CHAPTER IV. Miss Marlett's

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CHAPTER IV. Miss Marlett's

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. A 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 saniitary 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 a l'Anglaise," said Janey Harman to Margaret.

"Ce que j'aime dans la tartine, c'est la simplicite prime-sautiere 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 exceptee, sont Francaises, dans cet etablissement peu recreatif," went on Janey, speaking low and fast.

"Je deteste le Francais," Margaret answered, "mais je le prefere infiniment a l'Allemand."

"Comment accentuez, vous le mot prefere, 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 a Aldershot Pourquoi ne doit il pas ecrire a moi, il est comme on diroit, mon frere."

"Est il votre parent?"

"Non, pas du tout, mais je l'ai connu pour des ans. Oh, pour des ans! Voici, elle a deux depeches telegraphiques," 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 a part, apres, 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!" _

Read next: CHAPTER V. Flown

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