"And this," Emily continued, "is the thirtieth of June, eighteen hundred and eighty-one. You can now judge for yourself. Did you know my father?"
Miss Jethro answered mechanically, using the same words.
"I did know your father."
Emily"s feeling of distrust was not set at rest. "I never heard him speak of you," she said.
In her younger days the teacher must have been a handsome woman.
Her grandly-formed features still suggested the idea of imperial beauty--perhaps Jewish in its origin. When Emily said, "I never heard him speak of you," the color flew into her pallid cheeks: her dim eyes became alive again with a momentary light. She left her seat on the bed, and, turning away, mastered the emotion that shook her.
"How hot the night is!" she said: and sighed, and resumed the subject with a steady countenance. "I am not surprised that your father never mentioned me--to _you_." She spoke quietly, but her face was paler than ever. She sat down again on the bed. "Is there anything I can do for you," she asked, "before I go away? Oh, I only mean some trifling service that would lay you under no obligation, and would not oblige you to keep up your acquaintance with me."
Her eyes--the dim black eyes that must once have been irresistibly beautiful--looked at Emily so sadly that the generous girl reproached herself for having doubted her father"s friend. "Are you thinking of _him_," she said gently, "when you ask if you can be of service to me?"
Miss Jethro made no direct reply. "You were fond of your father?" she added, in a whisper. "You told your schoolfellow that your heart still aches when you speak of him."
"I only told her the truth," Emily answered simply.
Miss Jethro shuddered--on that hot night!--shuddered as if a chill had struck her.
Emily held out her hand; the kind feeling that had been roused in her glittered prettily in her eyes. "I am afraid I have not done you justice," she said. "Will you forgive me and shake hands?"
Miss Jethro rose, and drew back. "Look at the light!" she exclaimed.
The candle was all burned out. Emily still offered her hand--and still Miss Jethro refused to see it.
"There is just light enough left," she said, "to show me my way to the door. Good-night--and good-by."
Emily caught at her dress, and stopped her. "Why won"t you shake hands with me?" she asked.
The wick of the candle fell over in the socket, and left them in the dark. Emily resolutely held the teacher"s dress. With or without light, she was still bent on making Miss Jethro explain herself.
They had throughout spoken in guarded tones, fearing to disturb the sleeping girls. The sudden darkness had its inevitable effect. Their voices sank to whispers now. "My father"s friend," Emily pleaded, "is surely my friend?"
"Drop the subject."
"Why?"
"You can never be _my_ friend."
"Why not?"
"Let me go!"
Emily"s sense of self-respect forbade her to persist any longer. "I beg your pardon for having kept you here against your will," she said--and dropped her hold on the dress.
Miss Jethro instantly yielded on her side. "I am sorry to have been obstinate," she answered. "If you do despise me, it is after all no more than I have deserved." Her hot breath beat on Emily"s face: the unhappy woman must have bent over the bed as she made her confession. "I am not a fit person for you to a.s.sociate with."
"I don"t believe it!"
Miss Jethro sighed bitterly. "Young and warm hearted--I was once like you!" She controlled that outburst of despair. Her next words were spoken in steadier tones. "You _will_ have it--you _shall_ have it!"
she said. "Some one (in this house or out of it; I don"t know which) has betrayed me to the mistress of the school. A wretch in my situation suspects everybody, and worse still, does it without reason or excuse.
I heard you girls talking when you ought to have been asleep. You all dislike me. How did I know it mightn"t be one of you? Absurd, to a person with a well-balanced mind! I went halfway up the stairs, and felt ashamed of myself, and went back to my room. If I could only have got some rest! Ah, well, it was not to be done. My own vile suspicions kept me awake; I left my bed again. You know what I heard on the other side of that door, and why I was interested in hearing it. Your father never told me he had a daughter. "Miss Brown," at this school, was any "Miss Brown," to me. I had no idea of who you really were until to-night.
I"m wandering. What does all this matter to you? Miss Ladd has been merciful; she lets me go without exposing me. You can guess what has happened. No? Not even yet? Is it innocence or kindness that makes you so slow to understand? My dear, I have obtained admission to this respectable house by means of false references, and I have been discovered. _Now_ you know why you must not be the friend of such a woman as I am! Once more, good-night--and good-by."
Emily shrank from that miserable farewell.
"Bid me good-night," she said, "but don"t bid me good-by. Let me see you again."
"Never!"
The sound of the softly-closed door was just audible in the darkness.
She had spoken--she had gone--never to be seen by Emily again.
Miserable, interesting, unfathomable creature--the problem that night of Emily"s waking thoughts: the phantom of her dreams. "Bad? or good?" she asked herself. "False; for she listened at the door. True; for she told me the tale of her own disgrace. A friend of my father; and she never knew that he had a daughter. Refined, accomplished, lady-like; and she stoops to use a false reference. Who is to reconcile such contradictions as these?"
Dawn looked in at the window--dawn of the memorable day which was, for Emily, the beginning of a new life. The years were before her; and the years in their course reveal baffling mysteries of life and death.
CHAPTER IV. MISS LADD"S DRAWING-MASTER.
Francine was awakened the next morning by one of the housemaids, bringing up her breakfast on a tray. Astonished at this concession to laziness, in an inst.i.tution devoted to the practice of all virtues, she looked round. The bedroom was deserted.
"The other young ladies are as busy as bees, miss," the housemaid explained. "They were up and dressed two hours ago: and the breakfast has been cleared away long since. It"s Miss Emily"s fault. She wouldn"t allow them to wake you; she said you could be of no possible use downstairs, and you had better be treated like a visitor. Miss Cecilia was so distressed at your missing your breakfast that she spoke to the housekeeper, and I was sent up to you. Please to excuse it if the tea"s cold. This is Grand Day, and we are all topsy-turvy in consequence."
Inquiring what "Grand Day" meant, and why it produced this extraordinary result in a ladies" school, Francine discovered that the first day of the vacation was devoted to the distribution of prizes, in the presence of parents, guardians and friends. An Entertainment was added, comprising those merciless tests of human endurance called Recitations; light refreshments and musical performances being distributed at intervals, to encourage the exhausted audience. The local newspaper sent a reporter to describe the proceedings, and some of Miss Ladd"s young ladies enjoyed the intoxicating luxury of seeing their names in print.
"It begins at three o"clock," the housemaid went on, "and, what with practicing and rehearsing, and ornamenting the schoolroom, there"s a hubbub fit to make a person"s head spin. Besides which," said the girl, lowering her voice, and approaching a little nearer to Francine, "we have all been taken by surprise. The first thing in the morning Miss Jethro left us, without saying good-by to anybody."
"Who is Miss Jethro?"
"The new teacher, miss. We none of us liked her, and we all suspect there"s something wrong. Miss Ladd and the clergyman had a long talk together yesterday (in private, you know), and they sent for Miss Jethro--which looks bad, doesn"t it? Is there anything more I can do for you, miss? It"s a beautiful day after the rain. If I was you, I should go and enjoy myself in the garden."
Having finished her breakfast, Francine decided on profiting by this sensible suggestion.
The servant who showed her the way to the garden was not favorably impressed by the new pupil: Francine"s temper a.s.serted itself a little too plainly in her face. To a girl possessing a high opinion of her own importance it was not very agreeable to feel herself excluded, as an illiterate stranger, from the one absorbing interest of her schoolfellows. "Will the time ever come," she wondered bitterly, "when I shall win a prize, and sing and play before all the company? How I should enjoy making the girls envy me!"
A broad lawn, overshadowed at one end by fine old trees--flower beds and shrubberies, and winding paths prettily and invitingly laid out--made the garden a welcome refuge on that fine summer morning. The novelty of the scene, after her experience in the West Indies, the delicious breezes cooled by the rain of the night, exerted their cheering influence even on the sullen disposition of Francine. She smiled, in spite of herself, as she followed the pleasant paths, and heard the birds singing their summer songs over her head.
Wandering among the trees, which occupied a considerable extent of ground, she pa.s.sed into an open s.p.a.ce beyond, and discovered an old fish-pond, overgrown by aquatic plants. Driblets of water trickled from a dilapidated fountain in the middle. On the further side of the pond the ground sloped downward toward the south, and revealed, over a low paling, a pretty view of a village and its church, backed by fir woods mounting the heathy sides of a range of hills beyond. A fanciful little wooden building, imitating the form of a Swiss cottage, was placed so as to command the prospect. Near it, in the shadow of the building, stood a rustic chair and table--with a color-box on one, and a portfolio on the other. Fluttering over the gra.s.s, at the mercy of the capricious breeze, was a neglected sheet of drawing-paper. Francine ran round the pond, and picked up the paper just as it was on the point of being tilted into the water. It contained a sketch in water colors of the village and the woods, and Francine had looked at the view itself with indifference--the picture of the view interested her. Ordinary visitors to Galleries of Art, which admit students, show the same strange perversity. The work of the copyist commands their whole attention; they take no interest in the original picture.
Looking up from the sketch, Francine was startled. She discovered a man, at the window of the Swiss summer-house, watching her.
"When you have done with that drawing," he said quietly, "please let me have it back again."
He was tall and thin and dark. His finely-shaped intelligent face--hidden, as to the lower part of it, by a curly black beard--would have been absolutely handsome, even in the eyes of a schoolgirl, but for the deep furrows that marked it prematurely between the eyebrows, and at the sides of the mouth. In the same way, an underlying mockery impaired the attraction of his otherwise refined and gentle manner. Among his fellow-creatures, children and dogs were the only critics who appreciated his merits without discovering the defects which lessened the favorable appreciation of him by men and women. He dressed neatly, but his morning coat was badly made, and his picturesque felt hat was too old. In short, there seemed to be no good quality about him which was not perversely a.s.sociated with a drawback of some kind. He was one of those harmless and luckless men, possessed of excellent qualities, who fail nevertheless to achieve popularity in their social sphere.