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 defen............