AS it happened, however, there were several people much occupied about Mrs. Brown on the morning after that wonderful chase with all its consequences. Mab, under one pretext or another, had spent most of the previous day in the school. She had heard the bigger girls say their lessons; she had hovered about the classes taught by the schoolmistress; she had watched over the course of instruction in general with anxious eyes. Was there any tampering with the morals of the girls of Watcham? Were the little ones taught their hymns and collects? Were the big ones kept up to their catechism now that the time for their confirmation began to approach? Mab had never hitherto felt herself one of the clergy of the parish, as the Rector’s niece might have been permitted to do. But now she was torn with those sensations which we may suppose to be felt by a priest who has received under the seal of confession a new light upon the proceedings and motives of an important official. This is a drawback of the priestly office which has rarely struck the general observer. To know that a man who is largely influential in life, who has important issues on hand, is using his powers for evil and not for good, and yet to be powerless to do anything, to prevent anything, to give any warning on the subject! Many a good priest no doubt has been bowed down under this unthought-of weight. And so was Mab, whose young shoulders were quite unfit for the part. Should she tell it all to Lady William, this knowledge that was too much for her to bear? Should she give her uncle a hint that she had discovered something which made the schoolmistress unfit for her place? Mab felt that in all likelihood Uncle James would laugh at her discovery, and to repeat Mrs. Brown’s confidences, even to Lady William, would be a breach of trust. Thus the only thing Mab could do was to come in, in her own person, to hold Mrs. Brown (perhaps) in awe, to watch over the instruction, to correct what was wrong, to see how far it might be her bounden duty to interfere. One wonders how a priest would act in a similar case, or whether the possession of many secret responsibilities in his consciousness may perhaps neutralise the weight of each. Nothing neutralised this dreadful weight in Mab’s case. She watched Mrs. Brown as a cat watches a mouse. She did not like to let that enigmatical person out of her sight. She even followed down the ranks of the girls whose heads were bent over their copybooks, to see that the line so beautifully written in round hand at the head of each page was orthodox. Mab gave herself a great deal more to do than if she had herself been the mistress of the school. She asked the girls all sorts of unexpected questions to test their views of morality.
‘What would you do if you saw somebody take something out of a shop? Suppose you saw a very poor person take a loaf from the baker’s?’ said Mab, with an anxious pucker in her forehead.
‘Oh, miss!’ cried two or three girls together; ‘tell Mr. White that minute, and if he runned away, catch him up.’
‘But if he were very, very poor—starving?’ said Mab.
There was a pause, for of course all the girls studied her countenance to know what she wished them to reply; and Mab’s little round, blunt-featured face, with an anxious cloud upon its childish brow, was void of all expression that could be taken as guidance.
‘If we knowed the man we could tell after—when he was gone,’ said one Jesuitical little person.
‘And then ‘e could run after ‘im to ‘is ‘ouse—or send the police,’ cried the rest. The idea of sending the police was the most popular. It seemed somehow to take off the responsibility. But the girls soon perceived that this was not the solution required.
‘If you please, miss,’ said a sharp little girl who was well acquainted with Mab’s ways, ‘if I ‘ad a penny I’d pay instead of ‘im, and then it wouldn’t be stealing at all.’
This was received, however, by a spontaneous groan from the class. ‘Oh, Lizzie Jones! that would be cheating as well.’
‘And it ain’t likely as I’d ‘ave the penny,’ said Lizzie meekly. She drew from Mab’s countenance the consolation that, after all, it was she who had answered the best.
To describe the delight with which Mrs. Brown looked on and listened to all this would be difficult. She read little Mab like a book, and her sense of humour was tickled beyond description. That she was herself upon her trial, and that the sentiments of her scholars were to be considered in justification or condemnation—while, at the same time, Mab was covertly consulting their ignorance and (supposed) spontaneousness of perception like an oracle, was as clear as daylight to this clever woman. She had never met anything so funny in her life; and it delighted her as a good joke delights people who are given that way, whether it is against themselves or not. But the gravity of her aspect was equally beyond description. She seemed to take this question in ethics with the most perfect good faith and all the seriousness in the world.
‘If the man was starving,’ she said, taking up the argument, ‘and Lizzie Jones had not a penny, as is most likely, and he was known not to be a dishonest man, but only driven mad by the poor children hungry at home——’
‘Yes, teacher,’ said Lizzie Jones, who felt that she herself had thrown most light on the subject.
‘Well,’ said Mrs. Brown, ‘of course it is never right to shield a wrong act.’
This was so unlike what the girls expected after her exordium that there was a little cry of surprise, swiftly modified into one of cordial assent.
‘But,’ said the schoolmistress, ‘knowing that this is so—which you must never forget—I’ll tell you what this young lady would do. She would go after the man to his house—which most likely she would know: and I’m not sure that she would not stop and buy some things on the way—at the butcher’s, perhaps——’
At this the girls manifested a little doubt; while one murmured ‘Tea, teacher,’ and another said ‘Potatoes’ loud out that she might not be overlooked; at which the class, consulting Mrs. Brown’s face by a lightning glance, burst into a laugh.
‘Hush!’ said Mrs. Brown. ‘This is a very interesting question that is set to us—as good as a story; but you mustn’t laugh. The young lady would go to the man’s house, and she would probably see the children devouring the bread; and she would ask a number of questions—far more than she has asked you to-day, though she has asked a great many. She would discover there was no fire (supposing it to be cold, which it isn’t to-day) and nothing to eat in the house, and that the man was out of work and the wife ill and the children starving. She would immediately send off for all that was wanted——’
‘Please, teacher,’ said Lizzie Jones, holding out her hand, ‘she’d give ’em a coal ticket, and a bread ticket and bid ’em send one of the little ones up with a basket for the pieces.’
‘Well, perhaps she would do that. And when she had supplied their wants, she would take the man aside, and she would say to him, “I saw you steal that loaf at Mr. White’s.”’
There was a long breath and a cry of ‘Oh!’ from the girls, and Lizzie Jones, who was soft-hearted—or was it only that she was forward?—began to cry.
‘“Now,” the young lady would say, “come back with me and pay for it. You’re going to get work again presently, and the children shall not starve; but you must not have anything against you when you get work.”’
There was another very large round ‘Oh!’ from the girls, who turned their eyes with one accord from Mrs. Brown’s to Mab’s face.
‘I don’t know if I would do that,’ said Mab.
‘Neither do I,’ said Mrs. Brown; ‘but judging by what I know of your character, Miss Pakenham, that is what I should expect you to do.’
This happened on the morning of the day after Leo’s chase in the rain. Mab went home very soberly when the children were dismissed for dinner and in a very uncertain state of mind. She did not know how to take Mrs. Brown’s apologue, which already was being circulated through the village in a dozen different versions as a thing which Miss Mab had actually done, until it came to the ears of White, the baker, who contradicted it indignantly, and declared that he’d give a stale loaf as soon as look at it if the children were starving; but let a man off as stole it because he come and offered to pay up after was what he wouldn’t never do.
In the meantime Leo had been turning over in his mind that idea of Mrs. Brown, the schoolmistress. At first it amused him to think that so harmless a visitor to the servants’ hall might have been the object of his very unnecessary pursuit, and in this sense he laughed at the situation, which was so ludicrous, and longed to cross over to the cottage in the rain, when he left the Rectory, to make Lady William the partaker of so good a joke. But as he drove home in Jim’s clothes and the sober Watcham fly, which Mrs. Plowden, in her motherly care, had ordered for him, a different view suddenly occurred to Leo. The joke was good, but not good enough to last out that slow drive through the deep dark and the falling rain. It occurred to him as he thought of it that a visitor to the servants’ hall might, indeed, be disconcerted by the curiosity of the master of the house, but would not, unless she had some very dishonest meaning, turn back and fly. Why should the schoolmistress, probably acquainted with the housekeeper and entertaining a very good opinion of herself, fly from Leo? There was no reason in the world why she should fly. She would probably have quickened her steps, and arrived at the little side entrance puffing and blowing, but chiefly with indignation, and given very warmly her opinion of the young master who spied upon the back-door visitors. But to turn back at the sight of him and get herself out of the way meant something more than a respectable visit to the housekeeper. What did it mean? A village schoolmistress was not one to visit the young maids, or get them into mischief; but why, why did she turn and flee? It was impossible to assign a sufficient reason for this to himself.
And then there was suddenly shot into his mind, as our best intuitions come, suddenly and with a sharp shock—almost a pang—the question, Who was the schoolmistress? Artémise was nothing if not a woman of variety. He had himself known her go through the most extraordinary transformation; one time dazzling in splendour, the next almost a beggar. Why should not she herself be the schoolmistress? There could be no such concealment, no such unlikely place to look for her, as in the parish school of Watcham. There she would be at his mother’s very door, accessible on every occasion, ever within call. He had thought it scarcely possible that she could come constantly from London and disappear again unseen; but if she were in Watcham, at hand, in such a place, where nobody could think of looking for her, the difficulty would disappear. And she was an excellent actress; a woman to take anybody in, not to say an unsophisticated and artless company like the Rector and his churchwardens. He could scarcely help smiling to himself in the dark as he suddenly thought of the perfect representation of a model schoolmistress which Artémise would get up for the edification of the authorities. No schoolmistress in the world was ever so excellent a type of the class as Artémise would make herself look—her voice, her gestures, her demeanour would be all perfect. And she would have the satisfaction of being perfectly safe, for who would think of looking for her there?
But then there were the ladies, who were different. Would she take in the ladies, too? Would not they suspect the representation to be too complete? And then Lady William—Lady William could not have been deceived. She must have recognised at once the woman of whom she was in search. Leo did not know Lady William’s peculiarity about the parish. He was aware that Mab knew everybody and all their circumstances, and it did not occur to him that her mother would hold apart. This seemed to cut the ground from under his feet again. But he determined to see for himself next day who the schoolmistress was.
Next day, however, was a half-holiday, and he did not reach the school till the afternoon, when all the children were dispersed and the house shut up. Mrs. Brown, he was informed at the nearest cottage, where it appeared her little maid-servant lived, had gone away for the afternoon, so that his inquiries made no further progress that day. He went to tell his adventure to Lady William, and, if not to suggest this solution, at least to ask what she knew of Mrs. Brown. But Lady William also was out of doors, and nothing more was to be done. He hesitated whether he should not go to the Rectory to make a call of thanks, and to see (perhaps) if Emmy Plowden resembled her aunt as much by daylight as she had done in the unusually favourable circumstances of last night. But this intention he did not carry out. Unfortunately for romance, Leo was so ungrateful as to recall what he called the bourgeois dinner, the drab-coloured comfort, the petty little anxieties and cares (chiefly on his own account) of the Rectory party, with more amusement than admiration, though with a compunction, too. Kind excellent people! How abominable it was to laugh at them! But his laughter was not checked by the compunction—it only gave a certain piquancy to all that was ludicrous in the picture.
The third person whose mind was full of Mrs. Brown was Jim Plowden. He had seen her little of late, partly that the many calls Mr. Osborne made upon him left him less time for those strolls about the village, which had ended so often in the ‘Blue Boar,’ but sometimes, to his advantage, in the schoolhouse; partly because, now that the evenings were so much lighter, he could not go there unseen. This reason had acted with the others in the partial reformation of Jim. It was scarcely possible to go into the ‘Blue Boar’ in the lingering daylight while all the village folk were about. Had he been altogether uninterrupted in his former habits, it is possible that by this time he might not have cared. But Mr. Osborne’s warm and exacting friendship had begun with the lengthening days, and after an interval, even of a week or two, such a hindrance told. On this occasion, however, Jim felt that he must risk a little danger for the sake of a woman who had been kind to him, who had certainly amused him, and, he sometimes began to think, had done him good. It could be nothing to her advantage to have a visitor such as he was. She had done it, he thought vaguely, out of kindness, and now he would risk something for kindness too; and then he could always say he had brought a message about the school from his father, or Florence, who took an interest in the school, or Mab, or somebody. Fortified by his good intention he walked into the schoolmistress’s house about six o’clock that evening when all the people were about, several of whom stared, he could see, at Mrs. Brown’s visitor—in which, however, I need not say, Jim deceived himself, for the village people were already aware that he visited Mrs. Brown, as well as that he visited the ‘Blue Boar,’ and held these secrets in store against the time when they might be of use either for or against the Rector’s son. He went in, however, boldly, to the surprise of Mrs. Brown, who did not expect him, and who was engaged in some sort of operation that looked very much like packing. She invited him to come in, and cleared one of the chairs from a number of miscellaneous articles with which it was covered, and which she was putting away.
‘You are not—going on a journey?’ he said, alarmed.
‘Oh no, not that I know of; but you know, Mr. Jim, a woman in such a humble position as mine, with so many people to please, has but an uncertain tenure. I am putting some old things in order, so that should anything untoward happen——’
‘But I hear nothing except praise,’ said Jim; ‘they say no one ever kept the school in such order, or the children so bright, or——’
‘Do they really say so? How truly good of them!’ said Mrs. Brown, with a laugh. It was a laugh of so much amusement that Jim, who did not see the joke, was disposed to be angry, but she ended by shaking her head and putting on a comically doleful look. ‘But I do not please everybody,’ she said; ‘oh, far from it. Your friend, Mr. Osborne, does not like me: and your cousin, Miss Mab, is full of suspicions.’
‘Mab,’ said Jim in high disdain, ‘as if it mattered what Mab thought!’
‘Don’t you know,’ said Mrs. Brown, ‘that Miss Mab will probably be an heiress one of these days, and that it will matter a great deal what she thinks?’
‘Nonsense,’ cried Jim, ‘as much an heiress as I am! We have no rich relations, alas! to leave us money.’
‘But she may have,’ said Mrs. Brown, ‘and if you will take my advice you will go in for your cousin, Mr. Jim; that would make everything straight if you got a nice little bit of money with your wife.’
‘Nonsense,’ cried Jim, becoming scarlet, and feeling the very tips of his ears burn. ‘Besides,’ he said, ‘if I ever have a wife I’d rather keep her than that she should keep me.’
‘A very excellent sentiment,’ said his adviser, ‘but I don’t quite see how you are going to carry it out.’
‘I shall carry it out by having no wife at all,’ said Jim: and then he added hastily, ‘that’s not what I came to tell you. Have you any reason for not wanting Swinford to know that you are here?’
‘For not wanting—Swinford—to know——?’ A little colour seemed to rise, too, in her dark countenance. ‘This change of subject,’ she cried, ‘takes away my breath. You are too quick for me. Have I any reason——? It is Leo Swinford you mean, at the Hall?’ As if she did not know who it was! Even Jim was clever enough to perceive that she was simply gaining time. ‘No,’ she answered slowly, ‘I have no particular reason. I do not, perhaps, in a general way wish—to receive—friends who have known me elsewhere, here——’ She looked round upon her little room, with a laugh. ‘You may, perhaps, if you think of it, understand why. Have you come to warn me that I am found out?’
‘Oh no,’ said Jim. ‘And I’m sure I don’t want to interfere; but he was at the Rectory last night. He said he had caught a glimpse of a lady he knew, and had followed her all the way down to the village to speak to her, and she had disappeared. Some one said that no one had passed but Mrs. Brown. And then he laughed and said, “Perhaps it was Mrs. Brown he had seen going to pay a visit to some one in the servants’ hall.”’
A sudden flash shot out of Mrs. Brown’s dark eyes. ‘I hope,’ she said, ‘you encouraged the idea that I paid visits in the servants’ hall?’
‘I didn’t say anything—good or bad,’ said Jim.
Which was not strictly true; but then nobody heard him, which came to the same thing.
‘Good friend,’ said Mrs. Brown, ‘true friend! but you can tell Leo Swinford when you see him again that one of these days Mrs. Brown is coming to call on him, with important information, at the Hall, and he will never need to hunt her through the rain any more!’