Chapter Nine.
“I wonder,” mused St. John, stroking Jill’s tumbled hair with his right hand, and holding both hers in his left, “why the governor should have come here and told you what he did? It was putting us all in such a false position, and—well, I should have considered it an act altogether beneath him.”
Jill sighed and nestled unconsciously a little closer to him.
“Can’t we forget all that for to-day,” she asked, “and just think only of our two selves? I quite believe you when you say that you are not engaged to your cousin. I think I believed it all along only I was so horribly jealous. I’m jealous still, jealous that she can see you when I can’t, and that she has a right to call you Jack—”
“But you have got that right too,” he interrupted, “a better right than she has. You will call me Jack, won’t you? I call you Jill.”
She laughed.
“Doesn’t it put you in mind of the nursery rhyme?” she said. “I never thought of it before.”
“Yes; let’s see, how does it go? We must alter it a little to fit the case, ‘Jack and Jill went up the hill to—’ we can’t say ‘fetch a pail of water.’”
“In search of fame together,” put in Jill.
“Ah, yes! Jack and Jill went up the hill In search of fame together, Jack fell down and broke his crown, And—”
“No,” interrupted Jill, “I won’t come tumbling after. You can say that I went on alone.”
“But that’s so unkind,” he objected; “besides it doesn’t rhyme.”
“Oh! well,” she answered after a pause devoted to thinking out a finish to the verse, “put, ‘But Jill goes climbing ever.’ That rhymes, and it’s true; I’m not going to stop in the valley trying to haul you up.”
“You’re a disagreeable little prig,” he exclaimed. “I should as likely as not be obliged to haul you.”
“And I daresay you could manage that,” she answered rubbing her cheek against his coat sleeve; “you’re big enough goodness knows. I should like to be hauled up and have no more climbing to do, Jack; it would be such a change. But that’s too good to come true I’m afraid, it will always be more kicks than coppers it seems to me.”
“What do you mean?” asked St. John in astonishment. “There will be no more kicks, Jill, when you are once married to me; I shall take all those.”
Jill went on caressing his coat sleeve vigorously, and her hand pressed his with tender warmth.
“We shall never marry, Jack,” she said; “we can’t.”
“Why?” he asked amazed.
“Because we can’t live on love, dear; I never did like sweet things much, and you don’t like bread and cheese, and stout. I don’t much either; but I have to go in for it; it’s cheap. Only now I do without the stout—and the cheese also the last day or two.”
“But, darling,” he exclaimed, not quite certain whether she was joking or not, “you are making troubles where they don’t exist. There will be no need to live on bread and cheese and affection—though I should be equal to that even if necessary—I have five hundred a year from my father, and he has promised to increase it when I marry.”
“Providing you marry your cousin,” Jill interposed. “He would certainly decrease it if you married me. Oh! I know quite well all about it. You forget that he called upon me; he told me so then. And though you love me and I love you we shouldn’t be such fools, Jack, as to marry on nothing.”
St. John looked glum. He entertained no doubt that his father had resolved upon this plan of deterring him from marrying the girl he wished to, and he determined to thwart him if possible.
“We could get married, and I could come and live here,” he suggested brilliantly, “and we could work together; that would be jolly.”
Jill smiled at this proposal but shook her head decisively.
“It’s no good; it wouldn’t answer,” she said. “We should fight dreadfully in a month, and then the models would get smashed. And you’d never earn anything at painting, you know; your pictures always require explaining, and your figures are atrocious. I can’t think why you will persist in going in for the human form divine; it’s most difficult; for any fool can see when a figure’s out of drawing except the one who draws it, and you never will learn that green isn’t a becoming tint for flesh even in the deep shadows.”
St. John heaved a sigh which seemed to proceed from the bottom of his boots. He was too genuinely despondent to resent her slighting criticism of his abilities, or too well aware of its truth perhaps. He rose impatiently, and walked restlessly up and down trying to think. Jill watched him, her own brows knit in a hopeless attempt to solve the difficulty.
“This is a pretty kettle of fish,” he exclaimed swinging round so suddenly that he nearly upset the model. “I’m hanged if I see what we are to do.”
“My dear boy,” remonstrated Jill in tones of apprehension, “do mind the lay figure. I am trying to finish this canvas with its sole aid,” pointing to the work that she had been engaged upon at his entry—a female figure recumbent on a night rainbow. “I can’t possibly employ a model, unless perhaps for a final sitting when I know that I shall see so many mistakes it will be a case of repainting it.”
Then St. John had a happy inspiration.
“Wouldn’t I do?” he asked in all good faith. “I’m bigger, of course; but I’d be better than a lay figure, and I don’t mind posing for you a bit.”
Jill broke into a laugh, the first laugh of thorough enjoyment that she had had for days.
“Ye gods!” she cried, “what next I wonder?” Then she got up and put her two arms about his neck.
“Dear old boy,” she said gratefully, “I believe you’d stand on your head if I wanted you to. But no, dear, I won’t pose you as ‘The Shepherd’s Delight,’ I’m sore afraid you wouldn’t do at all.”
Well the end of it all was that Jill absolutely refused to marry St. John on the understanding that they should pick up a precarious livelihood by their combined artistic efforts, though she was quite willing that he should speak to his father again on the subject if he deemed it of any use. She also thought that Miss Bolton should be apprised of what had taken place, and for the rest things would go on just as usual, only he would attend the Art School again, and, as he himself stipulated, pop in as often as he chose. Then Jill went and put her hat on at his request, and they strolled out to lunch somewhere, and afterwards spent the rest of the day as they liked, which wasn’t among pictures as one would have imagined from two such lovers of art. In the first place St. John drove to a jewellers and placed a handsome solitaire ring on the third finger of Jill’s left hand, then they attended a matinée at one of the theatres, and in the evening he took her to Frascatti’s to dinner. There were several men there whom he knew and saluted in passing. They bowed back and stared hard at the dowdy little girl he escorted, wondering where he had unearthed her, and why? That night Jill tasted champagne for the first time, and its effect upon her spirits was decidedly exhilarating. She liked champagne, she said, and St. John laughed at the naïveté of both manner and remark. When he asked her where she would like to finish up the evening she suggested a Music Hall; for there one could talk while the performance was going on. So they drove to Shaftsbury Avenue, and St. John got one of the comfortable little curtained boxes at the Palace where one can enjoy the stage if one wishes to, or sit back and not pay any attention to it at all. Jill liked the Living Pictures best. She almost forgot in the delight of watching that they were actually animate and not marvellously painted canvasses by some master hand. But St. John rather spoiled the effect by remarking that they were ‘leggy,’ whereat she told him that he was horrid; nevertheless she noticed how very quietly the house received these artistic representations; but it was the quietness of appreciation had she known it—the appreciation which enjoys, yet with a very common mock modesty fears to be detected enjoying. Jill glanced at her lover as he sat back watching her instead of the stage with a smile of quiet amusement on his face.
“They are lovely, Jack,” she said. “I should like to carry them all home in reality as I shall in my mind’s eye. But this is the wrong audience to exhibit such things to.”
And St. John agreed with her, though he was by no means certain as to the soundness of her logic, but he would have agreed to anything just then; he was in the idiotic, inconsequent stage of love sickness, and had got it fairly badly.
When the Music Hall was over he suggested a late supper somewhere, but Jill was firm in her refusal; so they drove straight to her lodgings where St. John alighted and opened the door for her, and embraced her several times in the dirty passage before he finally allowed her to shut him out and go on up to her room. And that night she fell asleep with her cheek pressed to the diamond ring, and a smile of perfect happiness parting her lips.
The next morning Jill went to work on the sachets again, though it was with the utmost difficulty that she managed to concentrate her thoughts upon anything at all save Jack and the new ring. As it was, her ideas kept wandering, and she caught herself every now and again breaking off into song—snatches of Music Hall choruses that she had heard the night before. And then in the midst of it in walked St. John, and seeing what she was doing he took the satin away from her in his masterful fashion, and crumpled it up in his hands before her horrified gaze.
“You said that the smirking idiot who gave you these to do made love to you,” he said. “I won’t brook any oily rivals of that description.”
Jill laughed. She rather enjoyed the idea of his being jealous.
“I thought you said that that was a hallucination,” she retorted. “I was almost prepared to believe you and to think that the next time he chucked me under the chin, or put his arm round my waist that it was only my vivid imagination.”
“He did that?” cried St. John fiercely.
“Oh, dear! yes; several times.”
“Give me his address,” commanded her lover. “I’ll stop his love-making propensities. Where does this greasy Lothario hang out?”
But Jill was too discreet to say.
“I forget,” she answered lamely; “I never was good at locality. Don’t look so savage, Jack; he only chucked me under the chin once, and I washed my face well directly I got back, indeed I did; I scrubbed so hard that I rubbed the skin off, I remember, and it was sore for two days.”
“You ought to have returned the work at once,” grumbled St. John. “I am surprised at your taking it after that.”
“Surprised!” she repeated. “You wouldn’t have been so astonished had you lived for a few days on a stale crust, and expected to dine the next off the crumbs if by good luck there happened to be any crumbs left.”
“Oh! Jill,” he exclaimed, “I’m a brute dear. Has it ever been as bad as that, my poor little girl?”
Jill nodded affirmatively, and then let her head recline contentedly against his shoulder, glad to nestle within the comforting security of his strong arms, and feel that there she could find both shelter and defence.
“Have you told your father yet?” she asked a little nervously.
“No, dear,” he answered. Then added quickly, “I will some time to-day, though.”
“Yes,” she said, “don’t put it off any longer; I think that he ought to know; and yet I feel somehow that his knowing will put an end to all this pleasant fooling. Oh! Jack, I’m such a horrid little coward, I know I am.”
She lifted her face, and he saw that she was laughing even though the tears stood in her eyes.
“If you feel like that,” he said tenderly, kissing the upturned face, “why not get married first and tell him afterwards?”
“Oh! Jack, fie,” she cried; “you are turning coward too.”
“Not I,” he contradicted stoutly, then added with a smile, “I think I am though; I’m so terribly afraid of your slipping through my fingers, you eel.”
“Oh, you dear!” whispered Jill softly. “It is nice to have someone wanting you so badly as all that. I won’t slip through though; I am far too comfortable where I am.”