But the next day Harriet was colder, more distant and severe than ever. For trifling reasons, sometimes for none at all, she scolded him, shook him, and slapped his face with such force that he saw stars. Several times during the day she made him kneel on the floor with his hands beneath his knees while she laid the ruler smartly across his shoulders. Unable to understand the cause of her displeasure, hurt and bewildered, he could do nothing but weep: had he known that this treatment was simply caused by the irritation of her unappeased desire for him, his anguish might perhaps have been less.
Before dinner she made his tears the pretext for pulling his hair: she did this so sharply that he was unable to repress a scream.
“So!” she said, her teeth showing for an instant. “So, you cry out for nothing! I’ll give you something to cry about then.” She picked up the cane and made it whistle in the air. “Down with your trousers!”
He felt the staggering injustice of the order with such intensity that he retreated a step, flushing hotly.
Harriet drew herself up. “So,” she said, her voice suddenly quiet and controlled, “you are not yet cured of your old habit of resistance, are you? I thought as much. No,” she said sharply, as he began fumbling in desperate haste with his clothing. “Stay as you are, sir. And go to your room and get into bed at once. You will go without your dinner tonight, – and after I have had mine I will pay you a little visit. Not another word. Go!” Miserably, he went upstairs to his room. Already he was bitterly regretting his impulse of rebellion, as much for the loss of Harriet’s favour as for the painful consequences which he foresaw; as he undressed slowly and got into bed he found himself trembling both with fear and remorse. –And would it, he asked himself, be one of those terrible evening corrections he had undergone in bed that winter? Surely not, he argued: after all, he had been a good boy, he was on his holidays. His meditations were interrupted by the sudden appearance of Harriet in the doorway.
Without a word she laid a new cane on the table, and then proceeded to draw the heavy curtains against the light of the summer evening.
He followed her movements with surprise and anguished uncertainty; then, unable to bear the suspense any longer: “Miss,” he asked timidly, “please, — are — are you going to whip me now?”
Harriet looked at him calmly for a few moments, drinking in the terror of his expression and attitude. “No,” she said at last. “I will come to you later, as I said.”
He shivered; then his eyes were raised to her in supplication. “And–and are you going to use the–the strap?” he asked piteously.
Harriet paused, a smile curving her beautiful lips for the first time that day. “I have not yet made up my mind on that point,” she said. Then, checking his words of entreaty with a gesture: “Silence, please! You are becoming impertinent, Richard. It will be better for you to employ the next hour in considering your misconduct and in resolving to amend it in the future, than in wondering about the degree of your punishment.” She paused again, picked up the cane and fingered it for a few moments, then laid it down. “I shall consider the whole matter very carefully at dinner,” she said. “You will be punished severely, of course; but I can assure you that it will not be more than you deserve.”
His solitary meditations for the next hour and a half were far from pleasant. Tossed between hope and fear, he had just succeeded in persuading himself, against reason and experience, that he might escape with a sound caning, when he saw the door open to admit his governess.
At his first sight of her he gave a moan of anguish. Harriet was wearing her long cape, in one hand she carried the leather bracelets for his wrist and ankles, and in the other she held the terrible strap.
“Yes,” she said quietly. “You are in for it this evening, my boy.”
And she was as good as her word.
Now, indeed, she was carried to that seventh heaven which none can know or appreciate save the flagellant who has found himself, for the first time, alone with the object of his stern affections, and free, free at last, to carry his severity to the limits of fleshly endurance. –Now, she thought, as each blow of her strong and cunning wrist evoked a wild scream of pain, now I can do as I wish with this charming boy! There is no one to hear his cries but me; there is nothing to check or hinder my will.
It was dark outside by the time she had finished. By then, Richard had been reduced to a moaning, blubbering mass: his flesh, from the long and vigorous application of strap and cane, was a deep fiery red latticed with thin dark lines, his cheeks were sodden with tears, the muscles of his throat were sore and strained from continual screaming. He lay motionless, conscious of nothing except the enormous relief of knowing that his whipping was over at last.
Harriet laid the cane on the table and sat down beside him on the bed.
“You understand now, I hope,” she said to him quietly, “how your holidays are to be passed, and that I mean to use them to break you in properly. Here in the country, you see, we are free from interference or interruption, and at last I have the power, as well as the will, to deal with you as you need to be dealt with.” She paused, and stroked his wet, quivering cheek gently. “You did not think of that, perhaps, when you told me how glad you would be to live alone with me! Now, I trust, you are beginning to know me and my methods a little better. And you will know still further before our holidays are over; for I must tell you, Richard, that we shall spend many other evenings like this together, you and I...”
He heard her voice, low and sweet, coming to him as if from far away, through the mist of pain, through the agony of his burning flesh, carrying in its tones a healing promise of better things, a guarantee of some unimaginable bliss that shone dimly before him from the horizons of a distant but certain future ...
“Yes, yours is a bitter cup, Richard,” the beloved voice went on softly. “You may pray, and pray again, in the months and years to come, that it may be put from you. But be sure of this, if you are sure of anything in the world, that I shall see that you drink it to the dregs. For I have but one end in view, my dear, and that is to bring you into the pleasant places prepared for you by your temperament and my love. Take courage, Richard: it will never be more than you can bear ... And remember always, if you should doubt or grow fainthearted, that your happiness, the happiness of your whole life, is in the hands of one who loves you more deeply than a mother.”