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 Classical Mistress,
and Rhoda, sick of her worshippers, had found this attitude 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--Classical Mistress. I shan't have to do any sums for that, you know.
I shall only have to know Greek, and isn't it a shame, Miss Quincey,
they won't let me learn it till I'm in the Fourth, and I never shall be.
But--don't tell any one--they've stuck me here, behind her now, and when
she's coaching that young idiot Susie Parker--"
"Laura, that is not the way to speak of your school-fellows."
"I know it isn't, but she _is_, you know. I've bought the books, and I
get behind them and I listen hard, and I can read now. What's more, I've
done a bit of a chorus. Look--" The pariah took a dirty bit of paper from
the breast of her gown. "It goes, 'Oh Love unconquered in battle,' and
it's simply splend_if_erous. Miss Quincey--when you like anything very
much--or any_body_--it doesn't matter which--do you turn red all over? Do
you have creeps all down your back? And do you feel it just here?" The
child clapped her yellow claw to Miss Quincey's heart. "You _do_, you do,
Miss Quincey; I can see it go thump, I can feel it go thud!"
She gazed into the teacher's face, and again the power of divination was
upon her.
"Laura!" Miss Quincey gasped; for the Head had been looming in their
neighbourhood, a deadly peril, and now she was sweeping down on them,
smiling a dangerous smile.
"Miss Quincey, I hope you've been making that child work," said she and
passed on.
"I _say_! She didn't see my verses, did she? You _won't_ let on that I
wrote them?"
"You'll never write verses," said Miss Quincey, deftly improving a bad
occasion, "if you don't understand arithmetic. Why, it's the science of
numbers. Come now, if ninety hogsheads--"
"Oh-h! I'm so tired of hogsheads; mayn't it be firkins this time?"
And, for fancy's sake, firkins Miss Quincey permitted it to be.
Now Rhoda was responsible for much, but for what followed the Mad Hatter
must, strictly speaking, be held accountable.
Miss Quincey had never been greatly interested in the movements of her
heart; but now that her attention had been drawn to them she admitted
that it was beating in a very extraordinary way; there was a decided
palpitation, a flutter.
That night she lay awake and listened to it.
It was going diddledy, diddledy, like the triplets in a Beethoven sonata
(only that it had no idea of time); then it suddenly left off till she
put her hand over it, when it gave a terrifying succession of runaway
knocks. Then it pretended that it was going to stop altogether, and Miss
Quincey implicitly believed it and prepared to die. Then its tactics
changed; it seemed to have shifted its habitation; to be rising and
rising, to be entangled with her collar-bone and struggling in her
throat. Then it sank suddenly and lay like a lump of lead, dragging her
down through the mattress, and through the bedstead, and through the
floor, down to the bottom of all things. Miss Quincey did not mind much;
she had been so unhappy. And then it gave an alarming double-knock at her
ribs, and Miss Quincey came to life again as unhappy as ever.
And of what it all meant Miss Quincey had no more idea than the man in
the moon, though even the Mad Hatter could have told her. Her heart went
through the same performance a second and a third night, and Miss Quincey
said to herself that if it happened again she would have to send for Dr.
Cautley. Nothing would have induced her to see him for a mere trifle, but
pride was one thing and prudence was another.
It did happen again, and she sent.
She may have hoped that he would discover something wrong, being dimly
conscious that her chance lay there, that suffering constituted the
incontestable claim on his sympathy; most distinctly she felt the desire
(monstrous of course in a woman of no account) to wear the aureole of
pain for its own sake; to walk for a little while in the glory and
glamour of death. She did not want or mean to give any trouble, to be a
source of expense; she had saved a little money for the supreme luxury.
But she had hardly entertained the idea for a moment when she dismissed
it as selfish. It was her duty to live, for the sake of St. Sidwell's and
of Mrs. Moon; and she was only calling Dr. Cautley in to help her to do
it. But through it all the feeling uppermost was joy in the certainty
that she would see him on an honourable pretext, and would be able to set
right that terrible misunderstanding.
She hardly expected him till late in the day; so she was a little
startled, when she came in after morning school, to find Mrs. Moon
waiting for her at the stairs, quivering with indignation that could have
but one cause.
He had lost no time in answering her summons.
The drawing-room door was ajar; the Old Lady closed it mysteriously, and
pushed her niece into the bedroom behind.
"Will you tell me the meaning of this? _That man_ has been cooling his
heels in there for the last ten minutes, and he says you sent for him. Is
that the case?"
Miss Quincey meekly admitted that it was, and entered upon a vague
description of her trouble.
"It's all capers and nonsense," said the Old Lady, "there's nothing the
matter with your heart. You're just hysterical, and you just want--?"
"I want to _know_, and Dr. Cautley will tell me."
"Oh ho! I daresay he'll find some mare's nest fast enough, if you tell
him where to look."
Miss Quincey took off her hat and cape and laid them down with a sigh.
She gave a terrified glance at the looking-glass and smoothed her thin
hair with her hand.
"Auntie--I must go. I can't keep him waiting any longer."
"Go then--I won't stop you."
She went trembling, followed so closely by Mrs. Moon that she looked like
a prisoner conducted to the dock.
"How will he receive me?" she wondered.
He received her coldly and curtly. There was a hurry and abstraction in
his manner utterly unlike his former leisurely sympathy. Many causes
contributed to this effect; he was still all bruised and bleeding from
the blow dealt to him by Rhoda's strong young arm; an epidemic had kept
him on his legs all day and a great part of the night; his time had never
been so valuable, and he had been obliged to waste ten minutes of it
contemplating the furniture in that detestable drawing-room. He was
worried and overworked, and Miss Quincey thought he was still offended;
his very appearance made her argue the worst. No hope to-day of clearing
up that terrible misunderstanding.
She tremulously obeyed his first brief order, one by one undoing the
buttons of her dress, laying bare her poor chest, all flat and formless
as a child's. A momentary gentleness came over him as he adjusted the
tubes of his stethoscope and began the sounding, backwards and forwards
from heart to lungs, and from lungs to heart again; while the Old Lady
looked on as merry as Destiny, and nodded her head and smiled, as much to
say, "Tchee-tchee, what a farce it is!"
He put up the stethoscope with a click.
"There is nothing the matter with you."
Mrs. Moon gave out a subdued ironical chuckle.
Miss Quincey looked anxiously into his face. "Do you not think the
heart--the heart is a little--?"
He smiled and at the same time he sighed. "Heart's all right. But you've
left off your tonic."
She had, she was afraid that so much poison--
"Poison?" (He was not in the least offended.) "Do you mean the arsenic?
There are some poisons you can't live without; but you must take them in
moderation."
"Will you--will you want to see me again?"
"It will not be necessary."
At that Mrs. Moon's chuckle broke all bounds and burst into a triumphant
"Tchee-tchee-chee!" He went away under cover of it. It was her way of
putting a pleasant face on the matter.
She hardly waited till his back was turned before she delivered herself
of that which was working within her.
"I tell you what it is, Juliana; you're a silly woman."
Miss Quincey looked up with a faint premonitory fear. Her fingers began
nervously buttoning and unbuttoning her dress bodice; while half-dressed
and shivering she waited the attack.
"And a pretty exhibition you've made of yourself this day. Anybody might
have thought you _wanted_ to let that young man see what was the matter
with you."
"So I did. He says there is nothing the matter with me."
"Nothing the matter with you, indeed! _He_ knows well enough what's the
matter with you."
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 buttoning and unbuttoning; 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."