These words tingling in her ears gave Janet the strangest little shock, like the sudden touch of an electric battery, in the midst of the comfort and quiet. She could scarcely keep from jumping up, starting out of her seat. Her black sleeve, when Gussy took her long fingers from it, seemed to give out sparks. To strike a blow, to win a battle, never to allow herself to be beat. What curious words in this absolutely quiet and ordinary domestic calm?
Ju came in with a nod to Miss Summerhayes, and said nothing at all while she despatched her breakfast. But then Gussy was talking all the time, and there was not much room for anyone else. She was certainly a most self-absorbed young person; but, save her silence and that acute small curve over each eyebrow, caused by a sort of permanent frown, there seemed nothing else to alarm a stranger.
Janet’s heart still beat more quickly than before, but she gradually got more calm, and assured herself there could be no real danger. In some families all the molehills are made into mountains, and perhaps that was the case here.
It was with a little excitement, however, that Janet walked into the school-room, which she found communicated with her own room by a short passage, and which occupied a corner of the house with one window to the garden and another in the other wall, from which a view could be obtained into the outer world, meaning in this case the exceedingly quiet suburban road between two lines of garden walls which had reminded Janet of a country town. The young governess of twenty came into this room, which was still in the shadow, though expectant of a gleam of sunshine from the south when the sun should have made a little more progress, with some excitement, of which, however, she was able to conceal the signs. It gave a brightness to her eyes and a little thrill to her upper lip, but that was all. She had not the least idea of what she was going to encounter. The young knight in the story of the Sleeping Beauty was not more ignorant, nor was she at all sure that she knew how to fight, or had the coolness and the courage necessary for an important encounter. With a child of fourteen! she tried to say to herself with a laugh. But, after all, twenty is not so very far elevated over fourteen, and the child was taller and almost more developed than the woman. It was at ten o’clock that lessons were to begin, and at ten minutes to ten Janet opened the school-room door. Mystery and expectation made her heart beat. She stepped in once more, feeling the thrill as of an electric machine; and her breathing was slightly affected, though she would not show it. She had almost feared she would find emptiness, which would have been the most embarrassing of all, for how fight when your opponent does not show? But, fortunately, Julia was already there. This was what Janet found: a table set out in the middle of the room, with books and writing things, all in good order; the piano open at the back, with music upon it. Meanwhile, at the south window, seated at another table, with both her elbows resting upon it as if riveted to the mahogany—Julia, her head supported on her hands, a book lying open before her, in precisely the same attitude in which she had lain on the previous night scorching her head in the heat and blaze of the fire.
Janet stood for a moment looking at her pupil with an internal shiver. Her pupil—to whom she was not at all sure of being able to teach anything—whom in any circumstances she would have felt an alarmed respect for, as a being probably destined to find her out, and expose her little pretences. Julia remained like a statue, immovable, not turning to see who had come in according to weak mortal usage, far too strong in the instincts of rebellion and individuality for any such betrayal of weakness. Miss Summerhayes then moved a little about the room—looked at the music, took up the books on the table, glanced out from the window. Ten o’clock had not yet struck. She finally went and seated herself in the chair placed for her, and waited until the ten tiny strokes, tingling from the clock on the mantelpiece, had been answered by all the church towers in the neighborhood. Then there came an awful moment.
“Julia, it is time for lessons.”
Janet heard her own voice falter, but the tremor was not audible to any listener. Julia did not move nor reply.
“I am waiting to begin lessons,” Janet repeated more sharply, after a moment.
Dead silence—not by the merest quiver of movement did Julia betray that she had heard.
“It is ten o’clock, and I am waiting to begin lessons. Julia!”