"How could you have it--"out with him"?"
"Oh I should just ask him what he thought of me; or better still, tell him what I thought of him."
Miss Quincey shrank visibly from the bold suggestion.
"Would you? Oh, that would never do. You won"t mind my saying so, but I think it would look a little indelicate. Of course it would be very different if it were a woman; if it were you for instance."
"I should do it any way. It"s the straightest thing."
"I daresay, dear, in your friendships it is. But I think you can hardly judge of this. You do not know Dr. Cautley as I do."
"No," said Rhoda meekly, "perhaps I don"t." Not for worlds would she have destroyed that beautiful illusion.
"It has been," continued Miss Quincey, "a very peculiar, a very interesting relationship. Strange too--considering. If you had asked me six months ago I should have told you that the thing was impossible, or rather, that in nine cases out of ten--I mean I should have said it was highly improbable that Dr. Cautley would take the faintest interest in me, let alone like me."
"He does like you, dear Miss Quincey, I know he does."
"How do you know?"
"He told me so." (Miss Quincey quivered and a faint flush worked up through the sallow of her cheek.) "And I"m sure he would be most distressed to think you were unhappy."
"It is not unhappiness; certainly not unhappiness. On the contrary I have been happy, quite happy lately. And I think it has been bad for me. I wasn"t used to it. Perhaps, if it had happened five-and-twenty years ago--Do not misunderstand me, I am merely speaking of friendship, dear; but it might--I mean I might--"
Far back in the chair and favoured by Rhoda"s silence, Miss Quincey dropped into a dream. Presently she woke up as it were with a start.
"What am I thinking of? Let us be reasonable; let us reduce it to figures. Forty-five--thirty--he is thirty. Take twenty-five from thirty and five remain. Why, Rhoda, he would have been--"
They looked at each other, but neither said: "He would have been five years old."
Miss Quincey seemed quite prostrated by the result of her calculations.
To everything that Rhoda could urge to soothe her she answered steadily:
"You do not know him as I do."
The voice was not Miss Quincey"s voice; it was the monotonous, melancholy voice of the Fixed Idea.
Her knowledge of him. After all, nothing could take from her the exquisite privacy of that possession.
"_Eros anikate machan_," said Rhoda.
Miss Quincey was gone and the Cla.s.sical Mistress was in school again, coaching a backward student through the "Antigone."
"Oh Love, unconquered in fight. Love who--Love who fliest, who fliest about among things," said the student. And the teacher laughed.
Laughed, for the entertaining blunder called up a vivid image of the G.o.d in Miss Quincey"s drawing-room, fluttering about among the furniture and doing terrific damage with his wings.
"What"s wrong?" asked the student.
"Oh nothing; only a slight confusion between flying about and falling upon. "Oh Love who fallest on the prey"; please go on."
""Oh Love who fallest on the prey"--" The chorus mumbled and stumbled, and the student sighed heavily, for the Greek was hard. "He who has--he who has--Oh dear, I can"t see any sense in these old choruses; I do hate them."
"Still," said Rhoda sweetly, "you mustn"t murder them. "He who has love has madness.""
The chorus limped to its end and the student left the coach to some curious reflections.
"_Eros anikate machan_!"
"Oh Love, unconquered in fight!" It sang in her ears persistently, joyously, ironically--a wedding-song, a battle-song, a song of victory.
Bastian Cautley was right when he said that the race was to the swift and the battle to the strong. How eager she had been for the fight, how mad for the crowded course! She had rushed on, heat after heat, outstripping all compet.i.tors and carrying off all the crowns and the judges"
compliments at the end of the day. She loved the race for its own sake, this young athlete; and though she took the crowns and the compliments very much as a matter of course, she had come to look on life as nothing but an endless round of Olympic games. And just as she forgot each successive event in the excitement of the next, she also had forgotten the losers and those who were tumbled in the dust. Until she had seen Miss Quincey.
Miss Quincey--so they had let her come to this among them all? They had left her so bare of happiness that the first man (it happened to be her doctor) who spoke two kind words to her became necessary to her existence. No, that was hardly the way to put it; it was underrating Bastian Cautley. He was the sort of man that any woman--But who would have thought it of Miss Quincey? And the really sad thing was that she did not think it of herself; it showed how empty of humanity her life had been. It was odd how these things happened. Miss Quincey was neither brilliant nor efficient, but she had made the most of herself; at least she had lived a life of grinding intellectual toil; the whole woman had seemed absorbed in her miserable arithmetical function. And yet at fifty (she looked fifty) she had contrived to develop that particular form of foolishness which it was Miss Cursiter"s business to exterminate. There were some of them who talked as if the thing was done; as if compet.i.tive examinations had superseded the primitive rivalry of s.e.x.
Bastian Cautley was right. You may go on building as high as you please, but you will never alter the original ground-plan of human nature. And how she had scoffed at his "man"s view"; how indignantly she had repulsed his suggestion that there was a side to the subject that her friends the idealists were much too ideal to see.
Were they really, as Bastian Cautley put it, so engrossed in producing a new type that they had lost sight of the individual? Was the system so far in accordance with Nature that it was careless of the single life?
Which was the only life open to most of them, poor things.
And she had blundered more grossly than the system itself. What, after all, had she done for that innocent whom she had made her friend? She had taken everything from her. She had promised to keep her place for her at St. Sidwell"s and was monopolising it herself. Worse than that, she had given her a friend with one hand and s.n.a.t.c.hed him from her with the other. (If you came to think of it, it was hard that she who had so much already could have Bastian Cautley too, any day, to play with, or to keep--for her very own. There was not a bit of him that could by any possibility belong to Miss Quincey.) She had tried to stand between her and her Fate, and she had become her Fate. Worse than all, she had kept from her the knowledge of the truth--the truth that might have cured her.
Of course she had done that out of consideration for Bastian Cautley.
There it seemed that Rhoda"s regard for his feelings ended. Though she admitted ten times over that he was right, she was by no means more disposed to come to an understanding with him on that account. On the contrary, when she saw him the very next evening (poor Bastian had chosen his moment indiscreetly) she endeavoured to repair her blunders by visiting them on his irreproachable head, dealing to him a certain painful, but not wholly unexpected back-hander in the face.
She had done all she could for Miss Quincey. At any rate, she said to herself, she had spared her the final blow.
CHAPTER IX
Through the Stethoscope
One morning the Mad Hatter was madder than ever. It was impossible to hold her attention. The black eyes blazed as they wandered, the paralytic pencil was hot in her burning fingers. When she laid it down towards the end of the morning and rested her head on her hands, Miss Quincey had not the heart to urge her to the loathsome toil. She let her talk.
"Miss Quincey," said the Mad Hatter in a solemn whisper, "I"m going to tell you a secret. Do you see _her_?" She indicated Miss Rhoda Vivian with the point of her pencil.
It was evident that Laura Lazarus did not adore the Cla.s.sical Mistress, and Rhoda, sick of her worshippers, had found this att.i.tude refreshing.
Even now she bestowed a smile and a nod on the Mad Hatter that would have kept any other St. Sidwellite in a fortnight"s ecstasy.
"Laura, that is not the way to speak of your teachers."
The child raised the Semitic arch of her eye-brows. Her face belonged to the type formed from all eternity for the expression of contempt.
"She"s not my teacher, thank goodness. Do you know what I"m going to be some day, when she"s married and gone away? I"m going to be what she is--Cla.s.sical Mistress. I shan"t have to do any sums for that, you know.