The Story Of Louie Part 23

Miss Levey t.i.ttered, and then suddenly said: "Ssss--I'll show you now!

Just you watch me----"

She slipped noiselessly round to the cords of the window Louie had opened a few moments before.

No doubt her sharp eyes had seen Mr. Jeffries approach. She gave him a helpless look, and he took the cords from her fumbling hands and closed the window for her. It was the more cleverly done that she detained Mr. Jeffries and managed to get closed the window which Louie wanted open at one and the same time. She turned her prominent brown eyes in grat.i.tude to Mr. Jeffries.

"Oh, thank you so much! You see, I've got rather a cold, and I'm going to a dance and don't vant to make it any vorse," she explained. "You don't dance, do you, Mr. Jeffries?"

But Mr. Jeffries merely replied "No," and turned away at once. Miss Levey turned to Kitty again.

"He needn't think he's put me off!" she said. "I _vill_ find out! I shall offer him some tickets now, for self and lady. And I bet if she dances I'll make him buy them!"

Kitty tossed her head. "_I_ should expect the gentleman _I_ was engaged to to take _me_ to dances," she said.

"But Archie didn't say 'engaged.' Just after somebody, I should say--and don't I just vish her joy!"

"It's evidently n.o.body at the School," mused Kitty Windus. "Archie was almost certain about that."

"Vell, it isn't _me_, if you're thinking of suspecting me!" said Miss Levey merrily. "_I_ vouldn't touch him with the end of a long pole."

"Chance is a fine thing, my dear," remarked Miss Windus.

"Opportunity's another." (This reply, Louie had noted, was _de rigueur_.)

"I expect she types or something at his place in the City."

"She might be in an A.B.C. shop--no, a Lockhart's."

"Or a barmaid," Kitty hinted.

"Or his vashervoman."

"Oh, I expect he washes his own s.h.i.+rts."

"Perhaps he'll vash her blouses, too, whoever she is."

They both laughed.

Louie, her mask once more a little out of place, turned suddenly away.

Little as she had been inclined to work, she was now, somehow or other, not much more inclined for amus.e.m.e.nt. She wandered into the shorthand dictation cla.s.s, but in a few minutes came out again. Then she walked into the lecture-room, where some example or other had been left chalked up on the big blackboard from the last lesson. Thence she went into the typewriting-room, and back to the lecture-room again.

Finally she got from the "library"--the little back room where the files and presses and gelatine copiers and a few books were kept--a number of old examination papers, and, finding a chair near the folding door that divided the lecture-room from the general-room, sat down and began to turn them over.

But she thought more of the conversation she had just overheard than she did of the examination papers. It had meant, as far as she had been able to make it out, that Mr. Jeffries had told young Merridew that he was engaged, or hoped to be engaged, to somebody outside the school altogether. That sounded--odd. Of course if Mr. Jeffries said so, Mr. Jeffries ought to know; but it is a difficult matter to disbelieve your own eyes. She supposed she had no choice but to disbelieve them, but--but--there _were_ those two glances he had given at the Polly Ross girl--whom, by the way, she must learn to call by her proper name, Miss Evie Soames.

Louie was perfectly certain that she had not been mistaken in the nature of those two glances. Her reason for cert.i.tude was quite una.s.sailable. She had known what they meant for the simple reason that she had never received such looks from a man herself.

Suddenly she dropped this mask of fevered amus.e.m.e.nt entirely. As she had once sat on the stile between Rainham Parva and the sea, so Louie now sat by the folding door--relaxed, thinking of nothing, or, if of anything, certainly neither of her late resolute pose nor yet of study. Her mind was what she had determined it should not be if she could help it--an empty chamber for unknown devils to enter.

Students pa.s.sed and repa.s.sed. Weston had been through several times, and twice Evie Soames had come and gone again. This so-much-talked-of Mr. Jeffries went into the library for a book and walked past with it again. He still wore that concealing ulster; the Soames girl had on a brown tailor-made and a cap of knitted white wool. Louie was hardly conscious that she noticed these things. She still sat, all slack and unbraced, with the examination papers on her knee.

All at once she came to herself. Why she should do so at that particular moment she did not know, but, doing so, she found herself completely awake again. To all intents and purposes she had come out of one of those naps which, lasting perhaps only a minute, have all the effect of a refres.h.i.+ng sleep. She could rea.s.sume her mask now.

Evie Soames was talking to Weston by the blackboard; opposite her, a pale student called Richardson was copying down an exercise from a sheet on the wall; and she supposed Mr. Jeffries would be bringing his book back presently. Louie was as alive to her surroundings now as she had been oblivious to them a few moments before.

A minute later Mr. Jeffries, returning with his book, pa.s.sed into the library. A few seconds later still Evie Soames had left Mr. Weston and had followed him.

"Now," thought Louie, "for a little more amus.e.m.e.nt."

The library had only one communicating door; its other door led only to a small room called the old ledger-room, a dusty cubby-hole, seldom entered, that had no outlet save the small pivoted window, high up, that gave on the head of the stairs. Mr. Jeffries and Miss Soames would have to come out by the same way they had entered, and Louie rather wanted to see them come out. It was no business of hers, but she had remembered those two glances and the conversation between Kitty Windus and Miriam Levey, and she had a perfect right to sit by the folding door and to use her eyes if she wished. She was now almost preternaturally awake. No jot of the jest, whatever it was, should escape her.

Evie came out first, after four or five minutes; but Louie was not interested in Evie. She was merely a dull tale: Louie wanted to see him.

Then, a moment later, he came.

But no amus.e.m.e.nt came with him. Instead, Louie knew not what sudden private ache stirred deep at her own heart. It was not a question of those two furtive, possessive glances now. Unmistakable enough those had been; you do not mistake the kind of glance for which you yourself have hungered when you see it given to another; but not only had Louie never seen--she had never, not even in her own rapt dreamings as a half-grown girl in her teens, thought it possible that a man's look at a woman could change his face as this man's face was changed now. It was irradiated, transfigured. He took no pains now to hide it. He could see clear down the room before him--could see (or so he evidently thought) any who saw him----

And since he did not see Louie by the folding door, Louie knew that in his former pa.s.sings and repa.s.sings he could not have seen her either.

He disappeared. The Soames girl was waiting by the door, evidently for him. No doubt he was going to see her home. Probably she would have preferred the other, the little cad with the red waistcoat, but she had the lion----

He returned, with his hat on, and they left together.

But what had brought that sudden ache into Louie's breast? Mr.

Jeffries was nothing to her. If his face shone, Louie's heart need not therefore ache. What ailed her?

Unmasked, as alive to things within herself now as she had just been to things outside herself, she sat, deeply wondering.

Against the wall at her left hand there stood a tall stationery cupboard. It had glazed doors, and the pale student called Richardson, coming up a moment ago to put his exercise-book back into its place, had left one of the doors open. The door moved on its hinges back into its place. With its motion there swung slowly into Louie's view the reflection of the grimy chandelier with its three naked gas-jets.

Was it this that reminded her of the night when she had swept out of Mrs. Lovenant-Smith's French window with the yellow-shaded standard lamp mirrored in its pane?

It had been on that night----

Suddenly her eyes closed, as if closed eyes could have shut out a mental picture. Her lips trembled--voicelessly they shaped a name.

It was the name of Roy.

Hitherto she had hardly known what her feelings towards Roy really were. It had been in order to avoid asking herself that question, among others, that she had amused herself with Kitty Windus and welcomed the buffooneries of Mr. Mackie. But it presented itself to her startlingly now. Her own complete ignorance had just revealed a s.h.i.+ning thing to her, the beautiful thing that had transformed Mr.

Jeffries' face; now--handy-dandy--that very transformation threw her brutally back on her ignorance again.

She had thought she had sounded a mystery; had she, after all, _not_ sounded any mystery, and was she to pay in labour and pain for nothing?

Her thoughts had flown back; they remained where they had flown. Good gracious! What an escapade! Without mercy for herself she examined it.

What had really happened? Anything worth what it was about to cost?

The radiant look of another man at another woman answered her: No.