The victim was staring now, with terror in her tired eyes. Her mouth dropped open with the question her tongue refused to utter.
"If you," continued Mrs. Moon, "had wanted to tell him plainly that you were in love with him, you couldn"t have set about it better. I should have thought you"d have been ashamed to look him in the face--at your age. You"re a disgrace to my family!"
The poor fingers ceased their labour of b.u.t.toning and unb.u.t.toning; Miss Quincey sat with her shoulders naked as it were to the lash.
"There!" said Mrs. Moon with an air of drawing back the whip and putting it by for the present. "If I were you I"d cover myself up, and not sit there catching cold with my dress-body off."
CHAPTER X
Miss Quincey Stands Back
As it happened on a Sat.u.r.day morning she had plenty of time to think about it. All the afternoon and the evening and the night lay before her; she was powerless to cope with Sunday and the night beyond that.
The remarkable revelation made to her by Mrs. Moon was so great a shock that her mind refused to realize it all at once. It was an outrage to all the meek reticences and chast.i.ties of her spirit. But she owned its truth; she saw it now, the thing they all had seen, that she only could not see.
She had sinned the sin of sins, the sin of youth in middle-age.
Now it was not imagination in Miss Quincey, so much as the tradition of St. Sidwell"s, that gave her innocent affection the proportions of a crime. Miss Quincey had lived all her life in ignorance of her own nature, having spent the best part of five-and-forty years in acquiring other knowledge. She had nothing to go upon, for she had never been young; or rather she had treated her youth unkindly, she had fed it on saw-dust and given it nothing but arithmetic books to play with, so that its experiences were of no earthly use to her.
And now, if they had only let her alone, she might have been none the wiser; her folly might have put on many quaint disguises, friendship, literary sympathy, intellectual esteem--there were a thousand delicate subterfuges and innocent hypocrisies, and under any one of them it might have crept about unchallenged in the shadows and blind alleys of thought.
As love pure and simple, if it came to that, there was no harm in it.
Many an old maid, older than she, has just such a secret folded up and put away all sweet and pure; the poor lady does not call it love, but remembrance, which is so to speak love laid in lavender; and she--who knows? She might have contrived a little shrine for it somewhere; she had always understood that love was a holy thing.
Unfortunately, when a holy thing has been pulled about and dragged in the mud, it may be as holy as ever but it will never look the same. In Miss Quincey"s case mortal pa.s.sion had been shaken out of its sleep and forced to look at itself before it had time to put on a shred of immortality. In the sudden glare it stood out monstrous, naked and ashamed; she herself had helped to deprive it of all the delicacies and amenities that made it tolerable to thought. With her own hands she had delivered it up to the stethoscope.
He knew, he knew. In the mad rush of her ideas one sentence detached itself from the torrent. "_He_ knows well enough what"s the matter with you."
The nature of the crime was such that there was no possibility or explanation or defence against the accuser whose condemnation weighed heaviest on her soul. He loomed before her, hovered over her, with the tubes of the heart-probing stethoscope in his ears (as a matter of fact they gave him a somewhat grotesque appearance, remotely suggestive of a Hindoo idol; but Miss Quincey had not noticed that); his b.u.mpy forehead was terrible with intelligence; his eyes were cold and comprehensive; the smile of a foregone conclusion flickered on his lips.
He must have known it all the time. There never had been any misunderstanding. That was the clue to his conduct; that was the reason why he had left off coming to the house; for he was the soul of delicacy and honour. And yet she had never said a word that might be interpreted--He must have seen it in her face, then,--that day--when she allowed herself to sit with him in the park. She remembered--things that he had said to her--did they mean that he had seen? She saw it all as he had seen it. "Delicacy" and "honour" indeed! Disgust and contempt would be more likely feelings.
She lay awake all Sat.u.r.day night and all Sunday night, until four o"clock on Monday morning; always reviewing the situation, always going over the same patch of ground in the desperate hope of finding some place where her self-respect could rest, and discovering nothing but the traces of her guilty feet. A subtler woman would have flourished lightly over the territory, till she had whisked away every vestige of her trail; another would have seen the humour of the situation and blown the whole thing into the inane with a burst of healthy laughter; but subtlety and humour were not Miss Quincey"s strong points. She could do nothing but creep shivering to bed and lie there, face to face with her own enormity.
On Monday morning and on many mornings after she crept out into the street stealthily, like a criminal seeking some shelter where she could hide her head. She acquired a habit--odd enough to the casual onlooker--of slinking cautiously round every turning and rushing every crossing in her abject terror of meeting Bastian Cautley.
There was n.o.body to tell her that it would not matter if she did meet him; no cheerful woman of the world to smile in her frightened face and say: "My dear Miss Quincey, there is nothing remarkable in this. We all do it, sooner or later. Too late? Not a bit of it; better too late than never, and if it"s that Cautley man I"m sure I don"t wonder. I"m in love with him myself. Lost your self-respect, have you? Self-respect, indeed, why bless your soul, you are all the nicer for it. As for hiding your head I never heard such rubbish in my life. n.o.body is looking at you--certainly not the Cautley man. In fact, to tell you the truth, at this moment he is particularly engaged in looking the other way."
But Miss Quincey did not know that lady. She knew no one but Rhoda and Mrs. Moon; and if Mrs. Moon was too old, Rhoda was too young to take that view; besides, Mrs. Moon was not a woman of the world and no ridiculous delicacy prompted her to look the other way. In any case Juliana"s state of mind, advertised as it was by her complexion and many eccentricities of behaviour, could not have escaped her notice.
The Old Lady had reverted to her former humorous att.i.tude, and was trying whether Juliana"s state of mind would not yield to skilfully directed banter. In these tactics she was not left unsupported. Louisa had written a long letter about her husband and her children, with a postscript.
"P.S.--I don"t half like what you tell me about Juliana and Dr. C--. For goodness" sake don"t encourage her in any of that nonsense. Sit on it.
Laugh her out of it. I agree with you that it would be better if she cultivated her mind a little more.
"P.P.S.--Andrew has just come in. He says we oughtn"t to call her Juliana, but Fooliana."
So laughed Louisa, the married woman.
And Fooliana she was called. The joke was quite unworthy of the Greek Professor"s reputation, but for Mrs. Moon"s purposes he could hardly have made a better one.
Louisa had put a terrible weapon into the Old Lady"s hands. It was many weapons in one. It could be turned on in all its broad robust humour--"Fooliana!" Or refined away into a playful or delicate suggestion, pointed with an uplifted finger--"Fooli!" Or cut down and compressed into its essential meaning--"Fool!"
But whichever missile came handy, the effect was much the same. Juliana"s complexion grew redder or grayer, but her state of mind remained unchanged. Sometimes the Old Lady tried a graver method.
"If you would cultivate your mind a little in the evenings you would have no time for all this nonsense."
But Juliana had abandoned the cultivation of her mind. She made no attempt to pay off that small outstanding debt to _Sordello._ There was an end of the intellectual life; for the living wells of literature were tainted; Browning had become a bitter memory and Tennyson a shame.
But if Miss Quincey had no heart for General Culture, she was busier than ever in the discharge of her regular duties. At the end of the midsummer term the pressure on the staff was heavy. Her work had grown with the growth of St. Sidwell"s, and the pile of marble and granite copy-books rose higher than ever; it was monumental, and Miss Quincey was glad enough to bury her grief under it for a time. Indeed it looked as if in St. Sidwell"s she had found the shelter where she could hide her head; and a very desirable shelter too, as long as Mrs. Moon continued in that lively temper. Gradually she began to realize that of all those five hundred pairs of eyes there was none that had discovered her secret; that not one of those busy brains was occupied with her affairs. It was a relief to lose herself among them all and be of no account again.
In the corner behind Rhoda Vivian she and the Mad Hatter seemed to be clinging together more than ever in an ecstasy of isolation.
After all, above the turmoil of emotion a little tremulous, attenuated ideal was trying to raise its head. Her duty. She dimly discerned a possibility of deliverance, of purification from her sin. Therefore she clung more desperately than ever to her post. Seeing that she had served the system for five-and-twenty years, it was hard if she could not get from it a little protection against her own weakness, if she could not claim the intellectual support it professed to give. It was the first time she had ever put it to the test. If she could only stay on another year or two--
And now at the very end of the midsummer term it really looked as if St.
Sidwell"s was anxious to keep her. Everybody was curiously kind; the staff cast friendly glances on her as she sat in her corner; Rhoda was almost pa.s.sionate in her tenderness. Even Miss Cursiter seemed softened.
She had left off saying "Stand back, Miss Quincey, if you please"; and Miss Quincey began to wonder what it all meant.
She was soon to know.
One night, the last of the term, the Cla.s.sical Mistress was closeted with the Head. Rhoda, elbow-deep in examination papers, had been critically considering seventy variously ingenious renderings of a certain chorus, when the sudden rapping of a pen on the table roused her from her labours.
"You must see for yourself, Rhoda, how we are placed. We must keep up to a certain standard of efficiency in the staff. Miss Quincey is getting past her work."
(Rhoda became instantly absorbed in sharpening a pencil.)
"For the last two terms she has been constantly breaking down; and now I"m very much afraid she is breaking-up."
The Head remained solemnly unconscious of her own epigram.
"No wonder," said Rhoda to herself, "first love at fifty is new wine in old bottles; everybody knows what happens to the bottles."
The flush and the frown on the Cla.s.sical Mistress"s face might have been accounted for by the sudden snapping of the pencil.
"You see," continued Miss Cursiter, as if defending herself from some accusation conveyed by the frown, "as it is we have kept her on a long while for her sister"s sake."
(A murmur from the Cla.s.sical Mistress.)
"Of course we must put it to her prettily, wrap it up--in tissue paper."
(The Cla.s.sical Mistress is still inarticulate.)
"You are not giving me your opinion."
"It seems to me I"ve said a great deal more than I"ve any right to say."