Girls’ schools are chilly places. The unfortunate victims, when you
chance to meet them, mostly look but half-alive, and dismally cold.
Their noses (however charming these features may become in a year
or two, or even may be in the holidays) appear somehow of a frosty
temperature in the long dull months of school-time. The hands, too, of
the fair pupils are apt to seem larger than common, inclined to blue
in color, and, generally, are suggestive of inadequate circulation.
À tendency to get as near the fire as possible (to come within the
frontiers of the hearth-rug is forbidden), and to cower beneath shawls,
is also characteristic of joyous girlhood--school-girlhood, that is. In
fact, one thinks of a girls’ school as too frequently a spot where no
one takes any lively exercise (for walking in a funereal procession is
not exercise, or Mutes might be athletes), and where there is apt to be
a pervading impression of insufficient food, insufficient clothing, and
general unsatisfied tedium.
Miss Marlett’s Establishment for the Highest Education of Girls, more
briefly known as “The Dovecot, Conisbeare,” was no exception, on a
particularly cold February day--the day after Dicky Shields was found
dead--to these pretty general rules. The Dovecot, before it became a
girls’ school, was, no doubt, a pleasant English home, where “the fires
wass coot,” as the Highlandman said. The red-brick house, with its
lawn sloping down to the fields, all level with snow, stood at a little
distance from the main road, at the end of a handsome avenue of Scotch
pines. But the fires at Miss Marlett’s were not good on this February
morning. They never _were_ good at the Dovecot. Miss Marlett was one
of those people who, fortunately for themselves, and unfortunately for
persons dwelling under their roofs, never feel cold, or never know
what they feel. Therefore, Miss Marlett never poked the fire, which,
consequently used to grow black toward its early death, and was only
revived, at dangerously long intervals, by the most minute doses of
stimulant in the shape of rather damp small coals. Now, supplies of coal
had run low at the Dovecot, for the very excellent reason that the roads
were snowed up, and that convoys of the precious fuel were scarcely to
be urged along the heavy ways.
This did not matter much to the equable temperature of Miss Marlett; but
it did matter a great deal to her shivering pupils, three of whom were
just speeding their morning toilette, by the light of one candle, at the
pleasant hour of five minutes to seven on a frosty morning.
“Oh dear,” said one maiden--Janey Harman by name--whose blonde
complexion should have been pink and white, but was mottled with alien
and unbecoming hues, “_why_ won’t that old Cat let us have fires to
dress by? Gracious, Margaret, how black your fingers are!”
“Yes; and I cant get them clean,” said Margaret, holding up two very
pretty dripping hands, and quoting, in mock heroic parody:
“Ho, dogs of false Tarentum,
Are not my _hands_ washed white?”
“No talking in the bedrooms, young ladies,” came a voice, accompanied by
an icy draught, from the door, which was opened just enough to admit a
fleeting vision of Miss Mariettas personal charms.
“I was only repeating my lay, Miss Marlett,” replied the maiden thus
rebuked, in a tone of injured innocence--
“‘Ho, dogs of false Tarentum,’”
--and the door closed again on Miss Marlett, who had not altogether the
best of it in this affair of outposts, and could not help feeling as if
“that Miss Shields” was laughing at her.
“Old Cat!” the young lady went on, in a subdued whisper. “But no wonder
my hands were a little black, Janey. You forget that it’s my week to be
Stoker. Already, girls, by an early and unexpected movement, I have cut
off some of the enemy’s supplies.”
So speaking, Miss Margaret Shields proudly displayed a small deposit of
coals, stored, for secrecy, in the bottom of a clothes-basket.
“Gracious, Daisy, how clever! Well, you are something _like_ a stoker,”
exclaimed the third girl, who by this time had finished dressing: “we
shall have a blaze to-night.”
Now, it must be said that at Miss Marlett’s school, by an unusual and
inconsistent concession to comfort and sanitary principles, the elder
girls were allowed to have fires in their bed-rooms at night, in winter.
But seeing that these fires resembled the laughter of the wicked,
inasmuch as they were brief-lived as the crackling of thorns under pots,
the girls were driven to make predatory attacks on fuel wherever it
could be found. Sometimes, one is sorry to say, they robbed each
other’s fireplaces, and concealed the coal in their pockets. But this
conduct--resembling what is fabled of the natives of the Scilly Islands,
that they “eke out a precarious livelihood by taking in each other’s
washing”--led to strife and bickering; so that the Stoker for the week
(as the girl appointed to collect these supplies was called) had to
infringe a little on the secret household stores of Miss Marlett. This
week, as it happened, Margaret Shields was the Stoker, and she so bore
herself in her high office as to extort the admiration of the very
housemaids.
“Even the ranks of Tusculum
Could scarce forbear to cheer,”
If we may again quote the author who was at that time Miss Shields’
favorite poet. Miss Shields had not studied Mr. Matthew Arnold, and was
mercifully unaware that not to detect the “pinchbeck” in the _Lays_ is
the sign of a grovelling nature.
Before she was sent to Miss Marlett’s, four years ere this date,
Margaret Shields’ instruction had been limited. “The best thing that
could be said for it,” as the old sporting prophet remarked of his
own education, “was that it had been mainly eleemosynary.” The Chelsea
School Board fees could but rarely be extracted from old Dicky Shields.
But Robert Maitland, when still young in philanthropy, had seen the
clever, merry, brown-eyed child at some school treat, or inspection, or
other function; had covenanted in some sort with her shiftless parent;
had rescued the child from the streets, and sent her as a pupil to
Miss Marlett’s. Like Mr. Day, the accomplished author of “Sandford and
Merton,” and creator of the immortal Mr. Barlow, Robert Maitland had
conceived the hope that he might have a girl educated up to his own
intellectual standard, and made, or “ready-made,” a helpmate meet for
him. He was, in a more or less formal way, the guardian of Margaret
Shields, and the ward might be expected (by anyone who did not know
human nature any better) to blossom into the wife.
Maitland could “please himself,” as people say; that is, in his choice
of a partner he had no relations to please--no one but the elect young
lady, who, after all, might not be “pleased” with alacrity.
Whether pleased or not, there could be no doubt that Margaret Shields
was extremely pleasing. Beside her two shivering chamber-mates
(“chamber-dekyns” they would have been called, in Oxford slang, four
hundred years ago), Miss Shields looked quite brilliant, warm, and
comfortable, even in the eager and the nipping air of Miss Marlett’s
shuddering establishment, and by the frosty light of a single candle.
This young lady was tall and firmly fashioned; a nut-brown maid, with
a ruddy glow on her cheeks, with glossy hair rolled up in a big tight
knot, and with a smile (which knew when it was well off) always faithful
to her lips. These features, it is superfluous to say in speaking of a
heroine, “were rather too large for regular beauty.” She was perfectly
ready to face the enemy (in which light she humorously regarded her
mistress) when the loud cracked bell jangled at seven o’clock exactly,
and the drowsy girls came trooping from the dormitories down into the
wintry class-rooms.
Arithmetical diversions, in a cold chamber, were the intellectual treat
which awaited Margaret and her companions. Arithmetic and slates! Does
anyone remember--can anyone forget--how horribly distasteful a slate
can be when the icy fingers of youth have to clasp that cold educational
formation (Silurian, I believe), and to fumble with the greasy
slate-pencil? With her Colenso in her lap, Margaret Shields grappled for
some time with the mysteries of Tare and Tret. “Tare an’ ‘ouns, _I_ call
it,” whispered Janey Harman, who had taken, in the holidays, a “course”
of Lever’s Irish novels. Margaret did not make very satisfactory
progress with her commercial calculations. After hopelessly befogging
herself, she turned to that portion of Colenso’s engaging work which is
most palpitating with actuality:
“If ten Surrey laborers, in mowing a field of forty acres, drink
twenty-three quarts of beer, how much cider will thirteen Devonshire
laborers consume in building a stone wall of thirteen roods four poles
in length, and four feet six in height?”
This problem, also, proved too severe for Margaret’s mathematical
endowments, and (it is extraordinary how childish the very greatest
girls can be) she was playing at “oughts and crosses” with Janey Harman
when the arithmetic master came round. He sat down, not unwillingly,
beside Miss Shields, erased, without comment, the sportive diagrams, and
set himself vigorously to elucidate (by “the low cunning of algebra”)
the difficult sum from Colenso.
“You see, it is like _this_,” he said, mumbling rapidly, and scribbling
a series of figures and letters which the pupil was expected to follow
with intelligent interest. But the rapidity of the processes quite dazed
Margaret: a result not unusual when the teacher understands his topic
so well, and so much as a matter of course that he cannot make allowance
for the benighted darkness of the learner.
“Ninety-five firkins fourteen gallons three quarts. You see, it’s quite
simple,” said Mr. Cleghorn, the arithmetic master.
“Oh, thank you; I _see_,” said Margaret, with the kind readiness of
woman, who would profess to “see” the Secret of Hegel, or the
inmost heart of the Binomial Theorem, or the nature of the duties of
cover-point, or the latest hypothesis about the frieze of the Parthenon,
rather than be troubled with prolonged explanations, which the
expositor, after all, might find it inconvenient to give.
Arithmetic and algebra were not this scholar’s _forte_; and no young
lady in Miss Marlett’s establishment was so hungry, or so glad when
eight o’clock struck and the bell rang for breakfast, as Margaret
Shields.
Breakfast at Miss Marlett’s was not a convivial meal. There was a
long narrow table, with cross-tables at each end, these high seats, or
_dais_, being occupied by Miss Marlett and the governesses. At intervals
down the table were stacked huge piles of bread and butter--of extremely
thick bread and surprisingly thin butter--each slice being divided into
four portions. The rest of the banquet consisted solely of tea. Whether
this regimen was enough to support growing girls, who had risen at
seven, till dinnertime at half-past one, is a problem which, perhaps,
the inexperienced intellect of man can scarcely approach with
confidence. But, if girls do not always learn as much at school as could
be desired, intellectually speaking, it is certain that they have every
chance of acquiring Spartan habits, and of becoming accustomed (if
familiarity really breeds contempt) to despise hunger and cold. Not that
Miss Marlett’s establishment was a _Dothegirls Hall_, nor a school much
more scantily equipped with luxuries than others. But the human race has
still to learn that girls need good meals just as much as, or more than,
persons of maturer years. Boys are no better off at many places;
but boys have opportunities of adding bloaters and chops to their
breakfasts, which would be considered horribly indelicate and
insubordinate conduct in girls.
“Est ce que vous aimez les tartines à l’Anglaise,” said Janey Harman to
Margaret.
“Ce que j’aime dans la tartine, c’est la simplicité prime-sautière da sa
nature,” answered Miss Shields.
It was one of the charms of the “matinal meal” (as the author of “Guy
Livingstone” calls breakfast) that the young ladies were all compelled
to talk French (and such French!) during this period of refreshment.
“Toutes choses, la cuisine exceptée, sont Françaises, dans cet
établissement peu recréatif,” went on Janey, speaking low and fast.
“Je déteste le Français,” Margaret answered, “mais je le préfère
infiniment à l’Allemand.”
“Comment accentuez, vous le mot préfère, Marguerite?” asked Miss
Marlett, who had heard the word, and who neglected no chance of
conveying instruction.
“Oh, two accents--one this way, and the other that,” answered Margaret,
caught unawares. She certainly did not reply in the most correct
terminology.
“Vous allez perdre dix marks,” remarked the schoolmistress, if
incorrectly, perhaps not too severely. But perhaps it is not easy
to say, off-hand, what word Miss Marlett ought to have employed for
“marks.”
“Voici les lettres qui arrivent,” whispered Janey to Margaret, as the
post-bag was brought in and deposited before Miss Marlett, who opened it
with a key and withdrew the contents.
This was a trying moment for the young ladies. Miss Marlett first
sorted out all the letters for the girls, which came, indubitably and
unmistakably, from fathers and mothers. Then she picked out the other
letters, those directed to young ladies whom she thought she could
trust, and handed them over in honorable silence. These maidens were
regarded with envy by the others. Among them was not Miss Harman,
whose letters Miss Marlett always deliberately opened and read before
delivering them.
“Il y a une lettre pour moi, et elle va la lire,” said poor Janey to her
friend, who, for her part, never received any letters, save a few, at
stated intervals, from Maitland. These Miss Shields used to carry about
in her pocket without opening them till they were all crumply at the
edges. Then she hastily mastered their contents, and made answer in the
briefest and most decorous manner.
“Qui est votre correspondent?” Margaret asked. We are not defending her
French.
“C’est le pauvre Harry Wyville,” answered Janey. “Il est sous-lieutenant
dans les Berkshires à Aldershot Pourquoi ne doit il pas écrire à moi, il
est comme on diroit, mon frère.”
“Est il votre parent?”
“Non, pas du tout, mais je l’ai connu pour des ans. Oh, pour des ans!
Voici, elle à deux dépêches télégraphiques,” Janey added, observing
two orange colored envelopes which had come in the mail-bag with the
letters.
As this moment Miss Marlett finished the fraternal epistle of Lieutenant
Wyville, which she folded up with a frown and returned to the envelope.
“Jeanne je veux vous parler à part, après, dans mon boudoir,” remarked
Miss Marlett severely; and Miss Herman, becoming a little blanched,
displayed no further appetite for tartines, nor for French conversation.
Indeed, to see another, and a much older lady, read letters written to
one by a lieutenant at Aldershot, whom one has known for years, and who
is just like one’s brother, is a trial to any girl.
Then Miss Marlett betook herself to her own correspondence, which,
as Janey had noticed, included _two_ telegraphic despatches in
orange-colored envelopes.
That she had not rushed at these, and opened them first, proves the
admirable rigidity of her discipline. Any other woman would have
done so, but it was Miss Marietta rule to dispose of the pupils’
correspondence before attending to her own. “Business first, pleasure
afterward,” was the motto of this admirable woman.
Breakfast ended, as the girls were leaving the room for the tasks of the
day, Miss Marlett beckoned Margaret aside.
“Come to me, dear, in the boudoir, after Janey Harman,” said the
schoolmistress in English, and in a tone to which Margaret was so
unaccustomed that she felt painfully uneasy and anxious--unwonted moods
for this careless maiden.
“Janey, something must have happened,” she whispered to her friend, who
was hardening her own heart for the dreadful interview.
“Something’s _going_ to happen, I’m sure,” said poor Janey,
apprehensively, and then she entered the august presence, alone.
Margaret remained at the further end of the passage, leading to what
Miss Marlett, when she spoke French, called her “boudoir.” The girl felt
colder than even the weather warranted. She looked alternately at Miss
Marietta door and out of the window, across the dead blank flats to the
low white hills far away. Just under the window one of the little girls
was standing, throwing crumbs, remains of the tartines, to robins
and sparrows, which chattered and fought over the spoil. One or two
blackbirds, with their yellow bills, fluttered shyly on the outside of
the ring of more familiar birds. Up from the south a miserable blue-gray
haze was drifting and shuddering, ominous of a thaw. From the eaves and
the branches of the trees heavy drops kept falling, making round black
holes in the snow, and mixing and melting here and there in a yellowish
plash.
Margaret shivered. Then she heard the boudoir door open, and Janey came
out, making a plucky attempt not to cry.
“What is it?” whispered Margaret, forgetting the dread interview before
her, and her own unformed misgivings.
“She won’t give me the letter. I’m to have it when I go home for good;
and I’m to go home for good at the holidays,” whimpered Janey.
“Poor Janey!” said Margaret, petting the blonde head on her shoulder.
“Margaret Shields, come here!” cried Miss Marlett, in a shaky voice,
from the boudoir.
“Come to the back music-room when she’s done with you,” the other
girl whispered. And Margaret marched, with a beating heart, into Miss
Marlett’s chamber.
“My dear Margaret!” said Miss Marlett, holding out her hands. She was
standing up in the middle of the boudoir. She ought to have been sitting
grimly, fortified behind her bureau; that was the position in which she
generally received pupils on these gloomy occasions.
“My dear Margaret!” she repeated. The girl trembled a little as the
school-mistress drew her closer, and made her sit down on a sofa.
“What has happened?” she asked. Her lips were so dry that she could
scarcely speak.
“You must make up your mind to be very brave. Your father----”
“Was it an accident?” asked Margaret, suddenly. She knew pretty well
what was coming. Often she had foreseen the end, which it needed no
prophet to foretell. “Was it anything very dreadful?”
“Mr. Maitland does not say. You are to be called for to-day. Poor
Daisy!”
“Oh, Miss Marlett, I am so very unhappy!” the girl sobbed. Somehow she
was kneeling now, with her head buried in the elder lady’s lap. “I have
been horrid to you. I am so wretched!”
A little kindness and a sudden trouble had broken down Miss Margaret
Shields. For years she had been living, like Dr. Johnson at college,
with a sad and hungry heart, trying to “carry it off by her wild talk
and her wit.” “It was bitterness they mistook for frolic.” She had known
herself to be a kind of outcast, and she determined to hold her own with
the other girls who had homes and went to them in the holidays. Margaret
had not gone home for a year. She had learned much, working harder than
they knew; she had been in the “best set” among the pupils, by dint of
her cheery rebelliousness. Now she suddenly felt all her loneliness, and
knew, too, that she had been living, socially, in that little society at
the expense of this kind queer old Miss Marlett’s feelings.
“I have been horrid to you,” she repeated. “I wish I had never been
born.”
The school-mistress said nothing at all, but kept stroking the girl’s
beautiful head. Surreptitiously Miss Marlett wiped away a frosty tear.
“Don’t mind me,” at last Miss Marlett said. “I never thought hardly of
you; I understood. Now you must go and get ready for your journey; you
can have any of the girls you like to help you to pack.”
Miss Marlett carried generosity so far that she did not even ask which
of the girls was to be chosen for this service. Perhaps she guessed that
it was the other culprit.
Then Margaret rose and dried her eyes, and Miss Marlett took her in her
arms and kissed her and went off to order a travelling luncheon and to
select the warmest railway rug she could find; for the teacher, though
she was not a very learned nor judicious school-mistress, had a heart
and affections of her own. She had once, it is true, taken the word
_legibus_ (dative plural of lex, a law) for an adjective of the third
declension, legibus, legiba, legibum; and Margaret had criticised this
grammatical subtlety with an unsparing philological acumen, as if she
had been Professor Moritz Haupt and Miss Marlett, Orelli. And this had
led to the end of Latin lessons at the Dovecot, wherefore Margaret was
honored as a goddess by girls averse to studying the classic languages.
But now Miss Marlett forgot these things, and all the other skirmishes
of the past.
Margaret went wearily to her room, where she bathed her face with cold
water; it could not be too cold for her, A certain numb forgetfulness
seemed to steep her mind while she was thus deadening her eyes again
and again. She felt as if she never wished to raise her eyes from this
chilling consolation. Then, when she thought she had got lid of all the
traces of her trouble, she went cautiously to the back music-room. Janey
was there, moping alone, drumming on the window-pane with her fingers.
“Come to my room, Janey,” she said, beckoning.
Now, to consort together in their bedrooms during school-hours was
forbidden to the girls.
“Why, well only get into another scrape,” said Janey, ruefully.
“No, come away; I’ve got leave for you. You’re to help me to pack”
“To pack!” cried Janey. “Why, _you’re_ not expelled, are you? You’ve
done nothing. You’ve not even had a perfectly harmless letter from a boy
who is just like a brother to you and whom you’ve known for years.”
Margaret only beckoned again and turned away, Janey following in silence
and intense curiosity.
When they reached their room, where Margaret’s portmanteau had already
been placed, the girl began to put up such things as she would need for
a short journey. She said nothing till she had finished, and then she
sat down on a bed and told Janey what she had learned; and the pair “had
a good cry,” and comforted each other as well as they might.
“And what are you going to do?” asked Janey, when, as Homer says, “they
had taken their fill of chilling lamentations.”
“I don’t know!”
“Have you no one else in all the world?”
“No one at all. My mother died when I was a little child, in Smyrna.
Since then we have wandered all about; we were a long time in Algiers,
and we were at Marseilles, and then in London.”
“But you have a guardian, haven’t you?”
“Yes; he sent me here. And, of course, he’s been very kind, and done
everything for me; but he’s quite a young man, not thirty, and he’s so
stupid, and so stiff, and thinks so much about Oxford, and talks so like
a book. And he’s so shy, and always seems to do everything, not because
he likes it, but because he thinks he ought to. And, besides--”
But Margaret did not go further in her confessions, nor explain more
lucidly why she had scant affection for Mait-land of St. Gatien’s.
“And had your poor father no other friends who could take care of you?”
Janey asked.
“There was a gentleman who called now and then; I saw him twice. He had
been an officer in father’s ship, I think, or had known him long ago at
sea. He found us out somehow in Chelsea. There was no one else at all.”
“And you don’t know any of your father’s family?”
“No,” said Margaret, wearily. “Ob, I have forgotten to pack up my
prayer-book.” And she took up a little worn volume in black morocco with
silver clasps. “This was a book my father gave me,” she said. “It has a
name on it--my grandfather’s, I suppose--‘Richard Johnson, Linkheaton,
1837.’” Then she put the book in a pocket of her travelling cloak.
“Your mother’s father it may have belonged to,” said Janey.
“I don’t know,” Margaret replied, looking out of the window.
“I hope you won’t stay away long, dear,” said Janey, affectionately.
“But _you_ are going, too, you know,” Margaret answered, without much
tact; and Janey, reminded of her private griefs, was about to break
down, when the wheels of a carriage were heard laboring slowly up the
snow-laden drive.
“Why, here’s some one coming!” cried Janey, rushing to the window. “Two
horses! and a gentleman all in furs. Oh, Margaret, this must be for
you!”