THE WHITE LADY OF LYSTERBY.
Do the ladies of Lysterby continue to train atrociously and mismanage
children, to starve and thwart them, as they did in those far-off days,
so remote that on looking back it seems to me now that somebody else and
not I, a pacific and indifferent woman, content with most things round
about me, lived those five years of perpetual passion and frantic
unhappiness? Or has the old convent vanished, and carried off its long
tale of incompetence, ignorance, cruel stupidity, and futile vexation?
For the seeds of many an illness were stored up in young bodies by
systematic under-feeding, and hunger turned most of us into wistful
little gluttons, gazing longingly into the cake-shops as we marched two
by two through the tiny city, dreaming at night of Barmecide feasts, and
envying the fate of the happier children at home, who devoured all the
sweet things we with our empty little stomachs so bitterly remembered.
Sweet things only! Enough of bread-and-butter would have satisfied our
craving. When one of us sickened and rejected the single thin slice of
bread-and-butter allowed the children at breakfast, oh, the prayer and
expectation of each pair of hungry eyes fixed upon the sufferer, to see
to whom she would offer her neglected slice! The slice was cut in two,
and usually offered, while the nun was not looking, to the children on
either side. This miscarriage of appetite, we noted with regret, more
frequently happened at the two tables of the big girls, where such
windfalls were constantly amplifying the meagre breakfasts of somebody
or other in long skirts. But we were only ten, and our appetite was
pretty steady and never satisfied. Now it taxes all my heroism to visit
the dentist; but then I knew each visit was a prospective joy, for, if I
did not cry, the lay-teacher who conducted me thither always allowed me
to buy a jam-tart, which I ate as slowly as possible in the
confectioner's shop, noting the ravages of my teeth in the cake of
delight with melancholy and dismay. I so loved the recompense that I
used to watch anxiously for the first sign of a shaky tooth, and the
instant it was removed, I was sure to shriek out excitedly--
"You see, Miss Lawson, I didn't cry a bit."
But I would not have it thought that those early school-days were days
of untempered bitterness and constant ache. We were a merry lot of
little savages as far as the authorities permitted us to enjoy
ourselves, and life continually revealed its quaint surprises and
thrilling terrors. I learnt to read with amazing rapidity, and my
favourite books were of a kind liberally supplied by the convent
library--Tyburn, wonderful tales of the escapes and underground
adventures of Jesuits, double walls, spring-doors, mysterious passages,
whitened bones in long-forgotten boxes. Thanks to my ingenuity and vivid
imagination, our days became for us all a wild romance. Relegated to the
infirmary by prolonged illnesses, the result of semi-starvation,
naturally I had leisure to read laboriously various volumes of this
edifying literature.
The infirmary itself was a chamber of legend. It was a kind of
out-building to which led a long corridor behind just the sort of door
my mind was fixed upon, a mere panel that in no way differed from the
rest of the wainscoted wall, the very door for a Jesuit to vanish
through from the pursuit of mailed myrmidons. At the end of the corridor
you went down a flight of stairs, then up another flight into a pretty
little green-and-white room, low beamed, with cozy cots, and long
windows looking out beyond the rose-bushes, and a slip of velvet lawn,
where a terrible-looking and most enchanting alley, with the trees
meeting overhead, seemed to lead straight into the twilight of
ghostland.
It did not take me long to see a white lady slip down that alley, like a
white mist swallowed up in sombre night. No power on earth could have
convinced me that I had not seen a ghost, and I stood at the window
straining my eyes out in waiting for the white lady's return, with both
hands frantically clasped upon my heart, which beat as if it projected a
spring through my throat. White-faced and appalled, I hurried to the
infirmarian, who brought me in something hot to take, and screamed out,
"Oh, I've seen her, I've seen her! she was all in white, a real ghost!"
That night I was in full fever, and my poor silly little story-books
were taken away. But they had done their work, and by the time I was
well again my imagination had wrought out the stupendous fiction that
was to communicate its thrill even to some of the big girls, and send a
dozen of little girls crawling upon their knees and hands, victims of
my imagination. The white lady I conceived to be the ghost of a
beautiful Catholic persecuted in the days of Tyburn. She lived in this
old manor-house, for we knew that the Ivies had been a manor. In her
terror she had flown through the panel-door leading to the infirmary.
The flight of stairs, of course, in those days continued beyond the
floor, and the subterranean passage probably led round by the courtyard
to the gate at the end of the dark alley. I decided that there must be
several whitened bones under the floor of this corridor and the
infirmary, and so convinced all my companions, even Frank, that whining
little cad whom we all so heartily detested, that on play-days, during
the holidays, on Sunday afternoons, every moment we could spend in
secrecy, in turn two of us (companionship was necessary to add to the
excitement of labour and the terrors of consequences) would crawl away
from the rest with penknives and pencils, and assiduously cut away at
the wooden floor until we had made a hole large enough to insert our
little fists underneath. It must be admitted we always found something
hard and white, which proved my theory, and those bits of dry chips we
handled in awe.
For some singular months we lived upon this romance, and lived in it so
intensely that all else became but a dream. Dream-like we accomplished
our tasks, filled our slates with figures, copied headlines, recited
verses, the dates of English history, wrought our samplers, and answered
the responses of the rosary. But our thoughts, ourselves, were
elsewhere, with the next beam to make a hole in, and the assurance I had
given them that I had seen through a chink of the infirmary floor a
white hand like marble. I was the first victim of my own invention, for
I honestly believed all I said. I will not say that vanity was an alien
factor in the unconscious invention. I enjoyed my power, my triumph, the
fear I had inspired and so thrillingly shared--above all, I enjoyed the
popularity it gave me as leader of a band of miscreants.
I do not remember how or why the fever abated. Were we found out and
punished for mutilated planks? We so exaggerated the mystery of our
conspiracy that it would be strange indeed if it were not discovered.
But the end of the romance is completely effaced from memory. It has
left no impression whatever. I see myself in turn frozen and fevered
with terror, digging at every mortal spot of the convent open to the
depredations of my penknife, in a wild hunt for bones and secret
passages and forbidden stairs. I see the whole school enthralled by my
ardent whim. And that is all.