CHAPTER VITHE STORM BREAKS
The thing, however, which rankled deepest in Posey’s mind, and caused her more bitter feelings than everything else, was that for all Mrs. Hagood’s promise, which she herself standing by had heard, that Posey should go regularly to the near-by school, she had not been allowed to attend even for a single day. At first she had waited expecting something would be said about it every day, and at last had ventured to ask when she was to begin.
Mrs. Hagood heard the question with an air of surprise. “School!” she repeated, “and all the house-cleaning, and spring and summer work coming on, I wonder how you think I can spare you to go to school. One would think that with all I’m doing for you, and the work you make, that you’d want to help what little you could.”
Posey choked back a lump in her throat; inher own mind she was sure that she was doing more work than she made, and earning all she received or she wouldn’t be kept; at the same time it was plainly evident that school, at least for the present, was not for her. “If I can’t go this spring term, can I in the fall?” she asked somewhat anxiously.
Mrs. Hagood was busy making pies, and fall was far in the future. “Yes, I guess so,” she answered, glad to get rid of the matter so easily. “If you are a smart girl to work this summer you can go to school next fall.”
So summer went by, and all through its days Posey bore this promise in mind; many a time it was an incentive to her when she would otherwise have flagged; and a spur to endeavor without which she might have been negligent. Autumn came, apples grew ruddy in the orchards, grapes ripened on the vines, and the woods changed their summer’s dress of green for one of yellow and scarlet. Yet Posey, who all through the spring and early summer had watched with longing eyes the children passing to and fro, saw the opening of the fall term draw near—delayed by repairs on the schoolhouse farbeyond its usual time—without a single word or sign as to her going. And the day before it was to begin Mrs. Hagood said to her, “Posey, I want you to pick the green tomatoes to-morrow morning, then after dinner you can chop them for the mixed pickle.”
Posey’s heart sank with dismay. The ambition the teacher at the Refuge had awakened, had grown with her own growth; more still, an education seemed her one hope of escape from the life of a charity dependent, and she determined to risk a great deal rather than give it up. “Hadn’t I better pick the tomatoes to-day?” she asked not without an inward trembling of the heart. “You know school begins to-morrow.”
Mrs. Hagood paused in the pantry door. “Well, what if it does?”
“Why, you promised me, don’t you remember? that I should go to school this fall.”
“I don’t remember, no, and I can’t spare you to go, anyway. There’s all the pickles to put up, and apples to dry, and apple butter to stir, and the pig to be killed, with lard to try out, and sausage to make, and potatoes to be sorted over, and Brother Solon’s wifecoming for a visit. You don’t much more than earn your salt now, and to go to school you wouldn’t be worth anything. All you care about it anyway is just for an excuse to race and run and get rid of work.”
“It isn’t, either,” Posey protested hotly, “I like to study. Ask my teachers at the Refuge if I didn’t have my lessons. Besides I want to go to school so I can be a teacher myself some day.”
“A teacher,” with a scornful laugh that sent the blood to Posey’s face, “a pretty teacher you’d make.”
“And when I came here with you,” Posey went on, sticking to the point in issue, “you promised that I should go to school.”
“I can teach you all you need. And for a poor girl who has to depend on charity for her bringing up, to know how to work is a great deal more account than a little smattering of books, and a lot of high-flown, silly ideas that will never amount to anything.”
“Then you don’t mean that I shall go to school at all?” Posey’s voice trembled a little as she put the question. She had grownpale around the mouth, and her eyes had become wide and dark.
“I don’t know as it’s any of your business what I intend,” was the answer in Mrs. Hagood’s most decided tone. “I’ve told you that you couldn’t go now, and I don’t want to hear another word about it.”
Posey laid down the ball of carpet rags she had been winding and faced Mrs. Hagood, her slim figure very erect and a spot of red burning on each cheek. “You are a wicked woman, and a liar,” she cried shrilly, all the gathered disappointment and bitterness of months breaking out in a sudden burst of fiery passion. “You promised Mr. Mott, at the Refuge, that I should go to school; I heard you, and I shall write and tell him just what you have done.”
“You will, will you?” scoffed Mrs. Hagood. “And who do you suppose will believe what you say, a deceiving medium’s child?”
“I wasn’t her child, as you know well enough,” retorted Posey. “And whatever she was, she was better than you. She sent me to school, and didn’t make me work every enduring minute of the time. And my ownmother was the most beautiful lady that ever lived; you are no more like her than you are like an angel. You are a bad, cruel woman, that’s what you are.”
Posey had been so repressed with Mrs. Hagood that when her long smoldering resentment leaped into wrathful words the latter stood for a moment in bewildered astonishment. It was only for a moment, however, a color so deep it was fairly purple mottled her face; glancing around her eye rested on a small wooden rod she had taken from a curtain, and seizing this she turned on Posey, “You vile little beggar. I’ll teach you to talk that way to me!”
With the first blow that fell Posey sprang forward and fastened her sharp white teeth in Mrs. Hagood’s hand. But the latter’s greater strength shook her off before anything more than a deep mark had been made, the pain of which, as well as the insult of it only adding to the storm of blows the hand rained. “There,” she exclaimed, as breathless with anger, excitement, and exertion, she gave Posey a final violent shake, and whirled her into her little bedroom with suchforce that she fell in a heap on the floor, “you’ll stay in here till to-morrow morning, and we’ll see then if you will talk in any such way, and fly at me like a wildcat. If you do you’ll get something that you’ll remember as long as you live, I can tell you.” And with this parting threat she shut the door with a bang.
Left alone, throbbing with a rage of resentful passion, into which the physical pain entered as a part, Posey threw herself on the bed and buried her head in the clothes with the old cry, “Mamma, my mamma,” and then as a gust of stormy sobs shook her frame. “Why can’t I die, too, oh, why can’t I?”
But her tears were not of penitence, far from it, and it was well that Mrs. Hagood had not demanded of her any expression of sorrow for her offense, or of submission for the future; for in Posey’s present mood she would have been beaten to death before she would either have confessed or yielded. As it was she sobbed as softly as she could, and kept her face well in the pillow that Mrs. Hagood might not have the pleasure of knowing thatshe was crying, and under her breath she repeated over and over, as though it gave her some relief, “I hate you, oh, I do hate you, you bad, cruel woman!”