I
UP the long hill from the station at St.-Cloud, Lizzie West climbed in
the cold spring sunshine. As she breasted the incline, she noticed the
first waves of wistaria over courtyard railings and the high lights of
new foliage against the walls of ivy-matted gardens; and she thought
again, as she had thought a hundred times before, that she had never
seen so beautiful a spring.
She was on her way to the Deerings’ house, in a street near the hilltop;
and every step was dear and familiar to her. She went there five times
a week to teach little Juliet Deering, the daughter of Mr. Vincent
Deering, the distinguished American artist. Juliet had been her pupil
for two years, and day after day, during that time, Lizzie West had
mounted the hill in all weathers; sometimes with her umbrella bent
against a driving rain, sometimes with her frail cotton parasol unfurled
beneath a fiery sun, sometimes with the snow soaking through her patched
boots or a bitter wind piercing her thin jacket, sometimes with the dust
whirling about her and bleaching the flowers of the poor little hat that
_had_ to “carry her through” till next summer.
At first the ascent had seemed tedious enough, as dull as the trudge to
her other lessons. Lizzie was not a heaven-sent teacher; she had no born
zeal for her calling, and though she dealt kindly and dutifully with her
pupils, she did not fly to them on winged feet. But one day something
had happened to change the face of life, and since then the climb to the
Deering house had seemed like a dream-flight up a heavenly stairway.
Her heart beat faster as she remembered it--no longer in a tumult of
fright and self-reproach, but softly, peacefully, as if brooding over a
possession that none could take from her.
It was on a day of the previous October that she had stopped, after
Juliet’s lesson, to ask if she might speak to Juliet’s papa. One had
always to apply to Mr. Deering if there was anything to be said about
the lessons. Mrs. Deering lay on her lounge up-stairs, reading greasy
relays of dog-eared novels, the choice of which she left to the cook
and the nurse, who were always fetching them for her from the _cabinet
de lecture;_ and it was understood in the house that she was not to be
“bothered” about Juliet. Mr. Deering’s interest in his daughter was
fitful rather than consecutive; but at least he was approachable, and
listened sympathetically, if a little absently, stroking his long, fair
mustache, while Lizzie stated her difficulty or put in her plea for maps
or copy-books.
“Yes, yes--of course--whatever you think right,” he would always assent,
sometimes drawing a five-franc piece from his pocket, and laying it
carelessly on the table, or oftener saying, with his charming smile:
“Get what you please, and just put it on your account, you know.”
But this time Lizzie had not come to ask for maps or copy-books, or
even to hint, in crimson misery,--as once, poor soul! she had had
to do,--that Mr. Deering had overlooked her last little account had
probably not noticed that she had left it, some two months earlier, on
a corner of his littered writing-table. That hour had been bad enough,
though he had done his best to make it easy to carry it off gallantly
and gaily; but this was infinitely worse. For she had come to complain
of her pupil; to say that, much as she loved little Juliet, it was
useless, unless Mr. Deering could “do something,” to go on with the
lessons.
“It wouldn’t be honest--I should be robbing you; I’m not sure that I
haven’t already,” she half laughed, through mounting tears, as she
put her case. Little Juliet would not work, would not obey. Her poor,
little, drifting existence floated aimlessly between the kitchen and the
_lingerie_, and all the groping tendrils of her curiosity were fastened
about the doings of the backstairs.
It was the same kind of curiosity that Mrs. Deering, overhead in her
drug-scented room, lavished on her dog-eared novels and on the “society
notes” of the morning paper; but since Juliet’s horizon was not yet wide
enough to embrace these loftier objects, her interest was centered in
the anecdotes that Celeste and Suzanne brought back from the market
and the library. That these were not always of an edifying nature the
child’s artless prattle too often betrayed; but unhappily they occupied
her fancy to the complete exclusion of such nourishing items as dates
and dynasties, and the sources of the principal European rivers.
At length the crisis became so acute that poor Lizzie felt herself bound
to resign her charge or ask Mr. Deering’s intervention; and for Juliet’s
sake she chose the harder alternative. It _was_ hard to speak to him not
only because one hated still more to ascribe it to such vulgar causes,
but because one blushed to bring them to the notice of a spirit engaged
with higher things. Mr. Deering was very busy at that moment: he had a
new picture “on.” And Lizzie entered the studio with the flutter of one
profanely intruding on some sacred rite; she almost heard the rustle of
retreating wings as she approached.
And then--and then--how differently it had all turned out! Perhaps it
wouldn’t have, if she hadn’t been such a goose--she who so seldom cried,
so prided herself on a stoic control of her little twittering cageful of
“feelings.” But if she had cried, it was because he had looked at her so
kindly, so softly, and because she had nevertheless felt him so pained
and shamed by what she said. The pain, of course, lay for both in the
implication behind her words--in the one word they left unspoken.
If little Juliet was as she was, it was because of the mother
up-stairs--the mother who had given her child her futile impulses, and
grudged her the care that might have guided them. The wretched case so
obviously revolved in its own vicious circle that when Mr. Deering had
murmured, “Of course if my wife were not an invalid,” they both turned
with a simultaneous spring to the flagrant “bad example” of Celeste and
Suzanne, fastening on that with a mutual insistence that ended in his
crying out, “All the more, then, how can you leave her to them?”
“But if I do her no good?” Lizzie wailed; and it was then that,--when he
took her hand and assured her gently, “But you do, you do!”--it was then
that, in the traditional phrase, she “broke down,” and her conventional
protest quivered off into tears.
“You do _me_ good, at any rate--you make the house seem less like a
desert,” she heard him say; and the next moment she felt herself drawn
to him, and they kissed each other through her weeping.
They kissed each other--there was the new fact. One does not, if one is
a poor little teacher living in Mme. Clopin’s Pension Suisse at Passy,
and if one has pretty brown hair and eyes that reach out trustfully to
other eyes--one does not, under these common but defenseless
conditions, arrive at the age of twenty-five without being now and then
kissed,--waylaid once by a noisy student between two doors, surprised
once by one’s gray-bearded professor as one bent over the “theme” he was
correcting,--but these episodes, if they tarnish the surface, do not
reach the heart: it is not the kiss endured, but the kiss returned, that
lives. And Lizzie West’s first kiss was for Vincent Deering.
As she drew back from it, something new awoke in her--something deeper
than the fright and the shame, and the penitent thought of Mrs. Deering.
A sleeping germ of life thrilled and unfolded, and started out blindly
to seek the sun.
She might have felt differently, perhaps,--the shame and penitence might
have prevailed,--had she not known him so kind and tender, and guessed
him so baffled, poor, and disappointed. She knew the failure of his
married life, and she divined a corresponding failure in his artistic
career. Lizzie, who had made her own faltering snatch at the same
laurels, brought her thwarted proficiency to bear on the question of his
pictures, which she judged to be extremely brilliant, but suspected of
having somehow failed to affirm their merit publicly. She understood
that he had tasted an earlier moment of success: a mention, a medal,
something official and tangible; then the tide of publicity had somehow
set the other way, and left him stranded in a noble isolation. It was
extraordinary and unbelievable that any one so naturally eminent and
exceptional should have been subject to the same vulgar necessities
that governed her own life, should have known poverty and obscurity and
indifference. But she gathered that this had been the case, and felt
that it formed the miraculous link between them. For through what
medium less revealing than that of shared misfortune would he ever have
perceived so inconspicuous an object as herself? And she recalled now
how gently his eyes had rested on her from the first--the gray eyes that
might have seemed mocking if they had not been so gentle.
She remembered how he had met her the first day, when Mrs. Deering’s
inevitable headache had prevented her from receiving the new teacher,
and how his few questions had at once revealed his interest in the
little stranded, compatriot, doomed to earn a precarious living so far
from her native shore. Sweet as the moment of unburdening had been,
she wondered afterward what had determined it: how she, so shy and
sequestered, had found herself letting slip her whole poverty-stricken
story, even to the avowal of the ineffectual “artistic” tendencies that
had drawn her to Paris, and had then left her there to the dry task of
tuition. She wondered at first, but she understood now; she understood
everything after he had kissed her. It was simply because he was as kind
as he was great.
She thought of this now as she mounted the hill in the spring sunshine,
and she thought of all that had happened since. The intervening months,
as she looked back at them, were merged in a vast golden haze, through
which here and there rose the outline of a shining island. The haze was
the general enveloping sense of his love, and the shining islands were
the days they had spent together. They had never kissed again under his
own roof. Lizzie’s professional honor had a keen edge, but she had been
spared the vulgar necessity of making him feel it. It was of the essence
of her fatality that he always “understood” when his failing to do so
might have imperiled his hold on her.
But her Thursdays and Sundays were free, and it soon became a habit to
give them to him. She knew, for her peace of mind, only too much about
pictures, and galleries and churches had been the one bright outlet from
the grayness of her personal atmosphere. For poetry, too, and the other
imaginative forms of literature, she had always felt more than she had
hitherto had occasion to betray; and now all these folded sympathies
shot out their tendrils to the light. Mr. Deering knew how to express
with unmatched clearness and competence the thoughts that trembled
in her mind: to talk with him was to soar up into the azure on
the outspread wings of his intelligence, and look down dizzily yet
distinctly, on all the wonders and glories of the world. She was a
little ashamed, sometimes, to find how few definite impressions she
brought back from these flights; but that was doubtless because her
heart beat so fast when he was near, and his smile made his words like
a long quiver of light. Afterward, in quieter hours, fragments of
their talk emerged in her memory with wondrous precision, every syllable
as minutely chiseled as some of the delicate objects in crystal or
ivory that he pointed out in the museums they frequented. It was always
a puzzle to Lizzie that some of their hours should be so blurred and
others so vivid.
On the morning in question she was reliving all these memories with
unusual distinctness, for it was a fortnight since she had seen her
friend. Mrs. Deering, some six weeks previously, had gone to visit a
relation at St.-Raphael; and, after she had been a month absent, her
husband and the little girl had joined her. Lizzie’s adieux to Deering
had been made on a rainy afternoon in the damp corridors of the Aquarium
at the Trocadero. She could not receive him at her own _pension_. That a
teacher should be visited by the father of a pupil, especially when that
father was still, as Madame Clopin said, _si bien_, was against that
lady’s austere Helvetian code. From Deering’s first tentative hint of
another solution Lizzie had recoiled in a wild unreasoned flurry of all
her scruples, he took her “No, no, _no!_” as he took all her twists and
turns of conscience, with eyes half-tender and half-mocking, and an
instant acquiescence which was the finest homage to the “lady” she felt
he divined and honored in her.
So they continued to meet in museums and galleries, or to extend, on
fine days, their explorations to the suburbs, where now and then, in
the solitude of grove or garden, the kiss renewed itself, fleeting,
isolated, or prolonged in a shy, silent pressure of the hand. But on
the day of his leave-taking the rain kept them under cover; and as they
threaded the subterranean windings of the Aquarium, and Lizzie looked
unseeingly at the monstrous faces glaring at her through walls of glass,
she felt like a poor drowned wretch at the bottom of the sea, with all
her glancing, sunlit memories rolling over her like the waves of its
surface.
“You’ll never see him again--never see him again,” the waves boomed in
her ears through his last words; and when she had said good-by to him
at the corner, and had scrambled, wet and shivering, into the Passy
omnibus, its great, grinding wheels took up the derisive burden--“Never
see him, never see him again.”
All that was only two weeks ago, and here she was, as happy as a lark,
mounting the hill to his door in the spring sunshine. So weak a heart
did not deserve such a radiant fate; and Lizzie said to herself that she
would never again distrust her star.