“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.