XVI
A LITTLE later in the day Uncle Si came into the back kitchen where June was at work. It seemed that he had an announcement to make.
“Niece, there’s a piece of news for you. I’ve decided to take Mrs. Runciman back.”
June saw no reason why Mrs. Runciman should not be taken back. Indeed, she would welcome the return of the charwoman. It would certainly reduce the burden of her own labours which was by no means light.
“You and I are not going to hit it off, I can see that. Already there’s been too much of your interference. Next thing you’ll upset that boy. And I wouldn’t have that happen—not for a thousand pounds. So I think the best thing I can do is to take Mrs. Runciman back, and get her to find you a job.”
“For me!” said June slowly. “Mrs. Runciman find a job for me!”
“If she comes you’ll have to go. I can’t afford to keep a couple o’ women eating their heads off. The times don’t run to it.”
“What sort of a job do you expect a charwoman to find for me?” June asked, biting her lip.
“She may know of somebody who wants a domestic help. As far as I can see, you are not fitted for anything else.”
That was true enough, as June felt with a sharp pang. She was a girl without any sort of training except in the tedium of housework. No other career was open to her and she was going to be turned adrift. There came a hot flame to her cheeks, a sting of quick tears to her eyes. She was a proud and ambitious girl; never had she felt so keenly humiliated.
“If you stay here,” said Uncle Si, “you’re sure to upset that boy. And, as I say, rather than that should happen I’d pay a thousand pounds to a hospital.”
June didn’t reply. But in a surge of feeling she went up to her attic, and with rage in her heart flung herself full length on the bed.
The blow was fully expected, yet that hardly made the weight of it less. Soon or late this miser was bound to turn her out of doors; yet coming at such a time “the sack” was in the nature of a calamity.
Well, she must face it! Domestic service was the only thing to which she could turn her hand, and that, she foresaw, was likely to prove a form of slavery. A future, hard, confined and miserable, lay in front of her.
Bitterly she regretted now that she had not been able to fit herself for some other way of life. She had had a reasonably good education, as far as it went, in her native town of Blackhampton, where her father at one time had been in a moderately good position. But he had died when she was fourteen. And her mother, with health completely broken several years before her death had been left so badly off that June, perforce, had to give up all thoughts of a wider field. Stifling vague ambitions, she had bravely submitted to the yoke but, in spite of a sense of duty honestly, even nobly done, the sequel was a grim distaste of household drudgery. And this had not been made less by a month under the roof of S. Gedge Antiques.
With a gnawing sense of misery that was like a toothache, June slid off the bed and looked at herself in the cracked mirror which adorned the crazy dressing-table. Her only assets were comprised in her personal appearance. Instinctively she took stock of them. Alas, as she beheld them now, they were pretty much a “washout.”
First to strike her was the tell-tale redness of her eyelids, and that disgusted her to begin with. But, apart from that, she felt in her own mind that her personality was not really attractive. Her education was small, her life had been restricted and narrow; and now there seemed no way out.
Honestly she was not pretty, she was not clever, and she knew next to nothing of the world. Even at Blackhampton, where the supply of smart girls was strictly limited, she had never passed for anything out of the common. She had felt sometimes that her nature was too serious. In a girl a serious nature was a handicap, she had once heard Mr. Boultby, the druggist at the corner of Curzon Street, remark. One “asset,” however, she certainly had. The mop of golden-brown hair had always been her stand-by, and Mr. Boultby, that man of the world, had paid her compliments upon it. An artist would revel in it, he had said. Certainly there was a lot of it, and the colour having aroused comment even in her early days at the High School among her form-mates, it was no doubt rather striking. She was also inclined to be tall and long in the leg, she knew that her shoulders and chest were good, she prided herself upon the neatness of her ankles, yet at the back of her shrewd mind lurked the fear that the general effect must be plainness, not beauty. She had heard Mr. Boultby, always a friend, describe her as “unusual,” but she had felt that it was his polite way of saying she was not so good-looking as she might be.
No, wherever her fortune might lie, it was not in her face. Once or twice, in her romantic Blackhampton phases, which at best were very brief and few, she had thought of the stage. But one month of London had convinced her that it was not her line. Considering her inexperience of life her fund of horse sense was rather remarkable. She was a great believer in the doctrine of “looking facts in the face.” And the fact she had to meet now was that she was not in any way pretty or talented. Unless you were one or the other, and London teemed with girls who were both, the doors of the theatre were locked and barred.
Back on the edge of the bed, she began to consider the question of learning shorthand and typing, so that she might become a clerk in an office. But her means were so scant that the plan was hardly feasible. Really it seemed that no career was open to her, other than the one she loathed. And then the thought of William came. At once, by a strange magic, it eased the pressure. Heart, brain and will were merged in an immediate task; she must stand between this child of nature and the avarice of his master.
The sudden thought of William brought courage, tenacity, fighting power. She knew that at this moment he was the other side the wall. An impelling need urged her to go to him. Forgetful of red and swollen lids she got up at once and went and knocked on the studio door.
A familiar voice said, “Come in!”
William, as usual in that room, was pottering about amid oils, canvasses and varnish. He was in shirt sleeves, he wore a large apron, his shock of fair hair, which gave him the look of a poet, was rumpled, there was a smudge on his cheek, but the absorption of his eyes, their look of intensity, half filled her with awe.
She had really come to tell him that she was going to be sent away. But as soon as she found herself in his presence she was overcome by sheer pride. From the first this young man had treated her with a deference which implied that she was of a clay superior to his own. His bearing towards her always stressed the fact that she was the niece of his good master, and that he was a servant humbly grateful for his fifteen shillings a week.
At first this attitude had fed her vanity in a subtle way. But now, in present circumstances, it seemed almost to enrage her. It was quite absurd that a man of such distinguished talent should place her upon a pedestal. The truth of the matter was she was unfit to lace his shoes, and it was amazing that he did not know it.
Upon her entrance William had immediately risen from his stool, and had bowed slightly over the pot of varnish he held in his hand, with a half-humorous air of homage, as some famous chemist might have done when disturbed by a great lady in the midst of his wonderful researches. “I know it’s not me you have come to see,” his gentle manner seemed to say; “it is this marvellous thing on the easel at my elbow.”
All the same it was William she had come to see. She had come to him for countenance and sympathy. And it did not help her at all that she should be treated with a shy reserve. She craved to be told that she had come to mean something to him; she craved to be told that his fastidious concern for her hands, and the regard he had for a beauty in which she herself did not believe was more than mere chivalry towards women in general. Alas, in spite of the eager friendliness of her reception this was not apparent. In the eyes of William she was just the master’s niece, and the incident of the pumice stone was without significance, beyond the fact that he was no more than the least of her servants.
It was very exasperating.
“But if you are wise,” said a voice within, “you will not let this Gaby know that you think so.”