Jill did not anticipate the return of either of her pupils that
morning--did not, indeed, expect Miss Bolton to return at all; in both
of which surmises she proved correct. St. John had been obliged to hail
a four-wheeler and drive with his cousin home, and a most unpleasant
drive she made it; it was as much as he could do to sit quiet under her
shower of tearful reproaches. He ought to have known better than to
have taken her to such a low place. She might have guessed after having
seen her what sort of creature the girl was. It would have been much
better to have acted as she wished to in the first place--given some
suitable donation or commissioned her for a painting; that would have
been quite sufficient; it wasn't her fault that the stupid girl got in
front of her wheel, etc: etc: St. John said,--
"Shut up, Evie; don't talk rot." But when you tell some people to shut
up it has a contrary effect and serves as an incentive to talk more, it
was so with Miss Bolton. She was not violent because it was not her
nature to be demonstrative, nor was she in the slightest degree vulgar;
but her command over the English language could not fail to excite the
astonishment of her listener; to quote St. John's euphonism, "it made
him sick."
"I daresay," retorted Miss Bolton disagreeably; "my remarks generally
have a nauseating effect upon you, I notice; yet that disgraceful girl
without any sense of decency--"
"_In_decency, you mean," he interrupted. "You are very horrid," sobbed
his cousin, subsiding into tears again, and St. John devoutly wished
that he had held his peace.
The rest of the journey was very watery, and at its termination he felt
too demoralised to do anything except go for a stroll; the house with
Miss Bolton in it was too small for him. Miss Bolton was Mr St. John
senior's ward; she was a kind of fifth cousin twice removed, which was
the nearest kinship that she could claim on earth--that is to say with
anyone worth claiming kinship with. There were cousins who kept a
haberdashery, and spoke of the `heiress' with a big `h' but Evie Bolton
didn't know them; though according to the genealogical tree they were
only once removed, but that remove had been so distant that it made all
the difference in the world. Mr St. John, senior, both admired and
loved his ward, Mr St. John, junior, was expected to follow the
paternal example, and Miss Bolton, herself, was quite willing to present
her big, good-looking cousin with her hand, and her fortune, and as much
of her heart as she could conveniently spare. It would be difficult to
ascertain whether St. John appreciated her generosity as it deserved.
He had appeared thoroughly acquiescent up to the present when a possible
engagement had been mooted by his father, but had so far refrained from
putting his luck to the test. But in Mr St. John, senior's, eyes the
affair was a settled fact, and had anyone suggested the probability of
its coming to nothing he would have scouted the idea.
The following Friday when St. John entered the Art School he found a
very subdued little figure waiting for him--the old style of Jill with
her hair tied with ribbon, and the big pinafore over her shabby frock.
But not altogether the old style either; there was no attempt at dignity
here, no self-sufficiency of manner but that she was so thoroughly
composed he would have thought her nervous. She shook hands with a
slightly deprecating smile, and remarked interrogatively,--
"Miss Bolton has not come? I am sorry."
"No," he answered with an assumption at indifference which he was far
from feeling. "I told you art was a temporary whim with her, and I
fancy the stairs rather appalled her; she is not very strong."
His desire to spare her embarrassment was altogether too palpable. Jill
turned away to hide a smile, or a blush, or something feminine which she
did not wish him to perceive. He watched her in some amusement and
waited for her to break the silence. He would have liked to have helped
her out, but could think of nothing to say.
"I behaved foolishly last Tuesday;" she remarked at length, speaking
with her back impolitely turned towards him, and a mixture of shame and
triumph on the face which he could not see. "I lost my temper which was
ill bred; and," turning round and laughingly openly, "I'm afraid that
I'm not so sorry as I ought to be. Don't," putting up her hand as he
essayed to speak, "go on making excuses--your very apologies but condemn
me further. It was most ungracious on my part after Miss Bolton's
condescension in coming; yet how was I to know that she was so
supersensitive?"
"I ought to have warned you," he answered. "But never mind now; there
is very little harm done, only I am afraid that you have lost a pupil."
"And isn't that highly deplorable," cried Jill, "considering how few I
have?"
But St. John was not to be drawn into any expression of sympathy;
personally he felt no inconvenience, and he shrewdly suspected that Miss
Erskine was not particularly distressed herself. He sat down and work
commenced as usual.
St. John was getting on more quickly than his teacher had imagined that
he would. He was not likely to ever make an artist but still he
progressed very fairly in amateur fashion. His eye unfortunately was
not true; he could never see when a thing was out of drawing, but he was
always ready to listen to advice, and correct his work under
supervision. His greatest fault was a desire to get on too quickly; and
Jill had to assert her authority on more than one occasion to restrain
him, and keep his ambition in check.
One day, several weeks after the Bolton episode, he suggested that it
was time he commenced painting; he was tired of black and white. He was
then drawing from the bust of Clytie, and had only just begun working
from the cast. Jill was not in a good temper that morning--things had
not been prospering with her lately--and so St. John's ill-timed
suggestion met with scant consideration.
"You want to run before you can walk," she returned with ill-humoured
sarcasm. "Some people are like that. I knew of a girl once who was
learning riding and insisted on cantering the second time she went out.
The result was not altogether satisfactory; for it left her sitting in
the middle of the road. Last week I yielded to your insane desire to
attempt Clytie; the attempt is a failure; and so you want to begin
painting."
"Well," he answered not exactly pleased by her manner of refusing his
petition. "I certainly should like to vary the monotony. I don't see
why I shouldn't paint one day a week and draw on the other."
"That's not my system," replied Jill, and the curt finality of tone and
manner irritated him exceedingly. He felt like saying `Damn your
system,' and only refrained by biting fiercely at his moustache, and
jerking back his drawing-board with such vehemence that, coming into
violent contact with the cast from which he had been working, and which
stood on a box in the centre of the table, it upset the whole erection,
and with a terrible crash Jill's favourite model was shivered into
fragments. Jill, herself, flew into such a rage as baffles description,
and, alas to have to record it! springing forward boxed St. John's ears.
It was by no means a lady-like thing to do; but it seemed to occasion
her some slight relief. She was positively quivering with passion, and
stood glaring at the offender as though he had been guilty of a crime.
St. John flushed crimson, and as if fearful of further assault dodged
behind the model of the Venus de Medici. He could hardly be reproached
with taking refuge behind a woman's petticoats; anyone knowing the
figure could vouch for the impracticability of that; but he felt
decidedly safer screened by the white limbs which had so scandalised his
cousin, and betrayed no disposition to emerge again in a hurry; he was
very big and Jill was very little but he most certainly felt afraid of
her just then.
"How clumsy of you!" she cried. "I wouldn't have had it happen for the
world--I believe you did it on purpose."
"I did not," he protested indignantly. "How can you say such a thing?
I am as sorry as you can be that it happened."
He was not though, and he knew it. He considered her vexation
altogether disproportionate, and absurd to a degree verging on
affectation. Had the damage been irreparable he could have understood
her loss of self-control; but it was only a plaster cast which she must
assuredly know that he would replace. Being a man he did not take
sentiment into consideration at all, but merely thought her ill-tempered
and ungovernable.
"How dare you equal your sorrow to mine?" Jill demanded fiercely. "You
can't know how I feel. I don't believe you care."
Her lip trembled and she turned quickly away. Never had she looked so
forlorn, so little, so shabby, he thought, as at that moment, and
perhaps never in his life before had he felt so uncomfortable--such a
brute. Vacating his position of safety he approached until he was close
behind her where she stood with her back to the debris, and he saw that
her hands were picking nervously at the paint-soiled apron.
"Don't," he said, and his voice sounded strangely unlike his usual
tones. "You make me feel such a beast. You know that I care--you must
know it. I would rather anything had happened than have vexed you like
this."
"It doesn't matter," answered Jill a little unsteadily, and then one of
the two big tears which had been welling slowly in her eyes fell with a
splash upon the floor, and he started as though she had struck him a
second time.
"Don't," he entreated again. And then without waiting for more he took
his hat and slipped quietly out of the studio. Jill scarcely noticed
his departure, did not even speculate as to his object in thus
unceremoniously leaving, nor wonder whether he was likely to return or
not. She was rather relieved at finding herself alone, and able to give
vent to the emotion she could no longer repress. Sitting down at the
table in the seat which St. John had so suddenly vacated she laid her
head upon his drawing-board and wept all over the paper. The outburst,
which was purely neurotic,--such outbursts usually are--had been
gathering for days past, and had culminated with the fall of Clytie--the
breaking of the bust which her father had so loved. Alas! for the
sweet, sad, absurd associations which cling about the things that the
dead have touched.
St. John was not away very long; he had been to a shop that he knew of
quite handy, and had driven there and back thanks to the stupid cabs
that Miss Bolton found so inconvenient. He had bought another bust of
Clytie, an altogether superior article in Parian marble which he carried
back to the studio in triumph quite expecting to see Jill's grief vanish
at sight of it, and tears give place to smiles. He found her still
seated at the table; she was not crying any longer; but the traces of
recent emotion were sufficiently apparent for him to detect at a glance.
The sight sobered him instantly, and he approached with less confidence
in the efficiency of his purchase than had possessed him when out of her
presence.
"It's all right," he exclaimed, speaking as cheerfully as he could, and
placing the new Clytie on the table among the ruins of her predecessor,
"I managed to get another. I hope you'll like it as well as the one I
broke. It was confoundedly clumsy of me. But you aren't angry with me
still?"
"No," answered Jill, raising her head to view the Clytie as he drew off
the paper wrapping for her to see. "Oh!" she cried, "it is far too
good; mine was only plaster."
"Was it?" he said slowly. "And yet, I fancy, you preferred it
infinitely to this one."
Jill's lips quivered ominously again, and half unconsciously as it were
she fingered one of the broken pieces in lingering regret.
"It had associations," she said simply.
He stooped forward so that he could see her face, and his hand sought
hers where it rested upon the table, and with a kindly pressure
imprisoned it while he spoke.
"Can't you form associations round this one too?" he asked.
For a moment there was silence. Then she looked back at him and smiled
faintly.
"I have commenced doing so already," she answered, and, quietly
withdrawing her hand, rose and stood back a little the better to admire
his purchase.
"It was dreadfully extravagant of you to buy a thing like that just for
an art school model," she exclaimed. "It ought to be in some
drawing-room instead of here."
"It looks very well where it is," he answered coolly. "But I think I'll
give over trying to draw it for a time; I can't catch that sadly
contemplative, sweetly scornful expression at all; I make a sneer of it
which is diabolical. Don't insist, please; because it makes me nervous
just to look at her."
That was the beginning of things--at any rate the perceptible
commencement; though it might have begun with the flowers as Isobel had
insinuated. Never a word did St. John utter that Jill could possibly
have turned or twisted into a betrayal of the growing regard which she
felt in her heart he entertained for her, and never a sign did Jill make
that she understood, or in any way reciprocated his unspoken liking.
She knew that he loved her by instinct, and the knowledge made her glad,
so that her life was no longer lonely, nor the occasional privations,
the incessant work, the petty, carking, almost daily worries so hard to
bear. Life was one long pleasant day-dream; though sometimes Miss
Bolton "biked" through the dreaming, and then it became a night-mare,
and Jill was consumed with a fierce burning jealousy that lasted until a
new-born, audacious, delicious conceit--her woman's intuition--assured
her that poor and insignificant though she was St. John was far more
fond of her than he would ever be of his pretty, elegant, and wealthy
cousin.