Century/'The Worm'

by Phyllis Bottome

"The Worm"

By Phyllis Bottome

(Mrs. Forbes Dennis)

MISS ONORIA STRICKLAND lived in a semi-detached villa and had no nonsense about her. Many women repose through life upon lesser attributes; they may have a handsome profile, a gift for putting on their clothes, a skilful tongue, or a kind heart. Miss Strickland found rest in none of these minor alleviations of the spirit; she took her stand triumphantly upon her direct common sense.

No one could beat her there. "What," she would ask herself as she came to any crisis in her life or in the lives of her neighbors, "is the most sensible thing to do?" And when she had answered this question, she did it; or in cases where an action of her own was not indicated, she ordered it to be done by others.

She had lived at Little Ticklington for forty-five years, and all this time she had had her eyes open and said whatever came into her head, under the impression that she was expressing a peculiarly pure form of truth.

Her friends depended upon her and feared her. When they did n't want to depend upon her, they got out of her way.

Miss Strickland was continually discovering the deceitfulness of human nature, but she never laid her finger upon its cause. She did not realize that the only way to keep on good terms with an aggressive personality is by the constant practice of evasion.

Miss Onoria Strickland was an exemplary citizen. She had earned her own living with talent and success from the age of twenty-one, and she had been a masterful, but helpful, daughter to her aged parents. They became aged a little prematurely under this assistance, and died within a year of each other.

Onoria had never felt lonely during the lifetime of her parents. She left home at nine o'clock every morning, and returned at five o'clock in the afternoon, except on Saturday, when she came back to lunch.

No one could have had a fuller life; she managed her parents, did the household accounts, worked in the garden, or took Prendergast for a walk. Prendergast was a pug-dog of a self-centered and exacting nature. He had been given to Mr. and Mrs. Strickland by an old friend of that name, and though Onoria had protested against the use of a surname for a pet dog as unsuitable and even ridiculous, her father and mother had querulously insisted that they wanted to call the pug "Prendergast" as a last tribute to their deceased friend; and as they were at this time feeble, and it was bad for them to insist, Onoria had wisely let her protest drop.

After her parents' death Prendergast became the pivot upon which the household turned. Onoria was not sensible about Prendergast; she adored him. He was the one licensed folly of her ordered life.

It must not be supposed that romance had passed Onoria by. It had fallen at her feet early in life, and when she discovered how much nonsense it had about it, she had kicked it ruthlessly away.

No one will ever know why Peter Gubbins worshiped Miss Strickland. He was a gentle, inoffensive youth, with a weak chin and bottle-necked shoulders; his strongest tastes were for magazines and barley sugar, and though he was easily convinced that he was unsuitable, he continued to worship Onoria in a melancholy, but resigned, manner for twenty years.

Peter Gubbins was her next-door neighbor, and in time a certain element of relief mingled with his melancholy.

He had a large tabby-cat called Samson of which he was inordinately proud. Samson did not so much return, as passively accept, his master's nervous devotion. He was inconsiderate about sleeping in a basket,—inflexible arrangements, when they were not his own, galled him,—and though he knew his name perfectly, he had never been known to answer to it unless he had reason to believe that fish was at the other end. Peter Gubbins was very fond of all small and reasonably gentle animals, and often took Prendergast for a walk if Miss Strickland had n't time.

Peter Gubbins had a private income and wrote occasional articles and poems for magazines. The articles dealt with sweetpeas, on which he was an expert, and Roman Catholicism, on which he was not; but by dint of studying the works of ex-nuns and ex-monks he had arrived at some very startling theories upon the Roman Catholic religion suitable for very low-church magazines. The poems were on certain aspects of nature that have unfortunately occurred to other persons in search of poetic subjects; still, they were occasionally published, and Mr. Gubbins signed them "Sirius." As he often wrote about stars, and always referred to them as "bright," his signature could not have been more appropriate. Obviously "Peter Gubbins" applauding the universe would not do.

He never showed the poems to Onoria, but they shared the articles on Rome, and sometimes Onoria liked them, though she felt them to be too milk-and-watery to do real justice to the subject. It was inconsistent of Onoria to have such a decided bias against Rome, for she was very fond of law and order and considered authority final. She said, "This settles it," about a dozen times a day, and no pope has ever made more ex-cathedra proclamations in the twenty-four hours.

Mr. Gubbins was by no means Onoria's greatest man friend; she merely saw the most of him. Men liked Onoria, and Onoria liked men. Women she despised. Men sought Onoria to tell her what they felt for other women, talked politics with her, and took a monstrous and secret pleasure in hearing her abuse her own sex; but with the exception of Mr. Gubbins, they did not propose to share their lives with Onoria; they preferred the weaker sisters whom Onoria had relentlessly dissected for their special delectation.

At the high school Onoria taught nothing but girls. She taught them music and singing with bitterness and with boredom for over twenty years, and she taught them exceedingly well. There is an excellent poem which asserts that "He who only rules by terror does a grievous wrong," and there is no doubt a good deal to be said for this theory. All Onoria's pupils would have agreed to it with rapture; still, one does not go down the path of least resistance often if one finds lions in the way. Even girls have the sense to make unusual efforts to avoid unusual inconveniences, and Miss Strickland's temper, when roused, was an unusual inconvenience. She said everything that came into her head against the girl who had failed her, and then, with the sting of a lifelong prejudice behind her, everything against the sex which had evolved her.

Onoria firmly believed that all girls were deceitful, lazy, and vain, and that the only way to deal with them was by repeated castigations of the spirit.

The level of Onoria's pupils was high, and as she did not believe in hidden depths, she never had to regret that she had failed to plumb them.

"I know exactly what each of my girls can do," she was fond of saying. What she did not know was what the girls could have done if they had n't been hers.

"I have never made a friend out of a pupil yet, thank the Lord," she would end up by saying to her men friends, who spent Sunday afternons in hearing Onoria undermine the position of women, "and what is more, I never will." The men shook their heads in delighted admiration; they knew they could not say as much for themselves, but they believed in Onoria's security.

Elsie Andrews was exactly the kind of child Miss Strickland disliked most. Nobody really liked Elsie very much, because it is difficult to like a girl who constantly squirms. At school she went by the name of "the worm." The young have an unconscious preference for success or the materials for success, and no one could have imagined a success being made of Elsie.

She had long, greasy, dark hair, which fell perfectly straight down her back, and was the color of a wet haystack. Her eyes were small and rather weak, her chin receded, and her complexion was a pale-fawn color.

She came into a room as if she were holding herself together with difficulty, and was unpleasantly aware of having broken the ten commandments. If she had really broken them, there would have been some sense in it; but she never broke anything except the points of her pencils.

Miss Strickland did not notice her except to tell her to sit up or to get out of the way. It came as a shock to the whole school, therefore, when it learned that Elsie had petitioned to be allowed to take music lessons from Miss Strickland instead of from the less accomplished, but much milder, teacher provided for the younger girls. It was like asking to be led into a lion's den without having evinced the slightest aptitude for being a Daniel. It was supposed that Miss Strickland would make short work of her, and that after the first or second music lesson Elsie's whitened bones would be left outside the music-room door.

Miss Strickland herself, staring at the small, bowed figure on the music-stool, felt as a rosarian might feel if asked to entertain the most noxious of the caterpillars.

Here was a true type of feminine nature, a prevaricating, vacillating, cowardly little girl, and a vain one, too, or how would she have dared to claim the best teacher in the school for presumably the worst pupil? She so exemplified everything that Miss Strickland felt women in general were, without any of the attractions which in the eyes of the undiscriminating outweigh these disadvantages, that Miss Strickland felt a certain kindliness rise in her—the kindliness of a prophet who sees his worst prognostications blossom into disastrous facts.

"May I ask what you think you know about music?" she shot out at the child with a twist of her determined chin.

This was Miss Strickland's usual preliminary to a campaign of slaughter, and all new pupils, even if she had a kindly feeling toward them, had to be slaughtered first.

Elsie choked, looked helplessly at her limp little fingers, and stammered:

"Nothing, please."

Miss Strickland did not appear in the least mollified by this collapse of confidence.

"Under the circumstances," she replied, with the easy smartness of a licensed bully, "can you tell me why the teacher for the younger girls was not considered sufficiently good for you?"

There was a breathless silence before Elsie, with an astonishing spasm of courage, answered:

"I should n't have learned anything from her, please."

"'Could n't' is no doubt what you mean," said Miss Strickland with genial irony. "And 'could n't' will be no doubt the result of trying to learn from me. Not even the cleverest teacher can make a good job with a bad tool. You are a very inefficient little girl. You don't know how to sit on a music-stool or how to hold your hands. Your back is a disgrace, and your fingers are all thumbs. Let's hear you play something. What have you got here, rubbish? Oh, I see, worse than rubbish—the usual sonata by that poor Mozart. Mercifully, he is dead!

"Play it, and as I am not dead, pray do not make it any louder than is strictly necessary. Keep your feet off the pedals. Pupils who don't know how to play their notes have an idea that they can fall back on the loud pedal to drown their incompetence. That is not the proper use of pedals. They were never put into a piano to reinforce blunders."

Elsie dropped the sonata on the floor, and, in picking it up, overturned the music-stool.

Miss Strickland longed to slap her. Like all highly strung musical organizations, she loathed a sudden noise.

"Clumsy little animal!" she said under her breath.

Elsie heard her, and turned a dull crimson. She arranged the sonata with trembling fingers, and started off solemnly upon its well-known track.

Every note she played was a mistake. She altered pace, she ignored rythm. She tried for expression when the notes escaped her. She wallowed desperately on through the thickening disapproval of Miss Strickland's portentous silence.

Elsie knew exactly what the sonata sounded like to Miss Strickland; she had the vision of the disciple into the mind of the master. She knew she was inflicting torture upon her ideal human being, but still she inflicted it, having grasped that obedience is better than sacrifice, even the sacrifice of the feelings of the one you are bound to obey. Blandina before the maddened cow in the Colosseum could not have shown a more desperate courage.

At the end Miss Strickland said:

"You cannot like music; it is impossible. What on earth persuaded you to suggest that I should teach you?"

For a long while Elsie said nothing; she seemed engrossed in folding up the sonata. Then she lifted her rather weak eyes to Miss Strickland's face. She had no color at all; her very lips were white.

"Because I liked you," she stammered. "I wanted you to speak to me even if you were angry."

Miss Strickland was not an expert in Biblical language, but there was a quotation which attacked her mind at that moment and which stuck in her memory for years afterward: "Though he slay me, yet will I trust in him." She was the first to look away.

If there was one thing Miss Strickland had always set her face against, it was school-girl devotions. If she had any reason for supposing that any particular girl was guilty of such a sentiment toward herself, she crushed it ruthlessly within the hour of its conception.

But there was something in Elsie's eyes which was different from anything she had seen in the eyes of other girls. It would not be an easy act for a strong swimmer to deprive a drowning man of his straw. As far as life was concerned, Miss Strickland was a strong swimmer, and Elsie was a drowning man; her hopeless, helpless eyes said it. She had this one desire, this one strange, pitiful claim upon the universe, and having made it, she was prepared to drown. She said no more. She did not cry; she sat and trembled on her music-stool, looking dumbly at Miss Strickland's face.

Miss Strickland hesitated; she had always worked on a principle before: girls below a certain standard were Miss Saunder's pupils; girls above it were hers. It is not easy to break a principle at one's own expense. Then she said with conscious dryness:

"Well, we must see what we can do with you." She had not taken away the straw. The small figure beside her gave a long sigh of relief.

"You quite understand," continued Miss Strickland, with her usual firmness, "that I make no promises. If you work very hard and improve, I will try to keep you; but it will require all the work you have in you. Now I am going to tell you not all the things that were wrong in your playing,—that would be impossible in the short time that is left to us,—but I shall point out a few of them that I shall expect you to overcome before the next lesson.

"As you play the sonata all wrong, I should suggest your never touching it again and starting to learn properly something you have never seen before. Are you listening to me attentively?"

Elsie nodded. She tried to listen attentively, but she was hearing, instead of Miss Strickland's words, the music of the spheres. The sons of God were shouting together in a newly created world and absorbed her attention.

Her heart's desire had been granted to Elsie. She was not going to be abandoned by the one being on earth whom she truly loved. It is unfortunate to have to confess at this point that Elsie had both parents living.

Her father was a genial tradesman of the higher class of tradesmen; he did not serve in his own shop, and liked to romp with his children when he came home from business. Mrs. Andrews was a flighty, pretentious little woman who had overlaid the maternal instinct by a desire to get on in the world. She would have liked a pretty little girl to show of to her neighbors, but she preferred boys. She had two of them, and she had brought them up to tease and tyrannize over their small sister. They did this without imagination, and not intending to be cruel, until they were old enough for school, when they ignored her. There were little things she could do for them in the holidays, and if she did them all right, she could live in peace.

It was a great relief to Elsie Andrews when nobody at home paid any attention to her, but it could not quite fill the whole horizon of youth. Miss Strickland filled the rest of it. Elsie believed in her as the wisest, most beautiful, and grandest of earthly beings. She sometimes wondered if Queen Victoria had ever been like her. Not in some ways, for Elsie hugged it to her heart as a golden, but guilty, secret that her goddess was "advanced." Elsie would not have revealed it under torture, but she had seen Miss Strickland smoke a cigarette behind the shrubbery in the school garden. Probably Queen Victoria had not done this; she had lacked that final Napoleonic touch of audacity.

Miss Strickland's cigarette was the nearest thing to an adventure that Elsie had ever known. It took the place in her imagination of

Perilous seas in faëry lands forlorn.

She never passed a tobacco shop without a thrill of memory, and she saw far down the vista of the years a kindred moment for herself. Miss Strickland's light-blue eyes and trim, erect figure—the rest of her appearance was not very impressive—was the way Elsie supposed Venus had arisen from the sea. The blue serge coat and skirt that invariably accompanied Miss Strickland no doubt adhered to her later.

Miss Strickland was as beautiful as Venus, as grand as Queen Victoria, as wise as Minerva. As far as Elsie was concerned, wisdom would die with Miss Strickland. When Onoria said, "That's settled," Elsie would rather have disputed the last trump.

It had taken two years of dumb and invisible worship before Elsie had dared to make this final bid for the notice of her goddess. She knew it was final. If Miss Strickland had turned her away, she would have sunk like a stone to the bottom of her despair. She would never have attempted to move again. Life would have gone on all round her, but she would not have lived. She was living now.

"Well," said Miss Strickland, "you 've had over your hour, and I think I 've told you enough to go on with. You have n't talent, but don't let that discourage you. I never believe in little girls with talent; work produces ability up to a certain point. There is no such thing as a woman genius, and never will be."

Elsie looked at her in surprise.

"But you," she murmured, "surely you are a genius?"

"Nonsense!" said Miss Strickland, flushing half with annoyance and half with a feeling that was not annoyance. "I am nothing of the kind. I am merely a very hard-working person with the natural advantages of a good ear and light fingers."

Elsie could not believe this and she looked as if she could not believe it, but she said nothing.

"Now run along," said Miss Strickland, briskly, but not unkindly. You cannot be unkind to a person who will not believe that you are not a genius.

Elsie went out of the music-room with her head held up and her eyes sparkling.

Miss Strickland did not immediately ring the bell to summon her next pupil. She felt unaccountably stirred.

"A very ordinary little girl," she said to herself, reassuringly, "a most ordinary little girl. Still, I will see if something can't be done with her. The poor child has been shamefully neglected; by some woman, no doubt. Women are the most destructive force in existence, or, I should rather say, weakness. Force is creative and appertains to man. Women are destructive because they have no force; they destroy by the conscious exercise of their weakness."

Then Miss Strickland rang the bell. She felt more natural after this little fling at her old enemy, and she had succeeded in hiding from herself why she had given way to Elsie, who should most certainly have been returned to Miss Saunders.

Even a very dull person may achieve his aim if he has only one aim and devotes his entire attention to it.

Elsie's aim in life was to please Miss Strickland. She thought of nothing else by day and she dreamed of nothing else by night.

All the other teachers, and the objects of their efforts, slipped past her. She saw them vaguely as trees walking, and bumped into them from time to time with some severity. She was considered the dunce of the school.

The cream of her concentration was her work for the piano. She practised as the devotee prays. She did not think any more of the actual process than the devotee thinks of his prayers. It is the Deity which is the object of the devotee, and it was Miss Strickland who stood for Elsie beyond the five-finger exercises and chromatic scales, even as the vision of Beatrice leaned toward Dante out of paradise.

Miss Strickland was amazed at the child's progress; she was the more amazed because she had seen from the first, with an instinct virtually unerring, that she was not dealing with talent. She still believed that it was not talent. It was something that baffled Miss Strickland, an ardor of obedience, a stake-like adherence to her least words, which produced odd blunders and sudden advances and finally a higher level of achievement than that of any other pupil in the school.

For two years the intercourse between Miss Strickland and Elsie was limited to forty minutes twice a week in the music-room. Elsie accepted Miss Strickland's temper as the earth accepts the ministrations of climate. Sun and shower, heat and cold, were part, no doubt, of a divine plan, and so was the sharpness or the mildness of Miss Strickland's nerves. Of course Elsie liked them to be mild, but when they were sharp, they seemed like the magnetic lightnings of the universe.

Miss Strickland had never had a pupil whom she could hurt more. She was often unscrupulous in the use of her power, but the absoluteness of it in Elsie's case stayed her hand. Elsie had no defense against her, and- she would have used none if she had had it. One day Miss Strickland announced:

"There is to be a concert at the end of the term, Elsie. You have improved so much lately that I have told Miss Bretherton that you will play at it."

"Oh, if you please, Miss Strickland, I can't!" she stammered. "I could n't, not before people. I'm too—I'm too afraid."

"Nonsense!" said Miss Strickland, firmly. "I am the best judge of whether you can play or not, and I have decided that you can. It is absurd to be afraid of people who know very little about music and have come prepared to be easily pleased. You are not afraid to play before me, and I don't come prepared to be pleased and do know a good deal about music." She considered that this settled it.

Elsie, if she could have explained, would have said: "That's what I'm afraid of—not pleasing you. It's you that will care about the people." But it was out of the question to make a statement of this kind to Miss Strickland, even if it had occurred to Elsie that it was the truth, and things seldom occurred to Elsie as the truth until after the thing feared had happened.

Now she merely repeated in an agony:

"Oh, please don't make me play! I shall break down. I know I shall break down. It would terrify me to disappoint you."

To which Miss Strickland replied:

"Don't be idiotic. I have decided upon Mendelssohn."

The school at Little Ticklington gave particularly good concerts. Besides the parents, the mayor sometimes appeared, with several town councilors, the vicar, who was an archdeacon, and various people in the neighborhood who thought education ought to be encouraged and that their presence at school concerts encouraged it.

Miss Strickland sat at the back of the hall, so that she could hear if the songs carried. She had prepared all the girls carefully, and Miss Saunders, who lived in the school, would supervise them on the platform.

Miss Strickland had not seen Elsie for three days. At her last lesson she had played the Mendelssohn uncommonly well, but she had annoyed Miss Strickland by opening and shutting her mouth like a fish. Miss Strickland had told her so, and Elsie had then shut her mouth and kept it shut; but Miss Strickland had still been annoyed. She was aware of something in the child that was not consenting to her will, and this was very unusual.

Children must play at concerts. Elsie was now fourteen; she was a big girl, and the Mendelssohn was very easy. Miss Strickland told herself these reassuring facts several times before the curtain swung vacillatingly back for the first girl to perform. "Besides," Miss Strickland hastily informed herself, "I take no special interest in Elsie."

The first girl performed as first girls generally do. She was chosen for her hardihood, and she had a little overestimated it. Still she banged pleasantly away, and while she was too nervous to remember any of the finer shades of Miss Strickland's careful teaching, she played no wrong notes, and covered up the weakness of her execution with that merciful solvent of piano-forte puzzles, the loud pedal down.

Miss Strickland mentally provided for this young criminal a castigation of the direct kind short of direct profanity. Only men, who deserve it, may have the relief of an entire language to devote to wrath. Miss Strickland had to rely upon the fervency of her emotion. Then she listened to a bad recitation with the grim patience of a teacher who is not involved in the subject.

After this there were several excellent and charming songs with choruses. Miss Strickland had taught them to the school, and in one case had written the song herself. They went with a vim, and gave her a certain amount of very slight pleasure. Then Elsie appeared.

She was dressed in a heavy white muslin dress that revealed her thick ankles and pitilessly broad-toed shoes.

It was the wrong kind of muslin, trimmed with tawdry embroidery, and girt about the untamed breadth of her waist by a harsh blue sash. Her hair lay lankly down her back, evading where it could the ministrations of a similarly harsh blue ribbon.

Elsie moved heavily, and stared at the audience with the eyes of a sleep-walker.

Miss Strickland had particularly told Elsie to keep her mouth shut, her head up, and her chin in. The results of these attempts upon the figure are usually beneficial to young performers, but nothing could do much for Elsie's figure; it remained thick and uncertain, with a tendency to bulge in the wrong places.

When she saw Elsie, Miss Strickland felt an unusual pang of depression, followed by a much more usual one of rage.

Elsie sat down clumsily on the music-stool. It was lower than she had expected it to be. Miss Sanders, the young music teacher, adjusted the Mendelssohn.

It was "The Venetian Boat-Song," and is considered the easiest and lightest of concert pieces.

Elsie played the first two bars faultlessly. Miss Strickland was about to breathe a sigh of relief when, to her horror, the girl stopped abruptly and took her hands off the piano. Then she played the first two bars over again, and stopped again.

There was a long silence in the hall, a breathless, inconvenient silence, and then Elsie turned slowly on her music-stool away from the piano and faced the audience. She looked like a person delivering herself into the hands of Indians for torture. She faced the people with her hands in her lap, and her eyes fixed not so much appealingly as hopelessly upon the audience.

She did not cry; it was the expression of an immovable despair. She neither stirred nor spoke; she only looked straight in front of her, as if she saw the end of hope.

Miss Strickland felt as if the child's gaze fixed itself upon her heart. Before she had time to move. Miss Sanders had stepped forward at a sign from Miss Bretherton and led Elsie away. It was obviously impossible for any one who looked like that to play "The Venetian Boat-Song."

Miss Sanders, who wanted Elsie to enjoy her tea afterward, led her to the back row of little girls. Elsie went with her passively, and sank into her seat like a thing frozen.

Miss Strickland had once watched a baby rabbit holding itself together to look like a leaf; its fear had fixed it into the landscape. Elsie looked like that. She did not move for half an hour: she was as anxious as the baby rabbit to escape all observation.

A group of charmingly dressed girls came on to the stage and danced. There were no more hitches. Everything was beautifully done, and when it was over, Elsie asked if she might go and rest. She said she had a headache.

Miss Sanders, who was sympathetic and did n't know what else to say, agreed readily. The other girls stared at Elsie, but no one was cruel enough or kind enough to say anything to her. They all felt that she was interesting to talk about, but uncomfortable to talk to, and they left her alone.

Miss Strickland decided to do the same. She took her tea on the lawn and ate some particularly good strawberries without enjoying them.

Then she went to look for Elsie. There were very few places where Elsie had any right to be. She was n't in the empty school-room, or in a small anteroom used by the teachers before they went into their classes. She was in the dressing-room, behind a curtain, lying on the boots and shoes.

It was only by the faintest of creaks that her presence was disclosed to Miss Strickland. She lay there in a crumpled heap of muslin and anguish, sobbing as if her heart would break.

It was very pitiful to see her. Miss Strickland knelt down by Elsie's side and tried to speak; but, to her surprise, she found it difficult. She said, "My dear child," twice over. The first time her voice actually shook; then she recovered herself.

"Stop groveling among those boots!" she exclaimed sharply. This was better. Elsie sat up, and made an enormous effort to control herself; but the sobs had got possession of her, and shook her down among the boots again: Miss Strickland frowned.

"It's all my fault," she found herself saying. "I ought not to have made you play, and you really must n't be so distressed about it. People often make mistakes. One can retrieve them. I dare say," she went on mercifully, but without accuracy—"I dare say I 've broken down myself before now, but I should n't give way about it. I know that it was not carelessness on your part. On the contrary, you were trying too hard."

"Oh," gasped Elsie, "don't you hate me? You must, I know you must! You see I can't—I'm no good. I never was any good, and I never shall be. I'm like that!"

Miss Strickland was shocked. She disliked over-confidence,—over-confident people always do,—but this child's formidable hopelessness was worse than any over-confidence. She was behaving as if there were a flaw in the universe, and in Miss Strickland's universe there had never been a flaw. She had disliked many occurrences, but she had felt equal to them, whether she disliked them or not. She did not feel equal to what was happening now. After a long moment of silence she said:

"My dear, you must n't be silly. If you were n't some good, you would n't be here."

Elsie replied:

"But I know I'm not, and I don't want to be here. I'd rather be dead."

"That's sillier still," Miss Strickland answered doubtfully, "and it's also wrong."

"What does it matter if it's wrong or not—if you hate me?" sobbed Elsie. "Nothing matters to me except that."

Miss Strickland stared at her uncomfortably. She still did not know what action was the most sensible to take. An instinct told her what to do, but she was not used to instincts, and felt flurried by having one. Her instinct told her to take the child in her arms. She compromised with it, and kissed Elsie a little reluctantly on the check.

"I don't hate you at all, child," she said kindly. "You 're a very good, painstaking little girl."

Then Miss Strickland arrived at the nearest she was ever likely to get to a miracle.

She saw a plain little girl, made plainer by a convulsive fit of crying, turn perfectly beautiful. It was like watching a black and wind-swept country yielding to the sun. Across Elsie's face light spread—the light of a great gratitude, a preposterous faith, an overwhelming love.

Her eyes met Miss Strickland's, and held hers almost against her will.

"Then," the child said slowly, "I'm glad I broke down."

It was the truth, and Miss Strickland, with her love of truth, should have recognized it; but she had already recognized a great deal more than it was at all comfortable to recognize. She really could n't go on recognizing things which were so far from sensible, whether they were true or not.

"Well, don't let us have any more nonsense," she said briskly. "Wipe your eyes, and brush, as far as you can, the dust off your frock. You really should not have lain down on boots and shoes; it was most unsuitable. You'd better come and see Miss Bretherton. She has been asking about you on the lawn, and she's no more angry with you than I am."

"Please may I go home?" Elsie pleaded. "I'm quite happy now; only I don't want to see any one else. You see, nobody else matters."

Miss Strickland hesitated. Head mistresses always matter. Still, she had pressed the point about Elsie's playing, and it has proved a mistake. Onoria made a point of learning from her mistakes when she saw them. Perhaps it was better to waive the point. The child looked dreadful. She could make excuses for her to Miss Bretherton, and excuses are tidier and more malleable than tear-stained little girls.

"Very well," Miss Strickland said at last, "you may go home if you want to."

But there was something in Elsie's eyes that still held hers.

"If I might," whispered Elsie, bravely, "play you 'The Venetian Boat-Song' before I go."

Miss Strickland nodded. She led the way into a small practice-room, out of reach of the festivities on the lawn. Then she sat down on a hard cane chair and listened to the "Venetian Boat-Song" for perhaps the five hundredth time. It did not sound at all familiar to her.

Elsie played it as Miss Strickland had never heard it played before. For the only time in her life music was captured by Elsie's faithful, clumsy little fingers. She played it dreamily, tenderly, with ardor and grace, as Mendelssohn himself, who had the heart of a child, might have played it. There was a little silence after the last notes sounded.

"That," Elsie explained as she turned around slowly on her music-stool, "was the way I had meant to play it."

 

 

PART II

AT first Onoria Strickland undertook Elsie Andrews as a conscientious educator undertakes bad material, but as the years passed and Elsie's affection stood solidly across Onoria's pathway as immovable as granite, she began to find in Elsie strange and exotic virtues.

"That girl," she would announce, "has the mind of the fourteenth century, mature and adventurous. She will do something one day. She is not like modern girls; she has character. Not that silly thing they call temperament, thank goodness! Temperament wobbles, stings like a jelly-fish, and arrives nowhere; but good solid English character. Elsie won't set the Thames on fire, perhaps, but she has n't set out with any such theory. Mercifully, she knows her limitations as a woman. What she has set out to do she will accomplish in spite of all obstacles. I call that dignified."

Elsie knew just what Onoria thought of her, because Onoria always told her friends exactly what she thought of them even when it was nice.

After her twenty-first birthday Miss Strickland became "Onoria" to Elsie.

It was difficult for Elsie to believe that she was dignified, but she knew that she had a kind of strength. She found in herself a fund of resistance enabling her to guard her friendship with Onoria. Neither her father nor her mother liked it, Mrs. Andrews because, like many mothers, it seemed to her unnecessary that her children should form any ties outside their home; Mr. Andrews because he foresaw that this one-ideaed occupation of his daughter's heart might damage her future prospects.

Elsie disliked young people. They believed all the things Onoria said were not so, and they carried on conversations that were not solely for the sake of conversation. They seemed to wish to attract one another.

Elsie knew that the fault lay in the women, and she would have talked to the young men if they had looked at her, but they did not seem to see that she was there. Onoria explained Elsie's position to her kindly, but firmly.

"You are not a man's woman," she said to her, "and you had better make up your mind to it once and for all. There are many other things in life."

What Elsie liked best in the world was sitting in Onoria's garden and being told what to think.

Onoria had fewer and fewer objects for her affection. Prendergast had changed from being an elderly and morose pug into being very old, and resentful of all claims upon his attention except in the shape of well-chopped-up food. He liked the results of tenderness without its expression. Peter Gubbins was just as faithful, but if one has been faddy and aggravating as a young man, he will infallibly become eccentric and exasperating when youth has left him. He wrote less poetry and rather more articles, and he grew the finest sweet-peas in the neighborhood.

There was one event which might have awakened Peter to the lapse of years if it had not come on almost as gradually as his success with the sweet-peas. This was the introduction of Elsie. She had not made friends with Peter at first; but after two or three years of speechless, tepid watchfulness upon both sides, a bond had been secretly and invisibly formed between them.

They could not have told why it was secret and they hardly knew that it was a bond. They only knew that in each other's society there was an absence of insistent racket, a blissful sense of not being at their best and liveliest, and not needing to be, which took the place of active pleasure.

There were very few of these harmonious moments. Usually Onoria was there, and they met under her eyes, and with the volleyings of her wit, and the tremendous onslaught of her theories thick upon them. But there had been June evenings when Onoria had letters to write, or was playing over new sets of pieces with a view to her profession, when Elsie slipped out of the long French window to water the flowers, and found that Peter was watering his, on the other side of the garden wall.

Peter joined her on these occasions, and they hunted for slugs together with an effortless ardor rarely obtained upon their separate quests.

Their talk was full of Onoria. They quoted her most strident sayings with bursts of nervous laughter, they bulwarked their own opinions with the justice of her utterances, and sometimes with bated breath they confessed to each other the little difficulties which arose on their domestic hearths when these hearths were confronted by Onoria; for Mr. Gubbins had a housekeeper who hated Onoria and was herself a redoubtable woman, while Elsie's family sometimes stood up and raged against her intimacy with Onoria.

"I said," Elsie explained breathlessly behind the rhododendron-bushes, "if you stop me going to see Miss Strickland, I 'll tell the vicar and Miss Bretherton. You know, father thinks the world of the vicar since we 've stopped going to chapel, and no one would like to have Miss Bretherton down on them, not even mother; so they just glared. Glaring's awful, of course; still, it can't do you any real harm."

"No," Mr. Gubbins murmured, with a long sigh of regret; "it's not as if your parents cooked for you. If Mrs. Binns has been crossed,—and whenever she sees Onoria she seems to get crossed,—she pours pepper into everything I eat. And, as I 've often told you, I have a very delicate throat."

"What are you two talking about over there in the shrubbery?" shouted Onoria from the window.

Mr. Gubbins looked appealingly at Elsie. They both trembled, but Mr. Gubbins trembled most.

"Slugs," in a wavering voice Elsie called back.

Her eyes fell before the accusatory ones of Mr. Gubbins.

He was thinking how true, how painfully true, Onoria's theory was as to the prevarication of women.

Whatever the consequences might have been, he could not have told a lie to Onoria. He would not have dared.

Jealousy is one of the faults which it is hardest for human beings to confess. It is the least successful of the vices, for by its nature it implies that you find yourself less attractive than somebody else, and you are aware that in the exercise of it you become still less attractive. Fortunately, righteous indignation often looks very like it.

Miss Onoria Strickland never dreamed that she suffered from jealousy. She considered it a slave vice confined to women and exceptionally feeble men. She was taken completely by surprise when Peter Gubbins and Elsie Andrews conspired behind her back to make a fool of her. This was her instant definition of their timid attempts to form a relation wholly apart from her.

Onoria might not have been so astonished if she had been a quicker hand at reading the silences of others. But, like most great talkers, she was apt to take for granted, unless directly contradicted, that some form of agreement had taken place. She did not realize that the silence which gives consent is only one out of many others far less accommodating.

Neither Elsie nor Peter had ever openly disagreed with Onoria, but their souls had rebelled in a wordless determination rather like that which precedes the back kick of a mule. They could not, for instance, see the harm of Peter Gubbins singing, to Elsie's accompaniment, old Scotch ballads. Peter had a great fancy for Scotch ballads, no knowledge of the dialect, and a tenor voice liable to those spasmodic interludes which sometimes take place upon a telephone.

Onoria had, not without justice, decided that he ought not to sing in public.

Peter had broken himself of the habit, but he still indulged in occasional orgies, which took place while Onoria was at school. He could only pick out the air with one finger on the piano and, to his great delight, Elsie agreed to accompany him. She arranged to come early to Onoria's before school hours were over and meet Peter in Onoria's music-room. When Onoria became due, Peter hurried out of the window into the garden, and crossed by the wall into his own domain. On Onoria's arrival she found Elsie, punctual and passive, waiting for her usual rites upon the piano.

Ostriches would have known better than Peter and Elsie. When they plunge their heads into the sand to escape an enemy they do not sing Scotch dialect songs with voices like a damaged kettle. Peter's voice carried, and on one still day it reached Onoria, coming up the road. She had a faultless ear and she knew it was Peter's voice, and that it came not out of his window, which would have been a misdemeanor, but out of her own, which was a crime; and she knew that Peter could not play his own accompaniments.

She hastened to the gate, but by the time she had reached it, Peter had already vanished. He did not know what he was leaving his accomplice to face, but there is no reasonable doubt that, if he had known, he would still have left her.

Breathless and terrific, Onoria rushed into the music-room.

"What," she cried, with piercing incisiveness, "are you doing here?"

Elsie was in the act of lifting her muff to her face. It was not much of a protection, but she had seized upon it when she heard the front door bang. She felt that it was the bang of a discovered crime. It took Elsie a long time to say, "Nothing," but at last she said it, and then she looked all round the room for a way of escape, and found none.

It would be difficult to say with which of the two criminals Onoria was angrier. She had been angry with Peter Gubbins all her life for being Peter Gubbins; his character irritated and at times eluded her. Elsie she loved; probably she was angrier with Elsie.

"Please don't tell me lies," she exclaimed, with deadly patience. "I heard perfectly well what you were doing as I came up the road. I could no more mistake Peter's voice than a donkey braying. It came from my room, and you—you, Elsie, were playing his accompaniments!"

Elsie bit a piece of fur out of her muff in anguish. The situation was too large for her. Speechless and overwhelmed, she cowered under it; but something at the bottom of her heart told her it was not fair, and would not be overwhelmed.

"What do you mean by such atrocious behavior?" went on Onoria, with fluent passion, "Using my house, behind my back, to do what you know I have forbidden! How dared you do such a thing, Elsie? How can you come here now and look me in the face with that treacherous secret upon you?"

Elsie made a gesture of despair; she put the muff down.

It was a late autumn evening. A river fog had crept into the room, and everything was a little indistinct, like a scene in a nightmare; only the bitter, sharp voice of Onoria, pelting at her, was as distinct as a succession of stones flung against a wall.

"Oh," Elsie gasped, "I did n't mean—we did n't think!"

"Mean! think!" cried Onoria. "What have you ever thought or meant, either of you? How can I tell now? How can I believe you? Don't you see what you 've done? You 've undermined my confidence. How many times have you played here without my knowledge? I don't believe this is the first."

"He did like singing the Scotch ballads so," Elsie murmured defensively. "It was an accident the first time. We just tried them over; it did n't seem any harm. He had come in to dust your books for you, and I was early; so we just tried them over."

Onoria changed her ground; she felt for a moment as if it was not so firm as she had expected. The crime did not stand out well against the background of Peter's services.

"Of course," she said more mildly, "you must n't think I mind for myself. People do not as a rule care to have their houses used for other people's meetings without their consent, but I overlook all that. Has it never occurred to you what a scandal such performances produce? No doubt you are being talked about all over Ticklington at this moment. If your parents knew of it, they would very rightly prevent your coming here again. And since it is my house, I am in a sense responsible for you. I have never been placed in such an insidious position in mv life—and by you, Elsie!"

"I did n't mean any harm," sobbed Elsie. "We only played 'Over the Sea to Skye.' I don't see why people should talk about it."

"You were alone here with Peter in my absence," said Onoria, coldly; "that is what they will talk about."

It was very unfair of Onoria to say this, because she was constantly alone with Peter herself, and nobody in Little Ticklington had ever talked about it. Nobody in Little Ticklington thought any more about being alone with Peter than they would have thought of being alone with Prendergast.

"I am speaking for your own good," added Onoria, more gently and even less truthfully; for, like most people who think they are speaking for the good of others, she was merely speaking to relieve her own spiteful feelings.

The sight of Elsie's tears softened her a little, but she mistook their meaning. They were not tears of penitence, as Onoria believed; they were the tears of an outraged sense of justice.

"I don't see what particular good you think this is going to do me," Elsie observed between her sobs. Onoria opened her mouth to reply and then shut it again. It took time to produce any tangible advantage to Elsie out of the vortex of her own bad temper. Finally, however, she did produce it.

"I hope it will check you," she said, with dignity, "before you do something more compromising still. My advice to you is not to see Peter Gubbins again. I will deal with him later, and let him know what I think of him for taking advantage of a young and, I hope, innocent girl."

"I don't see where the advantage comes," persisted Elsie, who had unaccountably stopped crying, "if he is n't to sing his songs any more."

"Don't be puerile!" said Onoria, sharply. "You know perfectly well what I mean. None of your green-girl prevarications with me!"

"No, I don't," replied Elsie, with astounding obstinacy. "You 've often told me it was always women who took advantage of men, and dragged them into things, and then complained about them afterward. Well, if it is, Peter could n't have dragged me into anything, could he? And I'm not complaining."

Nobody likes to be convicted out of his own mouth, and Onoria liked it less than most people.

"Please don't make such an absurd exhibition of yourself," she said, with heightened color and reduced softness. "I have told you what I think and how I intend to act. I am always perfectly direct and straightforward. It is a pity that you cannot be the same. We will discuss this question no further. Do you wish to take your music-lesson this afternoon or do you not?"

Of course Elsie did not wish to take her music-lesson, but habit is very powerful, and the habit of surrendering to a stronger will is probably more difficult to break than any other habit. She gasped, put her muff down, and took her lesson as if it were a dose of medicine.

She even kissed Onoria good-by when she left; but if Onoria had been an adept in kisses, which she was not, she would have felt that something was wrong about Elsie's.

The scene between Peter and Onoria was far less drastic. Onoria had quieted down before she saw him, and she spoke as man to man. She pointed out to Peter that he had taken an unwarrantable liberty with her premises, and that he had acted in a compromising way with a girl very nearly thirty years younger than himself.

Peter did not tell her, as the more virile type of man whom Onoria admired might have told her, that she was a bad-minded old hen and was talking a pack of nonsense; he took what she said with extreme seriousness. He quite saw her point about her premises, and apologized. He would not enter them again unless she were there herself.

He hoped that he had not done Elsie any harm, and it had never occurred to him that any one would dream of coupling their names together. The bare idea of it was painful to him. Still, he quite saw what Onoria meant.

Onoria was quite genial, and they smoked several cigarettes together; then Peter went home. It was quite true that he meant to be careful, very careful indeed; but the person of whom he meant to be careful was Onoria.

Peter Gubbins had always taken great care of his broken heart. In a place like Little Ticklington, full of marriageable women, it was a very important asset. It played the part of a chaperon. No one could expect to marry a man whose heart was as steadily and obviously broken as Peter's.

It had never occurred to Peter to marry any one but Onoria. He had a pleasant income for a single man, reinforced by certain small checks for his articles. He would never have confessed it even to himself, but he knew he was a great deal better off as he was. There was nothing in Elsie Andrews to lead him to change this opinion.

At first he thought her a nice, quiet little girl; then, when she shot up into long skirts, and grew half a head taller than Onoria, he thought of her as a sensible young woman. She made no effort to attract Peter, and Peter, like many not very attractive men, was very suspicious of efforts made to attract him.

He did not often grasp new subjects, but when he did, his mind played upon them with the magnifying effect of a microscope. It excited him to be told that he had compromised Elsie; he had never compromised any one before, and he was not quite sure what it involved.

Peter wished to continue to meet Elsie, but he did not wish to be morally bound. He gave the matter a great deal of quiet study and reflection, but he did nothing to precipitate the event of seeing Elsie again. He felt that if they met by chance, it would rob their meeting of any dangerous intensity that it would otherwise have.

The meeting took place at the post-office precisely a week later. Elsie was standing with her back to Peter, reading the notice of an oratorio that was to be performed at a neighboring cathedral town. Peter bought three ha'penny-stamps and a packet of post-cards before anything striking happened. Then Elsie, turning, gasped:

"O Mr. Gubbins!"

Peter kept his head, and paid for the post-cards before he answered her.

"Oh, it's you, Elsie, is it?" he remarked guardedly, having counted his change. "Have you ever heard 'The Messiah'?"

Elsie said she had n't. She did n't know whether to go out of the post-office into the street, where anything at all might happen, or to remain in the secure shelter of the post-office, where it would be more difficult to get away if anything did happen. Eventually they got into the street.

"It must be splendid," said Elsie, referring to "The Messiah." "Only, I believe Onoria said it was n't; so of course it can't be. Have you ever heard it?"

"Oh, time and time again," said Mr. Gubbins, lightly. "It is one of my favorite entertainments. As a young man I went regularly to hear it every Christmas eve at the Albert Hall. I only gave it up after an attack of tonsilitis I had one winter. I may have told you about it? I date all my throat trouble from then."

He had told Elsie about it several times, but as she merely murmured sympathetically, he told her about it again. After he had finished, he came back to "The Messiah."

"How would you like to go and hear it at the cathedral?" he inquired.

"Like it!" exclaimed Elsie. "Oh, frightfully; but, you see, mother and father hate music except bands on the beach, and Onoria says local renderings of oratorios should be put down by law."

"Well," said Mr. Gubbins, with unflinching courage, "opinions differ about oratories, of course. How would it be if I took you myself? I dare say we could arrange something about it."

Elsie looked at him as if he had suggested ah expedition to central Africa. It was a most inspiriting look. Mr. Gubbins found it so; a lukewarm desire to do something desperate took possession of him. But he meant to be very careful about it. He stage-managed this plunge into the forbidden land with vast precaution. As human plans go, it was perfect; there was nothing unarranged for except Fate, Mr. and Mrs. Andrews were to be told part of the truth. Elsie was to break to them that she was going to hear "The Messiah" at Mellingham, Mr. Gubbins did not suggest a downright lie to Elsie, but when he said, "I dare say they 'll suppose it means with Onoria," he paved the way for a leakage in accuracy of which Elsie took full advantage. Onoria was not to be told anything at all.

Elsie was to leave the station of Little Ticklington by a one o'clock train, and Mr. Gubbins by a one-thirty, and the journey took half an hour.

Elsie was to wait for him in a baker's shop opposite the cathedral. They were to come back in the same train, but in different compartments.

Short of an unfavorable interposition on the part of Providence, they were safe; but those who rely upon Providence to remain inactive in their favor should not tempt it by displaying any activity of their own. Miss Bretherton, without consulting Onoria beforehand, arranged for her to take six pupils to "The Messiah," whether she liked it or not.

Forty girls, in white dresses with blue sashes, upon one side, and forty men, in a variety of semi-evening clothes, upon the other, had scarcely sung through the first chorus before Elsie and Peter became aware of Onoria's eyes.

They knew they were Onoria's eyes, although she was sitting at some distance to the right of them, much as those who looked upon the Medusa's head must have been aware that it was her head before they turned into stone. No fate so happy awaited Peter and Elsie: if they had been turned into stone, they could have stared back. As it was, they twitched and trembled under Onoria's ruthless gaze, aware, with a cowering intensity, of their flesh and blood.

Peter sank from terror to terror, till from the lowest depth of cowardice, in which he contemplated leaving Elsie to her fate, he rose to a state of rage. He became as savage and determined as a very timid animal at bay. He would not be caught—that was what it came to. He set his lips firmly together. Onoria or no Onoria, he would simply not be caught. Of course there was Elsie; Elsie wept.

"Stop crying!" he hissed at Elsie with a snarl.

Elsie swallowed a sob abruptly and retreated into a large pocket handkerchief. The people sitting next to her thought she had a sensitive musical temperament and admired her for it. They did not know what Peter had, but they did not admire him nearly so much.

The six girls, followed by Onoria with the face of an awakened Fury, advanced down the aisle.

"We must get out of this!" said Peter, hurriedly.

He grasped Elsie firmly by the arm and dragged her after him.

Onoria saw the action, and said, "Elsie," out loud in the cathedral over the six girls' heads. Several people turned round. Elsie stiffened into instant obedience, but Peter's clutch of manly terror was greater than Elsie's power of womanly resistance. He had her out of the cathedral and half-way to the railway station before she could turn round. Onoria could not run after them. She had her dignity to preserve and the six girls to return intact.

Peter and Elsie had nothing to think of but their personal safety. They preserved this by the skin of their teeth, and by getting without tickets into a train destined for London.

They sat staring wild-eyed at each other, incapable of further speech, even if they had dared to give utterance to what was in their hearts in the presence of a clergyman, a market-gardener, and two elderly ladies who looked at them as if they thought that people in such a hurry must have done something wrong. When Elsie had got her breath again, she began to cry. Peter stared desperately out of the window. He was trying to make up his mind to the idea of never going back to his home, and he was remembering Samson and the sweet-peas.

Every one in the railway carriage was sorry for Elsie. No one was sorry for Mr. Gubbins. Indeed, the clergyman was beginning to be highly suspicious of him. He was not at all sure that he was not, for the first time in his well-chosen career, confronted by a social evil.

Mr. Gubbins looked ferocious; Elsie sobbed on. The clergyman leaned forward and said tentatively, as it was surely his duty to do:

"I am afraid this young lady is somewhat distressed?"

Peter Gubbins rose to the occasion; a flash of inspiration shot through him.

"She's just had a tooth out," he explained with unswerving duplicity.

Elsie stopped crying; she could not believe that Peter Gubbins had told a lie like that at a moment's notice. With the natural depravity of women, she had never admired him so much before. She gave the clergyman a watery smile of affirmation.

Miss Strickland had great self-control, and she needed it. When her amazed eyes rested upon Elsie and Peter Gubbins, she could hardly believe them. Disobedience and deceit united for purposes of pleasure had never so flaunted themselves before her in the whole course of her career. For a week she had believed Elsie and Peter to be crushed.

For a moment she was almost too astonished to be angry. But her surprise was swiftly reinforced by anger. She was in a consecrated building, and the oratorio had begun, so she remained perfectly still, although her figure became charged like an electric battery. All the six pupils of Miss Bretherton received small invigorating shocks from it.

They knew something was wrong and not with them. After all, "The Messiah" was not going to be such a frightful bore as they had feared. They followed the direction of Miss Strickland's eyes and arrived at Elsie and Peter. The opening chorus might have been a salute to adventurers, for all the pupils heard of it. Solemnly and gloatingly they gazed at the desperate couple. Peter and Elsie felt all these hostile eyes converging upon them, and they also heard nothing of the opening chorus.

At the close, the girls knelt for a respectful and non-committal moment in the direction of the altar, and then proceeded to bear down upon the delinquents through the easy-going crowd that blocked the main aisle of the cathedral, ripe for slaughter.

They thrilled with ecstasy at the resonant and piercing voice of Miss Strickland when she said aloud in the sacred building, "Elsie!" In another moment they would have been upon the victims had not a remorseless family of nine interfered between them and their prey. Breathless, they hacked their way to the door, only to see Elsie and Peter arm in arm disappearing round a corner. Then Miss Strickland reined them in, saying with perfect self-control and extreme unfairness:

"I don't know what you girls are hurrying for. There is plenty of time to catch the train. Please walk at your usual pace and in your usual order."

Miss Strickland had only once said, "Elsie." When this command failed, her lips and her heart had simultaneously closed.

Onoria pulled herself together when she reached the street. Her duty was to her pupils, and she did it.

Methodically, though with a heart on fire, she arranged their return tickets and marshaled them into the train. If Elsie and Peter had been at the station, Onoria would have seen them, but she would not have noticed them. She put her charges into a third-class carriage marked "Ladies only," took a corner seat by the window, and proceeded to bone "The Messiah" for the delectation of her pupils. She had no great passion for Handel at the best of times, but on this occasion she was vitriolic.

The girls heard her with awe. Somebody was catching it, even if they were great and dead. They would have preferred to see Elsie and Peter catching it, because they were alive and lived at Little Ticklington, but they could not have everything.

Miss Strickland saw them safely back to their respective homes, and then returned to her own. Samson was at her door. He was a gloomy and outraged cat, wet by the autumn mist and deprived of his invariable tea, with Mr. Gubbins's share of cream, and a fire-warmed knee to rest up against afterward. Miss Strickland subdued a temptation to hit him sharply on the head with her umbrella.

It was quite open to her to hit him and it would serve Peter right; but Miss Strickland was a just woman. She reminded herself that the soul that sinneth it shall die. She opened the door, and Samson flew past her and consumed loudly and without hesitation Prendergast's neglected dinner. Prendergast had not wanted his dinner, and he did not want it now, but still less did he wish to see a low cat indulging itself with his sacred rites. There had always been a state of armed neutrality between the two animals. Neither was strong enough wholly to destroy the other, so they wisely avoided combat; but they were not friends.

Prendergast growled feebly from his basket, and gazed at his mistress, expecting her instant and effectual intervention; hut Miss Strickland sank down on a chair beside him with all her things on and her hands in her lap.

Samson finished the last mouthful of Prendergast's meal, wiped his whiskers ostentatiously in front of the basket, and disappeared lightly through a back window. Miss Strickland did not notice the defection of Samson; she did not for a long while notice anything. There was an inward drama in her heart that held her whole attention. Something implored her to let her pride go and keep her friends. It told her that she was getting old and had few earthly ties, that Elsie was dearer to her than she knew, that even Peter was a treasured habit left over from the richer years, and that, if she used her anger too ruthlessly against them, she would be condemning herself to perpetual loneliness.

Onoria really wanted Elsie to be happy. She did n't want her to grow up into a dull, lonely old woman with a pet animal; but it was hard to give her up to Peter.

If Peter had only been a man. It was n't, Onoria assured herself, that she minded about her old relation to Peter. After all, she never had valued it; still he was the only man it would have been any use in Onoria's minding.

She despised Peter, and the worst of it was that Elsie, whom she loved, cared more for this Peter that Onoria despised than she did for Onoria's opinion of him. That was the sting of stings.

Miss Strickland looked facts in the face. If she gave in, Elsie and Peter would come back to her. There would be no bitterness and no reproaches. But there would be one difference, one fatal difference to Onoria's pride: both would know that they had got the better of her. If they wanted something else that Onoria disapproved of their having, they would combine to get it. That was what she winced at.

Love ignored Peter Gubbins and how necessary it was to give him a lesson, it made specious excuses for Elsie's flagrant treachery. It said: "She deceived you only because she did n't want to hurt you. She disobeyed you only to be happy, and after all, that is what you want, is n't it? You want Elsie to be happy?"

Miss Strickland wavered under the pressure of love; but she only wavered. Righteousness and self-respect rose up afresh in her—self-respect at the touch of which love always dwindles out of sight, and righteousness, which so often consists in carrying out our own will in an imagined connection with the Deity.

"I shall do right, whatever it costs me," Onoria said to herself at last, and she did not know that she might as well have said, "I shall do what I like, whatever it costs anybody else." It would have meant precisely the same thing.

It was at this point in her meditations that Prendergast moved. He wanted attention and at last he received it. Miss Strickland made up the fire, and brought him a little warm milk with a dash of brandy in it. Prendergast responded to the stimulant and began to wander restlessly about the room. He could not make up his mind what he wanted. He moved about vaguely and stiffly as one who is practising the art of walking. His desires broke in him, and Miss Strickland, on the ground beside him, with a divine patience gratified in turn and without hurry each of his passing fancies.

No one who knew Onoria Strickland as she was to the world, to her pupils, or even to her friends could have believed in this tender, ministering Onoria, carrying out with anxious solicitude the whims of an old dog.

She did not leave Prendergast till he had finally decided on a return to his basket. She sat beside him and watched until his feeble snores told her that he was at rest. Then she groped her way to the mantelpiece for matches, and tidied herself for going out once more. She had decided to make an appeal to Elsie's parents.

Miss Strickland did not know the Andrews very well. She often said that they were like glass to her and that she could read them like a book; but their intercourse had been limited. Mrs. Andrews came to tea with Miss Strickland only once a year and Miss Strickland returned her call within a fortnight. She had met Mr. Andrews twice, and they had had on both occasions acrimonious disputes on politics.

Mr. and Mrs. Andrews were eating their supper when Miss Strickland was announced. They were not surprised that Elsie was late, as neither of them knew how long oratorios lasted; but they were frightened when they saw that Miss Strickland was alone.

Mrs. Andrews exclaimed at once:

"Where's Elsie? Has she been run over?" and Mr. Andrews said:

"Nonsense, Mother! Of course not. Where is the child, Miss Strickland?"

"I don't know," said Onoria, firmly. She took an arm-chair and faced the questioning parents with her usual deliberate self-assurance. "That is what I came to ask you."

"But surely—" Mrs. Andrews began, "surely you took Elsie to the oratorio? She said, did n't she, she was going this afternoon over to Mellingham?"

"I was," said Miss Strickland, "at the oratorio in Mellingham, and so was Elsie, but she was not with me."

"Well, I never!" said Mr. Andrews. "Fancy her going off like that all by herself! It's certainly time she was back. Girls are so independent nowadays."

"She was not alone," Miss Strickland said significantly.

Mr. Andrews leaned forward:

"Who was she with?" he asked truculently.

"She was with Peter Gubbins," said Miss Strickland, leaning back in her chair.

If she had intended to create a sensation, she had succeeded beyond her wildest dreams; but the incredible part of it was the type of sensation she had created. She had expected shame, indignation, and alarm. Mr. and Mrs. Andrews were quite obviously pleased.

They did not wish to show their satisfaction too plainly, but the tone in which Elsie's mother said, "Well, I never!" was one of flattered maternal pride; and Mr. Andrews, when he had drawn a long breath, exclaimed, "I never would have thought it!" in much the way in which he would have greeted a smart trick of the trade.

"You can never tell with the quiet kind," Mrs. Andrews continued reminiscently. "I was like that myself as a girl. I never went out of my way to attract anybody, and as to mentioning it at home—well, I'd have been ashamed. I just let things take their course, as it were, and here I am. Dear me!"

"Should n't you say Peter Gubbins was a warm man?" inquired Mr. Andrews, ignoring this revelation of his wife's tactics. "I 've always understood he had a tidy little sum put by."

"I could n't posibly tell you," said Miss Strickland, who during this outburst of vulgarity had recovered her secret poise.

"To tell the truth, the idea of Elsie's having arrived at any notion of matrimony had not occurred to me. I merely thought it was unfortunate that unchaperoned she should appear in public with a man who is old enough to be her father, but who is not her father."

"Oh, well, you know," said Mr. Andrews, "young people will be young people, won't they, Mother? And we all know Peter Gubbins about here. Peter Gubbins is as safe as the Bank of England. I don't call fifty old for a man."

"Appearances," said Miss Strickland coldly, "are never safe. I had not intended to mention it, but I see I had better put you in command of all the facts. Peter Gubbins has been in the habit of meeting Elsie at my house, in my absence, without my knowledge or consent."

Mr. and Mrs. Andrews looked at each other. Mr. Andrews whistled.

"Dear! dear!" said Mr. Andrews, after an awkward pause. "I'm sure we 're very sorry, Miss Strickland. Elsie ought n't to have done it, I allow; but if you won't mind my saying so, you should have thought of it before. What I mean to say is—it's a little late in the day, is n't it, for you to mind what Peter Gubbins does?"

"It's only natural," interposed Mrs. Andrews, "for him to take to a young girl like Elsie. We each have our turn, you know, Miss Strickland, and then we have to stand aside and let the young ones have theirs. It's hard lines, I know, but there it is—"

"You quite misunderstand me," said Onoria, who had turned a brick-red under this last onslaught of a parent's imagination. "What Peter Gubbins does or what he fancies is, and always has been, a matter of perfect indifference to me. In this case my sole concern has been Elsie and the compromising position to which such clandestine meetings give rise."

It was a good sentence, with a swing that took the wind out of Mr. Andrews' sails. Still, Miss Strickland would have preferred to fling the vulgar truth upon the table. She wanted to say:

"My dear good people, I 've refused Peter Gubbins dozens of times, and Elsie is merely taking my leavings, if she does take them; but that seems to me no good reason for carrying on behind my back."

But education takes from us our most effective weapons. It would have been ill bred to make this statement, and Miss Strickland, though she never minded being rude, did not wish to appear ill bred; and despite the excellence of her sentence, she knew that the Andrews still believed that Elsie had cut her out.

"Since you are not alarmed at Elsie's having failed to return at the termination of the oratorio," she said, rising to her feet, "or at the fact that she has apparently vanished into space with Peter Gubbins at eight o'clock at night, there is nothing further to be said. I can only congratulate you on the strength of your nerves."

"It is a little late," Mrs. Andrews admitted; "still—"

There was a sound at the garden gate; a moment later a loud knock heralded the telegraph boy.

Mr. Andrews put on his glasses and read out loud: "Missed train after oratorio. Too late to return. Staying with Aunt Anne. Elsie."

"Her Aunt Anne," explained Mr. Andrews, with restored satisfaction, "is a clergyman's widow who lives at Clapham. Elsie won't come to any harm staying with her Aunt Anne, Peter Gubbins or no Peter Gubbins."

"Probably he's come home," said Mrs. Andrews, comfortably. "He never was much of a gadabout. I'm sure we 're just as grateful to you, Miss Strickland, for coming in to tell us what you knew. You could n't have been kinder if you'd been a parent yourself."

"Thank God, I'm not!" Miss Strickland energetically and rather shockingly declared, though in a sense it would have been more shocking had she wished to be one. "If I were, I should hardly take my responsibilities as lightly as you do."

"I shall write to my sister to-morrow," said Mr. Andrews, with dignity, "and my wife will write to Elsie."

Miss Strickland walked to the door; her last hope had flickered out with the mention of Aunt Anne at Clapham. A situation occupied by Aunt Anne was impregnable. Onoria knew she had been outwitted by the ponderous stupidity of parents.

It was a cold foggy evening, the streets of Little Ticklington were badly lighted and empty. It seemed a long way home. A curious, stifling sense of dread overtook Onoria. She told herself sharply that when a thing has already happened it is silly to be afraid of its happening again. Nevertheless, she hurried.

Bridget had lit the fire in the hall, and the fire in the drawing-room burned brightly. Prendergast lay a little on one side in his basket.

He was not snoring, as he usually was. Miss Strickland leaned over him, anxiously. He did not open his eyes or turn his head to look at her, and then she saw that he never would again. He had made up his mind what he wanted.

A wild impulse to rush across and tell Peter Gubbins shook Miss Strickland. Nobody else loved Prendergast, but Peter had loved him. He had loved him nearly as much as he loved Samson. Miss Strickland looked down with quivering lips at the obese form of the dead pug. He was all she had in the world, and he had taken this opportunity to slip out of it.

Miss Strickland was a fighter. She was a very fine fighter, and up to this moment no wave of disaster had ever been beyond her power to surmount; but you cannot fight the memory of a dead dog.

Prendergast overwhelmed Miss Strickland completely. She sank on the floor beside his basket, sobbing as if her heart, which was already broken, could break again.

"They might have left me this!" she said between her sobs. She spoke as if Elsie and Peter between them had killed Prendergast, although she knew that this was nonsense.

Peter Gubbins had the type of mind which swiftly and invariably sees danger in the most unlikely places. He apprehended it from every wayside flower and tree. Nothing was too trivial or too transitory for Peter to snatch from it in passing a whiff of disaster. And yet the mere sound of Onoria's voice had driven him frantically, helter-skelter, toward the abyss of matrimony.

He raced from the cathedral to the station as a man flees from a burning building, his one idea being not to be caught by Onoria. Even if he had envisaged Onoria's face at one end of the race and matrimony at the other, it is probable that he would have continued running in the direction of matrimony. The true coward can see only one danger at a time, and falls light-heartedly into any other which lies in the opposite direction. It says a great deal for Peter Gubbins's heart that even in that awful moment of panic he dragged Elsie after him.

It was not till they were safe in the train that he began to wonder how on earth he was going to get rid of her. The chief obstacle to murder has always been the disposal of the body, and the problem of rescues is very similar to it. Peter wished with a burning longing that he could deposit Elsie in the cloak-room at Paddington Station, even if it involved his paying twopence a day for her forever.

After the tooth episode, it was wonderful how Elsie cheered up. She had found in Mr. Gubbins a prop and stay, and that was all she wanted. A flower grows without the support of a stick, but its carriage depends on being tied to it.

Elsie held her head up, and her mind, which was always practical, turned to Aunt Anne at Clapham.

They had a late tea in the station and sent off Elsie's telegram; then they took a taxi to Clapham. They could have gone as conveniently and more cheaply by train, but a taxi appealed to them both as more bucaneerish.

Peter enjoyed feeling bucaneerish until they reached the common; then he began to tremble before the idea of explaining things to Aunt Anne. He knew that he had done right, but he was aware that flight and guilt are to many people synonymous, and few men like to explain that they found it safer to run away.

Elsie, with incredible finesse, relieved him of this difficulty. She said she thought it would be better if he left her at the door and came back next day.

"You 'll have time then," she explained, "to think things over, and I know authors and people think of their plots better alone. Whatever you decide is sure to be wonderful, and Aunt Anne will be more likely to listen to me if you 're not there."

Peter gave a sigh of relief.

"Yes—yes," he agreed, "perhaps the explanation had better come from you direct. I know from personal experience that the way to tackle a difficult situation is easier to me if I am left alone face to face with it, as it were. Perhaps this is merely because I am a man. Onoria would say so; but, roughly speaking, I should say that women have the same gift."

"I don't know if it's a gift," said Elsie, modestly; "but I can't say anything if other people are there, and I can't say much if they are n't. But I 'll do what I can."

Aunt Aime required a good many explanations. She had never received a niece before at seven o'clock in the evening without a tooth-brush. She followed every explanation given by Elsie with:

"Still, I can't quite see, dear, how you have arrived without your night things. I am very glad to see you, of course, but it all sounds so precipitate."

It was on the edge of this precipice that Elsie fell asleep. She wisely kept Mr. Gubbins for breakfast. She then confessed to her Aunt Anne that she had not only run away from the oratorio because Miss Strickland did not like oratorios, but because Mr. Gubbins was with her, and Miss Strickland would have liked his presence even less than an oratorio.

Aunt Anne laid down her knife and fork and gazed at Elsie. The mystery was solved. It had been a mystery; it was now simply a crime. Aunt Anne had not understood before why Miss Strickland should object to certain parts of the Bible set to music. She herself was doubtful of opera, even if it had not been expensive; but sacred music was surely both educational and devout and not even very interesting. It was unreasonable for a high-school teacher to object to such a performance, but a young man!

Her gaze was awful, and Elsie shuddered under it, and, swallowing her tea hurriedly, choked.

When she had stopped choking. Aunt Anne said portentuously: "Is Mr. Gubbins a young man, Elsie?"

Elsie said that that depended on what you meant by young; she had known him for years and years, and he had gray hair and wore spectacles.

"Spectacles," said Aunt Anne, solemnly, "do not prevent youth, though they may disguise it. Gray hair is nothing. Am I to gather that there is some understanding between you and this—this Mr. Gubbins, Elsie, perhaps unknown to your dear parents?"

Elsie wriggled and twisted.

"They would n't mind him," she murmured forlornly; "at least I don't think so. Of course we understand each other in a way. I play his accompaniments."

"Elsie, you are hedging!" exclaimed Aunt Anne, majestically. "I must see this young man for myself."

Elsie was not really hedging. It she had seen a hedge, she would most certainly have taken shelter under it; but she was not aware of the exact danger her aunt supposed her to be avoiding.

The idea of marriage conveyed nothing personal to Elsie. Marriage was merely something that happened to other people, with a cake. She helped herself to marmalade, and hoped that Peter Gubbins would blow over.

Her aunt pursed up her lips and said, "This is dreadful"; but as Elsie refused to fall into the trap of asking what was dreadful, her aunt could not follow it up in any way except by telling Mary, the parlormaid, to show Mr, Gubbins, when he arrived, into her dead husband's study.

The study of a dead clergyman is not usually an invigorating spot. Aunt Anne was a massive lady, and she sat between Peter and the door. All the windows were closed as if on purpose. Even if Peter had had the courage to try to escape, it would have been very difficult. You cannot get out of dead people's rooms briskly without appearing heartless; besides, he had not the courage.

Peter was not as surprised at Aunt Anne's attitude as Elsie would have been, but he was more frightened. He saw in Aunt Anne's eye that matrimony had fallen upon him like a bolt from the blue.

One cannot put bolts back into the blue when they have fallen, and one could not dislodge the idea of matrimony from Aunt Anne's mind when once it had taken root there. If young people would go to oratorios together, they ought to be married. She saw that quite plainly, even without the lawless journey at the other end, which made the prospect, as she explained to Peter, "simply compulsory."

"You see," she explained, "Elsie arrived here literally without a tooth-brush. Need I say more?"

Peter assured her that there really was no need. It contained the case against them in a nutshell.

On the whole, he was not averse into being frightened into marriage with Elsie. One or two things had to be made perfectly plain before he would consent to it. One was that they should not go back to Little Ticklington on any account, and the other that the marriage should take place as quietly as possible without wedding guests. They might have relatives, but not friends. It was all terribly uncertain and disintegrating, but it was not as terrible as having to face Onoria.

Peter proposed to Elsie quite easily. He simply said:

"On the whole, I think the best way out for both of us is to be married. For a long time I have been feeling Little Ticklington too restricted for me mentally. One needs to be nearer the great pulse of life. Not too near, of course. I thought somewhere in the suburbs—Chiswick, for instance. There are some nice little houses in that direction, or Turnham Green. I could cultivate sweet-peas there, and yet attend literary causeries in London. Of course it's a great upheaval for both of us, especially at my age; but looking at it all round, it appears to me the wisest course to take. What do you feel about it?"

Elsie nodded. She was n't looking at it all round. She was seeing that it involved her not having to meet Onoria just yet. She said yes; she thought it was the best plan, if Peter did n't mind.

Peter said:

"You must take the rough with the smooth." Of course he had not contemplated such a step for many years, but he thought that if they were very careful and took things quietly they might be able to manage.

He understood from Aunt Anne that one wrote to the bishop's chaplain for a license, and did not have to see the bishop. The conversation came to an abrupt pause. Their eyes met guiltily, and they looked away from each other.

What were they going to do about Onoria? Peter hummed, and Elsie twiddled her fingers. Onoria never allowed these mitigations of self-control to take place. It was a great relief to them. They decided, in silence, to do nothing. It was as if they had been married already.

Peter said he had one or two things to do, and left her. Aunt Anne came in and wept on Elsie's neck and they decided to go out and do a little shopping.

Everything went quite smoothly. Elsie's parents came up to town, and were very pleased when they discovered that Peter had six hundred a year in trust funds, without counting what he made by his articles. They privately thought that marriage from Clapham was absurd, but Peter was unexpectedly firm upon the subject. He quite simply asserted that at Little Ticklington no such marriage would ever take place. He would marry Elsie at Clapham or he would not marry Elsie at all.

Mrs. Binns, Peter's former housekeeper, brought Samson up to town in a basket. Samson would not speak to Peter for several days, but he ate heartily.

It was the night before the wedding that Peter and Elsie heard of the death of Prendergast. Mrs. Binns had bought Peter a china dog as a wedding present, and this had put it into her head. Elsie and Peter concealed their emotion until they were alone; then they gazed at each other in sympathetic anguish. They could no longer keep silence about Onoria.

"Oh," said Elsie, "if only we could give Onoria another pug. Perhaps she would see then that we are n't really doing anything to upset her; and besides she would n't mind so much if she had something—you know what I mean—something of her own to fall back upon?"

"I was thinking the same thing myself," agreed Peter. "Between you and me, Onoria never had quite the subtlety for cats. Samson would never look at her, but dogs she knew through and through. I think she would appreciate our getting her a dog. It might heal any little breach that our—our coming together may have appeared to cause."

They bought a pug puppy directly after the marriage, on the way to Chiswick.

It was an expensive animal, and it relieved their feelings very much. Onoria would have returned it to them had she not discovered, on opening the basket, that with their usual inefficiency they had sent the poor little creature to her in a most deplorable condition.

First it had to be fed, and then a carbolic bath was more than indicated, and after Onoria had spent several hours over the puppy, she began to feel that it would be cruelty to send it back. It was obvious that neither of the Gubbins could take proper care of a dog.

Onoria never altogether lost touch with Peter and Elsie. She told them what she thought of them when she acknowledged the pug; but letters do not carry sound. They became used to the idea of what Onoria thought of them; it seemed less significant at Chiswick.

Onoria spent a night with them every now and then, and once a year they visited her for a week-end at Little Ticklington. Of course it was not the same thing. Onoria was just the same, and the Gubbins were not really very different; but they were more critical of Onoria. They did not stand up to her before her face, but they stood up to her behind her back quite easily. When Onoria got the better of them in argument, as she invariably did, they would wait until she was out of ear-shot. Then they would smile and say to each other with the secret consciousness of superior achievement:

"It stands to reason that an unmarried woman like Onoria can't understand things as we do. She has n't had the experience."

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