The Golden Calf | Page 3

a New Testament--the margins shamefully scribbled over,'
pursued Miss Pillby, with implacable monotony. 'Three Brazil nuts. A
piece of slate-pencil. The photograph of a little boy--'
'My brother,' cried Ida hastily. 'I hope you are not going to confiscate
that, Miss Pew, as you have confiscated my sketches.'
'It would be no more than you deserve if I were to burn everything in
your locker, Miss Palliser,' said the schoolmistress.
'Burn everything except my brother's portrait. I might never get another.
Papa is so thoughtless. Oh, please, Miss Pillby, give me back the
photo.'
'Give her the photograph,' said Miss Pew, who was not all inhuman,
although she kept a school, a hardening process which is supposed to
deaden the instincts of womanhood. 'And now, pray, Miss Palliser,
what excuse have you to offer for your untidiness?'
'None,' said Ida, 'except that I have no time to be tidy. You can't expect
tidiness from a drudge like me.'
And with this cool retort Miss Palliser turned her back upon her
mistress and left the room.
'Did you ever see such cheek?' murmured the irrepressible Miss Cobb
to her neighbour.
'She can afford to be cheeky,' retorted the neighbour. 'She has nothing
to lose. Old Pew couldn't possibly treat her any worse than she does. If
she did, it would be a police case.'
When Ida Palliser was in the little lobby outside the class room, she
took the little boy's photograph from her pocket, and kissed it
passionately. Then she ran upstairs to a small room on the landing,

where there was nothing but emptiness and a worn-out old square piano,
and sat down for her hour's practice. She was always told off to the
worst pianos in the house. She took out a book of five-finger exercises,
by a Leipsic professor, placed it on the desk, and then, just as she was
beginning to play, her whole frame was shaken like a bulrush in a
sudden gust of wind; she let her head fall forward on the desk, and
burst into tears, hot, passionate tears, that came like a flood, in spite of
her determination not to cry.
What was the matter with Ida Palliser? Not much, perhaps. Only
poverty, and poverty's natural corollary, a lack of friends. She was the
handsomest girl in the school, and one of the cleverest--clever in an
exceptional way, which claimed admiration even from the coldest. She
occupied the anomalous position of a pupil teacher, or an articled pupil.
Her father, a military man, living abroad on his half pay, with a young
second wife, and a five-year old son, had paid Miss Pew a lump sum of
fifty pounds, and for those fifty pounds Miss Pew had agreed to
maintain and educate Ida Palliser during the space of three years, to
give her the benefit of instruction from the masters who attended the
school, and to befit her for the brilliant and lucrative career of
governess in a gentleman's family. As a set-off against these
advantages, Miss Pew had full liberty to exact what services she
pleased from Miss Palliser, stopping short, as Miss Green had
suggested, of a police case.
Miss Pew had not shown herself narrow in her ideas of the articled
pupil's capacity. It was her theory that no amount of intellectual labour,
including some manual duties in the way of assisting in the lavatory on
tub-nights, washing hair-brushes, and mending clothes, could be too
much for a healthy young woman of nineteen. She always talked of Ida
as a young woman. The other pupils of the same age she called girls;
but of Ida she spoke uncompromisingly as a 'young woman.'
'Oh, how I hate them all!' said Ida, in the midst of her sobs. 'I hate
everybody, myself most of all!'
Then she pulled herself together with an effort, dried her tears hurriedly,
and began her five-finger exercises, _tum, tum, tum,_ with the little

finger, all the other fingers pinned resolutely down upon the keys.
'I wonder whether, if I had been ugly and stupid, they would have been
a little more merciful to me?' she said to herself.
Miss Palliser's ability had been a disadvantage to her at Mauleverer
Manor. When Miss Pew discovered that the girl had a knack of
teaching she enlarged her sphere of tuition, and from taking the lowest
class only, as former articled pupils had done, Miss Palliser was
allowed to preside over the second and third classes, and thereby saved
her employers forty pounds a year.
To teach two classes, each consisting of from fifteen to twenty girls,
was in itself no trifling labour. But besides this Ida had to give music
lessons to that lowest class which she had ceased to instruct in English
and French, and whose studies were now