GOING TO SCHOOL
“Your aunt wishes to send you both to the school where she has arranged
to send Margot.”
It was the doctor who was speaking, and Gretta clutched the coffee-pot
and stared with amazement at his surprising announcement.
To go to school! She, Gretta! So this was auntie’s secret! At first the
shock of surprise at the unexpected news held her speechless, almost
breathless; then the shock was followed by an overwhelming wave of
delight. The great wish of her life, that she had never voiced to anyone
before, was really to come to pass: she was to go to school--to school!
She sat silent, almost stunned with excitement and joy.
“You would like to go, of course?” said her father. At the sound of his
voice she glanced up, and a whole set of new feelings took the place of
the delighted ones that had filled her mind a moment before.
“How selfish I am!” she said to herself. “I’d quite forgotten that I’m
dad’s housekeeper. Oh, I can’t go and leave him all alone with Ann! How
lonely he’d be! And he might even get ill. Sybil can go, but I don’t see
how I can!”
“Well! Well!” said her father irritably. “Have you nothing to say? Your
aunt has been most generous; wants you both to get the advantage of good
teaching--even suggests that she will pay for violin lessons for
you----”
“Oh!” Gretta’s face crimsoned with pleasure at the idea. “Dad,” she
ventured, “but could you spare me?”
“Spare you! Why not?” said her father. “It’ll be the making of you. I
could never have afforded the school she has chosen, and the best thanks
you can give her is to make the most of her offer. It is generous in the
extreme.”
“But, dad,” ventured Gretta. “What would _you_ do? Wouldn’t you miss
us?”
“Well, yes,” said her father. “But we can’t get good things for nothing
in this world, and it’ll be worth while to be lonely at times if I know
that you and Sybil are being turned out as your mother would have
liked.” He opened his paper again, and Gretta said no more. So seldom
did he speak of her mother that the child knew by his last remark that
the arrangement was settled, and that he did not wish to say any more
about it.
“But talk it over with your aunt when she brings back Sybil to-morrow,”
he remarked, as he brushed his hat in the passage preparatory to
starting on his rounds. “Good-bye, child; you mustn’t turn into a woman
too soon, you know.”
He kissed her and banged the front door, and Gretta was left to a maze
of excited thoughts: she _was_ to go to school; the decision had been
taken out of her hands!
How much she longed to go she believed that no one in the whole world
knew. No one? Well, perhaps her fiddle did, the child thought to
herself; for Gretta, since her mother’s death, had been thrown very much
upon her own resources, and she would have felt even more solitary and
companionless had it not been for the hours she spent with her beloved
violin.
Could auntie have discovered all this, Gretta wondered--she was lovely
enough for anything! For, as she had offered the violin lessons, too,
she surely must have guessed how her elder niece had longed and longed
for proper ones! Gretta’s mother had played and had taught her, herself,
but when mother died, a year ago, there had been no one to help the
child with her music, and she had been forced to muddle along alone.
“How did Auntie Tib know about my violin?” she inquired of the doctor at
dinnertime that day.
“I don’t know, my dear. Probably your mother wrote to her about your
music,” said the doctor, who could not distinguish one note of music
from another. “She seems to wish you to keep it up at school.”
“Where is it? The school, I mean?” ventured Gretta timidly.
“Oh, a most healthy, bracing spot; sea-air and fine views, I believe.
The house is built on a sandy soil, and there is every modern
convenience conducive to health; sanitary arrangements splendid; you’re
a pair of lucky children!”
Gretta was used to streams of eloquence that she only half understood.
She waited patiently until this one was over. Evidently none of the
details dear to the hearts of children were to be elicited through
conversation with the doctor; she was thrown back upon her own
imaginings, and waited patiently for the advent of her aunt and Sybil on
the following day.
It was with a face of unusual excitement that she rushed to open the
front door to them when the time arrived, and the first glance at the
child’s eager face reassured Mrs. Fleming, who had feared that Gretta
might have demurred against the arrangement for her father’s sake.
“You’re looking forward to school, then, Gretta?” she inquired, when
Sybil had flown to acquaint Ann with the details of her visit.
“Dad says we’re to go, and he seems to think he can manage without me,
and thank you very much,” said Gretta, unwontedly demonstrative in the
excitement that she was feeling. “Auntie, darling, do you really mean
it?--about violin lessons, too?”
“Why, of course, my dear,” said Mrs. Fleming. “Your mother told me in
her letters, as you know, that you had quite a special gift in that
direction. She played so beautifully herself that I should like you to
have the advantages she had. Perhaps, too, Gretta, you know, you might
use it in years to come. It means hard work, but--the practising, I
mean.”
“Practice!” repeated Sybil, entering the room in high feather. “Is that
what you’re talking about? What a stupid thing! Aren’t you telling
Gretta about the hotel breakfast, auntie, and all the lots of different
things the waiters brought! But she’s sure to talk about that old
violin if anyone’ll listen; she’s just half-crazy about it. She twangs
it from morning to night when dad’s out, and last month she gave up
sugar in her tea because she’d no pocket-money and she wanted to buy a
new string, and----” The child paused, breathless.
Gretta blushed crimson, but as much with pleasure at what the future
held, as with annoyance at Sybil’s speech. Everything in her world
seemed changed; school, music-lessons, were to come her way; she was
feeling that she already had as much pleasure in prospect as a princess
in a fairy-tale, when Mrs. Fleming’s next speech made her gasp.
“And we’ve got all your clothes to get, you know.”
Clothes! Gretta hadn’t given them a thought; but evidently Sybil had.
“I’m to have some jumper dresses just like Margot’s,” she announced
grandly. “We’ve both been measured! And brown stockings,
Gretta--_brown!_”
Evidently with brown stockings the summit of Sybil’s happiness had been
reached. Gretta could only turn her eyes wonderingly towards her aunt.
“Oh, auntie, how lovely! But--ought she to have them? She has some quite
good black ones, only, of course, they’re darned.”
“Oh, Gretta, you spoil-sport! But you can’t change it, for they’re
bought, aren’t they, Auntie Tib?” and she danced a jig round Mrs.
Fleming’s chair.
“I spoke to your father, Gretta,” said that lady, when Sybil’s
excitement had subsided, “and asked him if I might think of you three
little girls as sisters while you were at school. He agreed, and
understood why I wanted it, and I think _you_ are old enough to
understand, too.”
Gretta said no more after that; she did not find it so easy as Sybil did
to express herself in words, but Mrs. Fleming could read the feelings in
her face and felt well repaid for all that she was doing for the
children. When she left again that afternoon it was with the promise
that, during the fortnight that remained before the new term at the
Cliff School commenced, she would undertake the buying of the children’s
wardrobes, and see that all things were in readiness for the
twenty-first of January.
That fortnight went by in a whirl of delight. Ann worked with a will,
excited with the idea that she was to be the doctor’s housekeeper and
factotum and “see if she could manage to make him really comfortable,”
as Mrs. Fleming put it. The doctor forgot his worries and fell in with
all the plans. Auntie came and went like a good fairy, cheerful and
kind, and Sybil was in such a state of wild delight at the pleasures
that school must hold for her that she could hardly wait patiently until
the eventful day should arrive.
“But you’ll be as glad to get home for the holidays as you are to get
away, Miss Sybil, and that’s a fact,” quoth Ann sententiously, on the
last evening. “You’ll have to behave yourself where you’re going; see if
you don’t!”
“That’s all _you_ know about it!” said Sybil grandly.
But when the day had dawned at last--the twenty-first of January, and
the first day of school--the throb that the little girl’s heart gave as
she woke from her dreams somehow or other did not feel as though it was
quite due to joyful excitement, and even Gretta was conscious of very
mixed feelings, the most pronounced of which seemed to be a positive
disinclination to saying good-bye to the doctor.
The children’s father appeared to be the most cheery member of the
group that met at the breakfast-table. Sybil found herself for once
quite unable to eat, and if it had not been for Ann’s I-told-you-so
expression of countenance when she entered the room with hot plates, the
child would probably have dissolved into tears before the end of the
meal. Her older sister was fully occupied with her own thoughts; turning
and re-turning over in her mind every possible dreadful thing that might
happen! Suppose Ann should not make dad comfortable; suppose he should
get ill! Suppose--suppose! It was a relief to all when the postman’s
knock sounded and Sybil raced to the letter-box, taking the opportunity
to mop her eyes in the loneliness of the passage as she went.
The only letter proved to be from auntie, and was merely a repetition of
the plans already decided upon for the comfort of the children on their
journey. “Margot and I will meet you both for lunch at York,” she wrote.
“Then I will see you into the Cliffland train, and you three will travel
down together.” The words came like the welcome sound of Mrs. Fleming’s
cheery voice; somehow things began to feel different, and by ten
o’clock, when the children were ready to start for the station with
their father, Sybil’s tongue, at least, was loosed once more.
“Good-bye, Ann. When I come back I’ll tell you all about school.” Sybil
was dressed in her new navy-blue suit and sported the cherished brown
stockings. Her hair was plaited and tied with a ribbon bow. She felt an
experienced schoolgirl already.
“Good-bye, Miss Sybil, and if they treat you badly, you just come
straight back ’ome; I ’ates them schools!” and Ann, whose knowledge was
altogether derived from sensational and impossible story-books, wiped
her eyes with her apron in anticipation of the troubles her pets were to
endure.
“Pooh!” said Sybil; “school’s not like that! Just you _wait_! I may come
back with heaps of prizes, and even _medals_ for all you know!”
Upstairs Gretta was clinging to her father, and wishing very hard indeed
that she needn’t go. “Dad, if you want me, you’ll _promise_ to send for
me?”
“I’ll promise,” said the doctor, with a trace of a smile at her words.
“And you’ll really change your boots when they’re wet, and not catch
cold! I’ve told Ann always to warm your slippers, but she’s certain to
forget after the first day; and you _will_ say if she makes the tea
properly hot when you write, won’t you?”
Her last injunctions were broken in upon by Sybil, who burst upstairs in
a frenzy of excitement. “The cab’s coming, and my elastic’s off my
perfectly new hat! And it’s all pussy’s fault; she would play with me
when I was saying good-bye to her, and I _had_ to snap it at her!”
In the excitement of putting the finishing touches to Sybil’s wardrobe
the last few minutes quickly passed, and before they could realize that
they were actually off, the children found themselves kissing their
hands frantically to their father, who was standing on the fast receding
platform waving his handkerchief. Really and truly they were off to
school!