Chapter Five.
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—”
“Indecency, 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 débris, 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.