

"That's true enough," he ruefully agreed. "Nevertheless the money is due to you; I received the tuition."

"It is not due," replied Jill firmly. "You are making me a present of it, Mr St. John, and I will not accept such a gift. There is your cheque, take it back if you please."

He took it from her, tore it savagely into pieces, and threw them on the floor.

"So be it," he answered wrathfully. "You must indeed be succeeding as you deserve, to reject what you have lawfully earned."

Jill went white as she generally did when in a rage, and favoured him with a glance that he was not likely to forget in a hurry.

"I have not earned it," she responded, "neither am I succeeding; two facts which you are thoroughly well acquainted with. Does _that_ look like success?" And she drew from the cardboard box the sachets she had brought home again from the shop that morning, and threw them on the table in front of him. "That's the kind of work that I have come to do, and I daresay I shall sink lower yet;--Xmas cards no doubt. Oh! yes, I have sunk pretty low. The man who gave me that order superintends the work, and corrects errors of detail. He does not like female figures in atmospheric drapery like those. He said the public wouldn't buy them that way; a nude figure on a nightdress bag--he didn't use the word nude, by the way, but plain vulgar English--was too suggestive, and requested me to take them home and paint in a garment--'Just a small one'--as though he were alluding to a vest. Ugh! it makes me sick--it makes me _blush_. He wears his hair oiled, too," she continued retrospectively, forgetting for the minute her resentment against St.

John in disgust at her latest patron, "and--further degradation--makes love to me which for the sake of the miserable commission I dare not resent."

What followed was unpardonable on St. John's part but for the life of him he could not resist retaliating for the thrusts that she had given him.

"Perhaps the last is a hallucination," he suggested ungenerously; "You have a tendency to imagine that sort of thing you know."

She eyed him for a moment in stony displeasure, then pointed imperiously to the door.