Before his dazed wits could recover from the shock of this announcement, Jake Getz's daughter had become the unanimously elected teacher of William Penn.
The ruling passion of the soul of Jacob Getz manifested itself conspicuously in his reception of the revelation that his daughter, through deliberate and systematic disobedience, carried on through all the years of her girlhood, had succeeded in obtaining a certificate from the county superintendent, and was now the teacher-elect at William Penn. The father's satisfaction in the possession of a child capable of earning forty dollars a month, his greedy joy in the prospect of this addition to his income, entirely overshadowed and dissipated the rage he would otherwise have felt. The pathos of his child's courageous persistency in the face of his dreaded severity, of her pitiful struggle with all the adverse conditions of her life,—this did not enter at all into his consideration of the case. It was obvious to Tillie, as it had been to the School Board on Saturday night, that he felt an added satisfaction in the fact that this wonder had been accomplished without any loss to him either of money or of his child's labor.
Somehow, her father's reception of her triumph filled her heart with more bitterness than she had ever felt toward him in all the years of her hard endeavor. It was on the eve of her first day of teaching that his unusually affectionate attitude to her at the supper-table suddenly roused in her a passion of hot resentment such as her gentle heart had not often experienced.
"I owe YOU no thanks, father, for what education I have!" she burst forth. "You always did everything in your power to hinder me!"
If a bomb had exploded in the midst of them, Mr. and Mrs. Getz could not have been more confounded. Mrs. Getz looked to see her husband order Tillie from the table, or rise from his place to shake her and box her ears. But he did neither. In amazement he stared at her for a moment—then answered with a mildness that amazed his wife even more than Tillie's "sassiness" had done.
"I'd of LEFT you study if I'd knowed you could come to anything like this by it. But I always thought you'd have to go to the Normal to be fit fur a teacher yet. And you can't say you don't owe me no thanks—ain't I always kep' you?"
"Kept me!" answered Tillie, with a scorn that widened her father's stare and made her stepmother drop her knife on her plate; "I never worked half so hard at Aunty Em's as I have done here every day of my life since I was nine years old—and SHE thought my work worth not only my 'keep,' but two dollars a week besides. When do you ever spend two dollars on me? You never gave me a dollar that I hadn't earned ten times over! You owe me back wages!"
Jake Getz laid down his knife, with a look on his face that made his other children quail. His countenance was livid with anger.
"OWE YOU BACK WAGES!" he choked. "Ain't you my child, then, where I begat and raised? Don't I own you? What's a child FUR? To grow up to be no use to them that raised it? You talk like that to me!" he roared. "You tell me I OWE you back money! Now listen here! I was a-goin' to leave you keep five dollars every month out of your forty. Yes, I conceited I'd leave you have all that—five a month! Now fur sassin' me like what you done, I ain't leavin' you have NONE the first month!"
"And what," Tillie wondered, a strange calm suddenly following her outburst, as she sat back in her chair, white and silent, "what will he do and say when I refuse to give him more than the price of my board?"