Mab had very seldom been silenced or daunted in her life, or kept from saying out what was in her mind. For once she had been overcome—chiefly by the apple and its effects, the sense of familiarity and obligation thus brought into her embarrassed mind—but such an embarrassment could not last, nor was she cowed except for a moment by Mrs. Brown’s personality—potent though it was.
‘I wish,’ she cried, ‘you had not told me these things. You put a weight upon my mind, for, of course, I cannot tell them to anybody, and I shall have to carry them all about as if they were secrets of mine. It was not just or fair to tell me—when I can’t tell them again or free myself from knowing, or forget for a long time what you have said. And as for what we wanted you to do—it was when we thought you were only Mrs. Brown, a lady that was poor, and obliged to put up with the school to get her living. Which did not matter to anybody—but now—now——’
‘You are disappointed in me,’ said Mrs. Brown. ‘You think I am not a lady, or obliged to get my living—and you think you had better say no more about it. You are quite right, for I should not have done it whatever you had said to me. I have a great curiosity, however, I confess, to know what it was to be.’
‘Please!’ said Mab, ‘of course I know you are a lady, but it is all different; they thought you might have done—Lady Macbeth—or something. But all that doesn’t matter now.’
‘Lady Macbeth—or something. What other thing did their wisdom think could go beside Lady Macbeth? No, my dear Miss Pakenham, I will not do Lady Macbeth—or anything. Tell the ladies I make my courtesy down to the ground,’ she did so as she spoke with the greatest gravity, while Mab followed her every movement fascinated, ‘for their kindness and for their thought that I was good enough to exhibit myself among them. You know now that I am not good enough. I am not a decayed gentlewoman that has known better days; but don’t hesitate on my account to clear your bosom of that perilous stuff. Tell it out, my dear, run home and tell it all to my lady, your mamma.’
She stopped short suddenly, but as if she would have said a great deal more. Mab seemed to stop short, too, in the hot tide of her interest as the schoolmistress paused. It was as if some swift career and progress of horse or man had been drawn up and cut short in their midst. Mab’s breath, which she had held in the great fever of her interest, burst from her with a kind of gasp. She seemed to herself to have been stopped short on the edge of some precipice.
‘Did you know,’ she said, hesitating, and thinking over every word, ‘my—mother—too?’
Mrs. Brown apparently did not expect this question. She stared at her for a moment, and then burst into an uneasy laugh and turned away.
‘Sarah, Sarah,’ she cried, clapping her hands, ‘it is almost time for school; come and clear these things away.’