The farmer and his family left the old north-country farm and went to
live in a large town some sixty miles away.
To the children at first this was all delightfully new. The house was
bigger, the rooms higher, and altogether it was wonderfully strange.
Hot water upstairs and down was a tremendous luxury, and a bath into
which Maggie and Deborah could both get together, and still leave
room for Elinor if she had also a mind to come, seemed really too
miraculously funny for words. But when you looked outside it was not
so inviting. To be sure there were trees in the garden opposite, and
very pretty gardens and trees belonging to the houses at the back, but
there was nothing loose, nor wild, nor natural about them. They hadn’t
breathed the scent of air blown off the Fells, nor drunk of the rain
whose clouds had blown across the Cumbrian Mountains. No, they were
simply city trees and city grass, and gave one a feeling of unrest and
unhappiness one could scarcely understand, for at the time you didn’t
understand that you were comparing them with a fuller, freer growth far
away. And here there was no interesting servant to impress them with
her conversation. And no milk, nor porridge, nor fowls, nor chickens,
nor anything that there had been before. The old grey cat had been
given away, and only the best of the furniture transplanted. So that
at the bottom there was something distinctly sad about this new home.
However, they settled down, and after a time things looked a bit more
ship-shape.
Then came the vital question—Where were the children to go to school?
Opposite their house was a semi-detached villa in which lived three
ladies who conducted a private school. It was eminently respectable,
indeed select, and just the place for the three younger girls to be
sent to. About five minutes’ walk away was a large church school, very
respectable and in good working order, and also well conducted, but
still supplying only elementary education.
Marion determined they should go to the former. Their father, for once,
was resolved they should attend the latter.
It was a very uncomfortable time.
“They will grow into little common vulgar things,” said she.
“They will get a sound education,” said he.
But that had no attraction for her—perhaps she did not quite
understand the phrase.
So matters went on, and after a terrible deal of argument the children
went to the elementary school. Their father took them himself, and
Elinor confidently, though privately, affirmed afterwards that the
schoolmistress fell in love with him, though on what grounds it would
be hard to say. Elinor loved to circulate stories like this—it added
zest to life. This precocious young lady had previously gathered Maggie
and Deborah together and admonished them.
“Now you’re not to speak to any of the children at this new school
we’re going to. They’re very common, and if you talk to them you’ll
grow as common as they. Now do you hear, Maggie? You’re to make no
friends at all.”
“All right,” said Maggie.
“Aren’t we to speak to them if they speak to us?” piped Deborah.
“Of course not. Now remember. At dinner-time I shall ask you.”
How Maggie fared Deborah never knew, but she herself fared badly.
She was placed next to a very loquacious child to whom pride,
_that_ kind of pride, was a sealed book.
“Yer’ll need-a-bag ter keep yer books in like me,” said she.
No answer.
“D’ye ’ear? Yer’ll need-a-bag.”
“Ye-es.”
“Yer new, aren’t yer?”
“Ye-es.”
Then she began stroking Deborah down the back in a most friendly manner.
“Is this yer frock or yer pinnifore?”
“It’s my frock.”
“Sara Jenkins, come out, you’re talking,” came the sound of a teacher’s
voice across the class.
“Please it was me,” said Deborah, getting up, trembling in every limb.
“Sit down. Sarah Jenkins, come out.”
So out went Sarah and received two raps with a cane. She came back
howling and wringing her hands, but she soon recovered.
“Have you ever had the toffee stick?” she asked.
“What’s that?” queried Deb.
“Why, the cane. Yer don’t know nothing.”
“No,” said Deborah, meekly.
“Shut up—she’s looking at us.”
Deborah reddened painfully. It was the first time she had ever been
told to “shut up” by a stranger.
Thus the time passed till twelve o’clock.
The three children waited for each other.
“Did you speak to anyone, Maggie?” asked Elinor, imperatively.
“Oh, no,” replied Maggie, and looked straight ahead.
“Did you, Deborah?”
“I—I only said ‘thank you’ when a girl lent me a pencil.”
“There was no need.”
On the second day Elinor altered her order.
“You can speak to the other children,” she said. “Some of them are
really very nice.”
But Elinor was a cure.
She was up to as many antics as the day was long, and formed a
friendship with all the pupil-teachers of that school, keeping them for
the most part screaming with laughter, or open-eyed with astonishment.
For the particular mistress who taught her she formed a more reverent
attachment.
One day Deborah came across her just before school time, busy stuffing
the front of her bodice with brown paper.
“What are you doing?” she asked languidly.
“Well, you see, Miss So-and-So has a remarkably good bust, and I want
to be more like her,” she answered.
“But you’re not going to school like that,” said Deborah, still with
the same half-interest, as she saw Elinor fastening her buttons over
the crude padding.
“Of course I am. What’s wrong with me?”
“Oh, nothing,” but she eyed her with mild astonishment.
All that afternoon the pupil-teachers were a mixture of giggles and
laughter, but Elinor looked as serious as a judge, and as matronly as
if she were her own mother.
A little while after this a mouse ran out in her particular class,
causing most naturally great excitement.
“Oh! OH! Miss Montague, there it is just behind you! There, behind your
foot! Oh! Oh! it’s run up your petticoat!” and Elinor ran out to shake
her skirts. “There, it’s run under the desk.” But it had really run
under the desk long since, only Elinor had grown tired of the monotony
of sitting still, and the others enjoyed it immensely; to see the
dignified teacher skipping about thinking the mouse was on her was to
them delightful.
Elinor did not stay long at school—she left in about a year. She
had never made much progress there, lessons evidently not being her
particular _forte_.
The only thing she had perhaps really learnt was to recite Gray’s
“Elegy,” and even Miss Montague gave her credit for being able to do
that.
The school lives of Maggie and Deborah afterwards became fairly calm.
Marion also was reconciled to the inevitable, chiefly no doubt because
one of the clergymen sent his son to the same school soon afterwards,
and upon that there followed a doctor’s daughter. This girl made great
friends with Maggie and Deborah, and the friendship lasted for a good
many years. But she at least was strong enough to keep to the rule of
never speaking to any other girls but as inferiors.
When she first came her mother had expressly forbidden that she should
be caned; consequently the other girls detested, even hated her.
Deborah out of school soon forgot all about all this. She never formed
any friendships except with those girls who distinctly put themselves
out of the way to approach her, and these naturally were very few.
There were two things only that made up her world. One was love for
her father, and the other, love of a world created out of involuntary
dreams.
Together with her love for her father went a strong religious tendency;
she had a great belief in the goodness of God and the love of Christ.
Instinctively Deborah felt the cloud that was hanging over them, yet
could not account for it.
For the first two years after leaving the country her father had
answered various advertisements, and gone personally in search of
situations, but nothing ever came of them. Then came a third year,
one of the dullest and gloomiest that could be imagined. There was
very little to live on, and only those who have had to live on nothing
and yet appear as if they lived on something can fully understand its
miseries.
Perhaps the saddest and most miserable thing of all was to see the
farmer in his best black coat. It had grown very brown and old and out
of fashion, and because he had grown thinner it seemed rather to hang
on him. There had been a time in the country when he regularly went to
church in it night and morning, for he had been a churchwarden nearly
twenty years. But now he never went to church at all. He read the Bible
at home some times instead. You see he had no top hat; the one that
formerly shone so well and looked so smooth was now shabby and old,
and how could a man who had regularly gone to church in a silk hat for
twenty years and was now growing old ever accustom himself to go there
in anything inferior?
Besides, he had no money, and once when Deborah, with a child’s
pointedness, had asked him why he never went to church now, he
replied,—
“One’s clothes are too shabby, and it looks badly to put nothing in at
the collection.”
When he said it he had looked out of the window and she only saw the
back of his head, which was growing very white and bald.
On a week day he wore an old grey coat, which was also too big for him,
and it was also very, very shabby.
But Deborah loved that old grey coat, it was somehow or other so very
like him, and he used to wear it in the country; only then it had not
been frayed at the corners as it was now.
At night, when she came home from school, he always helped her with her
lessons. He used to rule the lines with a round ruler, and he never
ruled them crooked nor made a smudge, as she was always doing. But it
must have been a bitterly miserable and humiliating time to him; he had
never been idle in his life before, and now there seemed absolutely
nothing for him to do.
His second son had gone to America, whilst he had placed his third
in an engineering office. He had congratulated himself upon this last
stroke of business, and felt confident he had given him a good start in
life; but very curiously, very depressingly, the whole thing went smash
just about this time and added to the general misery.
Jack, therefore, went for a while to stay with an uncle in the country
and do his book-keeping.
Of the girls, Marion stayed at home to look after the house, whilst
Susan took a situation as mother’s help. But it was a very unsuitable
place and she was obliged to leave. However, from there she went to a
children’s hospital to nurse. This was at eighteen. She stayed there
for several years and then went into one for adults. Afterwards she
took up private nursing and got on very nicely.
Elinor, when straits came to a very bad pass, was sent to learn
dressmaking. From the accounts she brought home they seemed to be very
strange kind of people, and perhaps she was right, as once when she
landed at the place in the morning it was to find they had decamped,
which naturally brought her home in the greatest state of excitement.
Maggie and Deborah continued at school, being too young to leave it.
“The end of it will be we shall all have to turn out and become
servants,” Marion used to say.
That seemed a terrible thing. They had not been brought up to think
that a servant is as good or as bad as a duchess. But then—who ever is?
And so the time dragged on.
After a time their father began to go regularly to town each morning,
and things at home began to look a bit brighter.
It’s wonderful what a change a little money can make after absolutely
none; one feels one has a right to live in the world where otherwise
one would be far better out of it.
Next, the greatest thing was that the farmer was able to buy a new suit
and a new hat. He looked quite a gentleman again and was once more able
to attend the church.
Still, though the cloud had lifted it had not by any means dispersed;
only they had become so accustomed to the deep gloom that this partial
lift seemed like the bright sunshine.