"Yes, Nature; and she"ll go her own way in spite of all the systems that ever were. Don"t you know---you are a teacher, so you ought to know--that overstrain of the higher faculties is sometimes followed by astonishing demonstrations on the part of Nature?"
Miss Quincey replied that no cases of the kind had come under _her_ notice.
"Well--your profession ought to go hand-in-hand with mine. If you only saw the half of what we see--But you only see the process; we get the results. By the way I must go and look at some of them."
His words echoed madly in a feverish little brain, "Ought to go--hand-in-hand--hand-in-hand with mine."
"Nature can be very cruel," said she.
Something in her tone recalled him from his flight. He stood looking down at her, thoughtful and pitiful. "And Nature can be very kind; kinder than we are. You are a case in point. Nature is trying to make you well against your will. A little more rest--a little more exercise--a little more air--"
She smiled. Yes, a little more of all the things she wanted and had never had. That was what her smile said in its soft and deprecating bitterness.
He held out his hand, and she too rose, shivering a little in her thin dress.
She was the first to hurry away.
He looked after her small figure, noted her nervous gait and the agitated movement of her hand as the streamers on her poor cape flapped and fluttered, the sport of the unfeeling wind.
CHAPTER VIII
A Painful Misunderstanding
And now, on early evenings and Sat.u.r.day afternoons when the weather was fine, Miss Quincey was to be found in Primrose Hill Park. Not that anybody ever came to look for Miss Quincey. Nevertheless, whether she was walking up and down the paths or sitting on a bench, Miss Quincey had a certain expectant air, as if at any moment Dr. Cautley might come tearing round the corner with his coat-tails flying, or as if she might look up and find him sitting beside her and talking to her. But he did not come.
There are some histories that never repeat themselves.
And he had never called since that day--Miss Quincey remembered it well; it was Sat.u.r.day the thirteenth of March. April and May went by; she had not seen him now for more than two months; and she began to think there must be a reason for it.
At last she saw him; she saw him twice running. Once in the park where they had sat together, and once in the forked road that leads past that part of St. Sidwell"s where Miss Cursiter and Miss Vivian lived in state.
Each time he was walking very fast as usual, and he looked at her, but he never raised his hat; she spoke, but he pa.s.sed her without a word. And yet he had recognised her; there could be no possible doubt of it.
Depend upon it there was a reason for _that_. Miss Quincey was one of those innocent people who believe that every variety of human behaviour must have a reason (as if only two months ago she had not been favoured with the spectacle of an absolutely unreasonable young man). To be sure it was not easy to find one for conduct so strange and unprecedented, and in any case Miss Quincey"s knowledge of masculine motives was but small.
Taken by itself it might have pa.s.sed without any reason, as an oversight, a momentary lapse; but coupled with his complete abandonment of Camden Street North it looked ominous indeed. Not that her faith in Bastian Cautley wavered for an instant. Because Bastian Cautley was what he was, he could never be guilty of spontaneous discourtesy; on the other hand, she had seen that he could be fierce enough on provocation; therefore, she argued, he had some obscure ground of offence against her.
Miss Quincey pa.s.sed a sleepless night reasoning about the reason, a palpitating never-ending night, without a doze or a dream in it or so much as the winking of an eyelid. She reasoned about it for a week between the cla.s.ses, and in her spare time (when she had any) in the evening (thus running into debt to _Sordello_ again). At the end of the week Miss Quincey"s mind seemed to have become remarkably lucid; every thought in it ground to excessive subtlety in the mill of her logic. She saw it all clearly. There had been some misunderstanding, some terrible mistake. She had forfeited his friendship through a blunder nameless but irrevocable. Once or twice she wondered if Mrs. Moon could be at the bottom of it--or Martha. Had her aunt carried out her dreadful threat of giving him a hint to send in his account? And had the hint implied that for the future all accounts with him were closed? Had he called on Mrs.
Moon and been received with crushing hostility? Or had Martha permitted herself to say that she, Miss Quincey, was out when perhaps he knew for a positive fact that she was in? But she soon dismissed these conjectures as inadequate and fell back on her original hypothesis.
And all the time the Old Lady"s eyes, and her voice too, were sharper than ever; from the corner where she dreamed she watched Miss Quincey incessantly between the dreams. At times the Old Lady was shaken with terrible and mysterious mirth. Bastian Cautley began to figure fantastically in her conversation. Her ideas travelled by slow trains of a.s.sociation that started from nowhere but always arrived at Bastian Cautley as a terminus. If Juliana had a headache Mrs. Moon supposed that she wanted that young man to be dancing attendance on her again; if Juliana sighed she declared that Dr. Cautley was a faithless swain who had forsaken Juliana; if Martha brought in the tea-tray she wondered when Dr. Cautley was coming back for another slice of Juliana"s wedding-cake.
Mrs. Moon referred to a certain abominable piece of confectionery now crumbling away on a shelf in the sideboard, where, with a breach in its side and its sugar turret in ruins, it seemed to nod at Miss Quincey with all sorts of satirical suggestions. And when Louisa sent her accounts of Teenie who lisped in German, Alexander who wrote Latin letters to his father, and Mildred who refused to read the New Testament in anything but Greek, and Miss Quincey remarked that if she had children she wouldn"t bring them up so, the Old Lady laughed--"Tchee--Tchee! We all know about old maids" children." Miss Quincey said nothing to that; but she hardened her heart against Louisa"s children, and against Louisa"s husband and Louisa. She couldn"t think how Louisa could have married such a dreadful little man as Andrew Mackinnon, with his unmistakable accent and problematical linen. The gentle creature who had never said a harsh word to anybody in her life became mysteriously cross and captious. She hardened her heart even to little Laura Lazarus.
And one morning when she came upon the Mad Hatter in her corner of the cla.s.s-room, and found her adding two familiar columns of figures together and adding them all wrong, Miss Quincey was very cross and very captious indeed. The Mad Hatter explained at more length than ever that the figures twisted themselves about; they wouldn"t stay still a minute so that she could hold them; they were always going on and on, turning over and over, and growing, growing, till there were millions, billions, trillions of them; oh, they were wonderful things those figures; you could go on watching them for ever if you were sharp enough; you could even--here Laura lowered her voice in awe of her own conception, for Laura was a mystic, a seer, a metaphysician, what you will--you could even think with them, if you knew how; in short you could do anything with them but turn them into sums. And as all this was very confusing to the intellect Miss Quincey became crosser than ever. And while Miss Quincey quivered all over with irritability, the Mad Hatter paid no heed whatever to her instructions, but thrust forward a small yellow face that was all nose and eyes, and gazed at Miss Quincey like one possessed by a spirit of divination.
"Have you got a headache, Miss Quincey?" she inquired on hearing herself addressed for the third time as "Stupid child!"
Miss Quincey relied tartly that no, she had not got a headache. The Mad Hatter appeared to be absorbed in tracing rude verses on her rough notebook with a paralytic pencil.
"I"m sorry; because then you must be unhappy. When people are cross," she continued, "it means one of two things. Either their heads ache or they are unhappy. You must be very unhappy. I know all about it." The paralytic pencil wavered and came to a full stop. "You like somebody, and so somebody has made you unhappy."
But for the shame of it, Miss Quincey could have put her head down on the desk and cried as she had seen the Mad Hatter cry over her sums, and for the same reason; because she could not put two and two together.
And what Mrs. Moon saw, what Martha saw, what the Mad Hatter divined with her feverish, precocious brain, Rhoda Vivian could not fail to see. It was Dr. Cautley"s business to look after Miss Quincey in her illness, and it was Rhoda"s to keep an eye on her in her recovery, and instantly report the slightest threatening of a break-down. Miss Quincey"s somewhat eccentric behaviour filled her with misgivings; and in order to investigate her case at leisure, she chose the first afternoon when Miss Cursiter was not at home to ask the little arithmetic teacher to lunch.
After Rhoda"s lunch, soothed with her sympathy and hidden, not to say extinguished, in an enormous chair, Miss Quincey was easily worked into the right mood for confidences; indeed she was in that state of mind when they rush out of their own accord in the utter exhaustion of the will.
"Are you sure you are perfectly well?" so Rhoda began her inquiry.
"Perfectly, perfectly--in myself," said Miss Quincey, "I think, perhaps--that is, sometimes I"m a little afraid that taking so much a.r.s.enic may have disagreed with me. You know it is a deadly poison. But I"ve left it off lately, so I ought to be better--unless perhaps I"m feeling the want of it."
"You are not worrying about St. Sidwell"s--about your work?"
"It"s not that--not that. But to tell you the truth, I _am_ worried, Rhoda. For some reason or other, my own fault, no doubt, I have lost a friend. It"s a hard thing," said Miss Quincey, "to lose a friend."
"Oh, I am sure--Do you mean Miss Cursiter?"
"No, I do not mean Miss Cursiter."
"Do you mean--me then? Not me?"
"You, dear child? Never. To be plain--this is in confidence, Rhoda--I am speaking of Dr. Cautley."
"Dr. Cautley?"
"Yes. I do not know what I have done, or how I have offended him, but he has not been near me for over two months."
"Perhaps he has been busy--in fact, I know he has."
"He has always been busy. It is not that. It is something--well, I hardly care to speak of it, it has been so very painful. My dear"--Miss Quincey"s voice sank to an awful whisper--"he has cut me in the street."
"Oh, I know--he _will_ do it; he has done it to all his patients. He is so dreadfully absent-minded."
If Miss Quincey had not been as guileless as the little old maid she was, she would have recognised these indications of intimacy; as it was, she said with superior conviction, "My dear, I _know_ Dr. Cautley. He has never cut me before, and he would not do it now without a reason. There has been some awful mistake. If I only knew what I had done!"
"You"ve done nothing. I wouldn"t worry if I were you."
"I can"t help worrying. You don"t know, Rhoda. The bitter and terrible part of this friendship is, and always has been, that I am under obligations to Dr. Cautley. I owe everything to him; I cannot tell you what he has done for me, and here I am, not allowed, and I never shall be allowed, to do anything for him." A sob struggled in Miss Quincey"s throat.
Rhoda was silent. Did she know? Very dimly, with a mere intellectual perception, but still a great deal better than the little arithmetic teacher could have told her, she understood the desire of that innocent person, not for love, not for happiness, but just for leave to lay down her life for this friend, this deity of hers, to be consumed in sacrifice. And the bitter and terrible thing was that she was not allowed to do it. The friend had no use for the life, the deity no appet.i.te for the sacrifice.
"Don"t think about it," she said; it seemed the best thing to say in the singular circ.u.mstances. "It will all come right."
By this time Miss Quincey had got the better of the sob in her throat.
"It may," she replied with dignity; "but I shall not be the first to make advances."
"Advances? Rather not. But if I thought he was thinking things--he isn"t, you know, he"s not that sort; still, if I thought it I should have it out with him."