An Ambitious Woman: A Novel. Fawcett Edgar

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СКАЧАТЬ hands folded together in her lap, and with looks that paid no seeming heed to any of her associates. Some of them were extremely stupid. They gave stammering responses, or rattled off the wrong thing with fatal glibness, or preserved that stolid silence which is the most naked candor of ignorance. The freckled girl, who ate bananas, cut an especially dull figure. Through some novel freak of parental indulgence she had been permitted to wear, this morning, a ring of clustered sapphires and diamonds, very beautiful and precious; and this she turned and re-turned, while puckering her forehead, whenever a question was put to her, as though the fair bauble might prove talismanic and show her some royal road out of learning's tangled mazes. No one appeared to think her replies particularly blundering or fatuous. Her ring, and her last new Parisian gown, and the luxurious prospect of her approaching lunch, seemed to invest even her weak wit with prestige. Claire felt it to be somehow in the air that this maiden's mental poverty should receive nothing except respectful sympathy from her fellows. Fortune does not shower every known gift on one favorite; that seemed to be tacitly understood. When she floundered in a French verb, or came to dire grief in compound fractions, the imbecility provoked no laughter; it bore a sort of gilded pardonableness, like the peccadillo of a princess.

      When recess came, Claire had distinguished herself. Everybody was convinced that her powers of mind were much above the common. Two of the teachers, both ladies of gentle bearing and kindly disposition, came to her side, and cheered her with a few words of complimentary encouragement. The grand Mrs. Arcularius did not come; she was elsewhere, in her elegant little reception-room; she had not yet heard of her new pupil's handsome exploits. But if she had already heard of them she would have paid Claire no congratulations. Good scholarship, she would have argued, with splendid egotism, was in this case a form of gratitude to which she was of course amply entitled, since she had allowed Twining the honor of seeing her autograph on his daughter's future receipted bills.

      During the first portion of the recess hour Claire ate her modest lunch, choking it down with strong reluctance. But one teacher now remained in the large class-room, and she was closely occupied in the examination of some written exercises. The girls were gathered here and there, among the files of desks, in whispering groups. They were all discussing Claire; she herself knew it; an instinct told her so. She was very much excited, but outwardly quite calm. The girls no longer stared at her; not a single giggle now broke the air; they had been impressed, startled, and perhaps a little awed as well; their pariah had turned out a sort of notability; she had clad herself in a sudden armor of cool defiance against impudence. They might have regarded her lately-revealed endowments as a queerness collateral with the eccentric quality of her clothing. But the pink robe, the brittle-looking curls, the beflowered hat, had vanished and left them no chance for such associative ridicule. There had been a transformation, abrupt and baffling. Claire was not going to be their butt; of this there was no doubt; she must either be accepted as an equal, or avoided as an inferior; she could no longer hold the position of a target for their covert raillery.

      The freckled girl, of the sumptuous mid-day meal, however, preserved opposite opinions. Her name was Ada Gerrard, and her family was one of great wealth and distinction. Her elder sister, a mindless blonde with creamy skin and exuberant figure, had made a notable English marriage, having wedded no less a potentate than the young Marquis of Monogram, heir of a renowned ducal house. Miss Ada was a leader in her way, and she felt keenly disappointed by the unforeseen turn of affairs. She had anticipated prodigious fun out of the new scholar. She was by nature cruel and arrogant, and she was now affected as some feline creature that has been cheated of the prey it has meant to maul and maim.

      Her reddish-hazel eyes, that showed so little white as to look like two large beads of clouded amber, and were fringed with scant lashes of lighter red, kept up a persistent scrutiny of Claire. She was sitting not far away from the latter, who caught, now and then, a waft of the delicate violet perfume which exhaled from her fine foreign apparel. She was occupied with her epicurean repast, whose dainties she devoured with a solemn gluttony; but this did not prevent her from keeping up a little fusillade of whispers to a friend on whom she had bestowed one or two bites of luscious cake as a mark of peculiar clemency.

      The converse was at first low-toned. Claire had finished her brief refreshment. She had opened a book, and maintained at least the semblance of being engaged in its contents. Suddenly she heard Ada Gerrard speak these words, in a voice lifted above her former key, though doubtless meant solely for her companion's ears:

      "I don't care how much she knows. She's a common little thing, and I wouldn't notice her if she got on her knees and begged me to."

      Claire waited a few seconds, with head lowered above her book. She trembled while she so waited. The tremor was half from anger, half from intimidation. She felt, in every fibre of her being, the coarseness of this speech, but through her sensitive soul had shot a pang of false shame, dealt by the piercing sense of contrast between her own humble state and the probable grandeur and comfort of life which had fed Ada Gerrard's present superciliousness. But anger conquered. She ceased to tremble, and closed her book. Then she rose, quietly, and faced her classmate. It may have been that the generations of gentlewomen from which, on her father's side, she had sprung, helped to nerve and steady her now; since the primal source of all aristocracy is a cogent self-assertion, and those races alone gain heights overbrowing their kind whose first founders have had the will and vigor to push forward resisted claims.

      Everybody saw her rise. It flashed through the little throng, in an instant, that something had spurred her into a course of retaliation. At least fifteen pairs of eager eyes were leveled upon her pale face. But she regarded Ada Gerrard only; and when she spoke, with enough clearness to be heard in all parts of the room, her first words were addressed strictly to that special offender.

      "You say that you will not notice me," Claire began, "and yet you say it so loudly that I can hear you, and thus you very plainly contradict yourself; or, in other words, you try to attract my attention by speaking a falsehood."

      Here she paused. A dead silence ensued. Many bewildered looks were exchanged. The presiding teacher stopped her task, and sat with a gaze of puzzled alarm fixed upon this resolute young combatant. Ada Gerrard flushed crimson, and ceased to discuss her savory confections.

      Claire's voice quivered as she now proceeded, but she quickly controlled this perturbed sign: "I do not think there is much chance of my begging you on my knees to notice me," she said. "But I might be tempted to take such a way of begging that you would try and help me to forget, as long as I remain here, how I have had the ill-luck of being thrown near anyone so unkind, so impudent, and so vulgar as yourself."

      Ada Gerrard sprang to her feet as the last calm word sounded from Claire's lips. She had clenched both of her plump hands, and there was a wrathful scowl on her face. Several titters were heard from her companions; they seemed to sting her; it was impossible for her to fail in perceiving that she had met an adversary of twice her own prowess. She knew to which side the sympathy had veered; all her imposing superiority in the way of dress, of diet, of home-splendor, of titled kindred, were momentarily as nothing beside Claire's placid antagonism. She was only an ugly girl in an ugly rage, who had behaved insolently and been rebuked with justice; while Claire, pale, unflinching, wholly in the right and wholly aware of it, her drawbacks of uncouth costume no longer present, her beauty a fact beyond dispute, her intelligence a recent discovery and a sharp surprise, stood clad with the dignity of easy and complete conquest.

      Ada Gerrard suddenly burst into tears. They were very irate tears; there was not the least tincture of remorse or shame in them. She flung herself back into her chair, and covered her face for several minutes while she wept.

      Claire watched her, tranquilly, for a little while. Then she sat down again and reopened her book. An intense silence reigned, broken by the sobs of Ada Gerrard. Claire leaned her head on her hand, feigning abrupt absorption in the page that she regarded, and feigning it very well. But her mind was in a secret whirl, now. She was mutely, but impetuously asking herself: "Will they think I was right? Will they take my part? Will they treat me any more kindly, СКАЧАТЬ