ELEANOR'S REPUTATION--THE MAD GENTLEMAN--FANCIES AND FOLLIES--MATILDA'S
HEALTH--THE NEW DOCTOR.
We were not jealous of Eleanor's popularity. She was popular with the
girls as well as with the teachers. If she was apt to be opinionated,
she was candid, generous, and modest. She was always willing to help any
one, and (the firmest seal of friendship!) she was utterly sincere.
She worked harder than any of us, so it was but just that she should be
most commended. But of all who lagged behind her, and who felt Madame's
severity, and created despair in the mind of the little
arithmetic-master, the most unlucky was poor Matilda.
Matilda and I were now on the best of terms, and the credit of this
happy condition of matters is more hers than mine.
It was not so much that I had learned more tact and sympathy (though I
hope these qualities do ripen with years and better knowledge!) as
because Matilda did most faithfully try to fulfil the good resolutions
Major Buller's kindness had led her to make.
So far as Matilda's ailments were mental, I think that school-life may
have been of some benefit.
Since the torments which have taught me caution in a household haunted
by boys, I am less confidential with my diary than I used to be. And if
I do not confide all my own follies to it, I am certainly not justified
in recording other people's.
Not that Matilda makes any secret of the hero-worship she wasted on the
man with the chiselled face and weird eyes, whom we used to see on the
Riflebury Esplanade. She never spoke to him; but neither for that matter
did his dog, a Scotch deerhound with eyes very like his master's, and a
long nose which (uncomfortable as the position must have been) he kept
always resting in his master's hand as the two paced up and down, hour
after hour, by the sea.
What folly Miss Perry talked on the subject it boots not at this date to
record. _I_ never indulged a more fanciful feeling towards him than
wonder, just dashed with a little fear--but I would myself have liked to
know the meaning of that long gaze he and the dog sometimes turned on
us!
We shall never know now, however, for the poor gentleman died in a
lunatic asylum.
I hope, when they shut him up, that they found the deerhound guilty also
of some unhydrophobiac madness, and imprisoned the two friends
together!
Of course we laugh now about Matilda's fancy for the insane gentleman,
though she declares that at the time she could never keep him out of her
head--that if she had met him thirty-four successive times on the
Esplanade, she would have borne no small amount of torture to earn the
privilege of one more turn to meet him for the thirty-fifth--and that
her rest was broken by waking dreams of the possible misfortunes which
might account for his (and the dog's) obvious melancholy, and of
impossible circumstances in which she should act as their good angel and
deliverer.
At the time she kept her own counsel, and it was not because she had
ever heard of the weird-eyed gentleman and his deerhound that Mrs.
Minchin concluded her advice to Aunt Theresa on one occasion by a shower
of nods which nearly shook the poppies out of her bonnet, and the
oracular utterance--"She's got some nonsense or other into her head,
depend upon it. Send her to school!"
One thing has often struck me in reading the biographies of great
people. They must have to be written in quite a different way to the
biographies of common people like ourselves.
For instance, when a practised writer is speaking of the early days of
celebrated poets, he says quite gravely--"Like Byron, Scott, and other
illustrious men, Hogg (the Ettrick shepherd) fell in love in his very
early childhood." And of course it sounds better than if one said, "Like
Smith, and Brown, and Jones, and nine out of every ten children, he did
not wait for years of discretion to make a fool of himself."
Not being illustrious, Matilda blushes to remember this early folly; and
not being a poet's biographer, Aunt Theresa said in a severe voice, for
the general behoof of the school-room, that "Little girls were sometimes
very silly, and got a great deal of nonsense into their heads." I do not
think it ever dawned upon her mind that girls' heads not being
jam-pots--which if you do not fill them will remain empty--the best way
to keep folly out was to put something less foolish in.
She would have taken a great deal of trouble that her daughters might
not be a flounce behind the fashions, and was so far-seeing in her
motherly anxieties, that she junketed herself and Major Buller to many
an entertainment, where they were bored for their pains, that an
extensive acquaintance might ensure to the girls partners, both for
balls and for life when they came to require them. But after what
fashion their fancies should be shaped, or whether they had wholesome
food and tender training for that high faculty of imagination by virtue
of which, after all, we so largely love and hate, choose right or
wrong, bear and forbear, adapt ourselves to the ups and downs of this
world, and spur our dull souls to the high hopes of a better--anxiety on
these matters Mrs. Buller had none.
As to Mrs. Minchin, she would not have known what it meant if it had
been put in print for her to read.
Matilda's irritability was certainly repressed in public by school
discipline, and from Eleanor's companionship our interests were varied
and enlarged. But in spite of these advantages her health rapidly
declined. And this without its seeming to attract Miss Mulberry's
notice.
Indeed, she meddled very little in the matter of our health. She kept a
stock of "family pills," which she distributed from time to time amongst
us. They cured her headaches, she said; and she seemed rather aggrieved
that they did not cure Matilda's.
But poor Matilda's headaches brought more than their own pain to her.
They seemed to stupefy her, and make her quite incapable of work. Her
complexion took a deadly, pasty hue, one eye was almost entirely closed,
and to a superficial observer she perhaps did look--what Madame always
pronounced her--sulky. Then, no matter how fully any lesson was at her
fingers' ends, she stumbled through a series of childish blunders to
utter downfall; and Madame's wrath was only equalled by her irony. To
do Matilda justice, she often used almost incredible courage in her
efforts to learn a task in spite of herself. Now and then she was
successful in defying pain; but by some odd revenge of nature, what she
learned in such circumstances was afterwards wiped as completely from
her memory as an old sum is sponged from a slate.
To headache and backache, to vain cravings for more fresh air, and to an
inequality of spirits and temper to which Eleanor and I patiently
submitted, Matilda still added a cough, which seemed to exasperate
Madame as much as her stupidity.
Not that our French governess was cruelly disposed. When she took
Matilda's health in hand and gave her a tumbler of warm water every
morning before breakfast, she did so in all good faith. It was a remedy
that she used herself.
Poor Matilda was furious both with Madame's warm-water cure and Miss
Mulberry's pill-box. She had a morbid hatred of being "doctored," which
is often characteristic of chest complaints. She struggled harder than
ever to work, in spite of her headaches; she ceased to complain of them,
and concealed her cough to a great extent, by a process known amongst us
as "smothering." The one remedy she pined for--fresh air--was the last
that either Miss Mulberry or Madame considered appropriate to any form
of a "cold."
This craving for fresh air helped Matilda in her struggle with illness.
Our daily "promenade" was dull enough, but it was in the open air; and
to be kept indoors, either as a punishment for ill-said lessons, or as a
cure for her cough, was Matilda's great dread.
Night after night, when Madame had paid her final visit to our rooms,
and we were safe, did Eleanor creep out of bed and noiselessly lower the
upper sash of our window to please Matilda; whilst I sat (sometimes for
an hour or more) upon the bolster of the bed in which Matilda and I
slept together, and "nursed her head."
What quaint, pale, grave little maids we were! As full of aches and
pains, and small anxieties, and self-repression, and tender sympathy, as
any other daughters of Mother Eve.
Eleanor and I have often since said that we believe we should make
excellent nurses for the insane, looking back upon our treatment of poor
Matilda. We knew exactly when to be authoritative, and when to
sympathize almost abjectly. I became skilful in what we called "nursing
her head," which meant much more than that I supported it on my knees.
Softly, but firmly, I stroked her brow and temples with both hands, and
passed my fingers through her hair to the back of her head. I rarely
failed to put her to sleep, and as she never woke when I laid her down,
I have since suspected myself of unconscious mesmerism.
One night, when I had long been asleep, I was awakened by Matilda's
hysterical sobs. She "couldn't get into a comfortable position;" her
"back ached so." Our bed was very narrow, and I commonly lay so poised
upon the outer edge to give Matilda room that more than once I have
rolled on to the floor.
We spoke in undertones, but Eleanor was awake.
"Come and see if you can sleep with me, Margery," she said. "I lie very
straight."
I scrambled out, and willingly crept in behind Eleanor, into her still
narrower bed; and after tearful thanks and protestations, poor Matilda
doubled herself at a restful angle, and fell asleep.
Happily for me, I was very well. Eleanor suffered from the utter change
of mode of life a good deal; but she had great powers of endurance.
Fatigue, and "muddle on the brain," often hindered her at night from
learning the lessons for next day. But she worked at them nevertheless;
and tasks, that by her own account she "drove into her head" in bed,
though she was quite unable to say them that evening, seemed to arrange
themselves properly in her memory before the morning.
Matilda's ill-health came to a crisis at last. To smother a cough
successfully, you must be able to escape at intervals. On one occasion
the smothering was tried too long, and after the aggravated outburst
which ensued, the doctor was called in. The Bush House family
practitioner being absent, a new man came for him, who, after a few
glances at Matilda, postponed the examination of her lungs, and begged
to see Miss Mulberry.
Matilda had learned her last lesson in Bush House.
From the long interview with the doctor, Miss Mulberry emerged with a
troubled face.
Lessons went irregularly that day. Our quarter of an hour's recreation
was as much extended as it was commonly cut short, and Madame herself
was subdued. She became a very kind nurse to Matilda, and crept many
times from her bed during the night to see if "la pauvre petite" were
sleeping, or had a wish that she could satisfy.
Indeed, an air of remorse seemed to tinge the kindness of the heads of
Bush House to poor Matilda, which connected itself in Eleanor's mind
with a brief dialogue that she overheard between Miss Mulberry and the
doctor at the front door:
"I feel there has been culpable neglect," said Miss Mulberry mournfully.
"But----"
"No, no. At least, not wilful," said the doctor; "and springing from the
best motives. But I should not be doing my duty, madam, towards a lady
in your responsible position, if I did not say that I have known too
many cases in which the ill-results have been life-long, and some in
which they have been rapidly fatal."