To which Miss Isabella had replied: "Well, you know, Robby dear, you really hardly saw her. You had so much to do, poor boy, just when she was here. Her name was Laura--Laura Rambotham."
And Mrs. Shepherd gently: "Yes, a nice little girl. But very young for her age. And SO shy."
"You wretched little lying sneak!"
In vain Laura wept and protested.
"You made me do it. I should never have told a word, if it hadn"t been for you."
This point of view enraged them. "What? You want to put it on us now, do you? ... you dirty little skunk! To say WE made you tell that pack of lies?--Look here: as long as you stay in this blooming shop, I"ll never open my mouth to you again!"
"Someone ought to tell old Gurley and have her expelled. That"s all she"s fit for. Spreading disgusting stories about people who"ve been kind to her. They probably only asked her there out of charity. She"s as poor as dirt."
"Wants her bottom smacked--that"s what I say!"
Thus Maria, and, with her, Kate Horner.
Tilly was cooler and bitterer. "I was a dashed fool ever to believe a word. I might have known her little game. She? Why, when I took her out to see my cousin Bob, she couldn"t say bo to a goose. He laughed about her afterwards like anything; said she ought to have come in a perambulator, with a nurse.--YOU make anyone in love with you--you!"
And Tilly spat, to show her disdain.
"What have they been saying to you, Laura?" whispered c.h.i.n.ky, pale and frightened. "Whatever is the matter?"
"Mind your own business and go away," sobbed Laura.
"I am, I"m going," said c.h.i.n.ky humbly.--"Oh, Laura, I WISH you had that ring."
"Oh, blow you and your ring! I hate the very name of it," cried Laura, maddened.--And retreating to a lavatory, which was the only private place in the school, she wept her full.
They all, every girl of them, understood white lies, and practised them. They might also have forgiven her a lie of the good, plain, straightforward, thumping order. What they could not forgive, or get over, was the extraordinary circ.u.mstantiality of the fictions which with she had gulled them: to be able to invent lies with such proficiency meant that you had been born with a criminal bent.--And as a criminal she was accordingly treated.
Even the grown-up girls heard a garbled version of the story.
"Whyever did you do it?" one of them asked Laura curiously; it was a very pretty girl, called Evelyn, with twinkling brown eyes.
"I don"t know," said Laura abjectly; and this was almost true.
"But I say! ... nasty tarradiddles about people who"d been so nice to you? What made you tell them?"
"I don"t KNOW. They just came."
The girl"s eyes smiled. "Well, I never! Poor little Kiddy," she said as she turned away.
But this was the only kind word Laura heard. For many and many a night after, she cried herself to sleep.
XIX.
Thus Laura went to Coventry.--Not that the social banishment she now suffered was known by that name. To the majority of the girls Coventry was just a word in the geography book, a place where ribbons were said to be made, and where for a better-read few, some one had hung with grooms and porters on a bridge; this detail, odd to say, making a deeper impression on their young minds than the story of Lady G.o.diva, which was looked upon merely as a naughty anecdote.
But, by whatever name it was known, Laura"s ostracism was complete. She had been sampled, tested, put on one side. And not the softest-hearted could find an excuse for her behaviour.
It was but another instance of how misfortune dogs him who is down, that c.h.i.n.ky should choose this very moment to bring further shame upon her.
On one of the miserable days that were now the rule, when Laura would have liked best to be a rabbit, hid deep in its burrow; as she was going upstairs one afternoon, she met Jacob, the man-of-all-work, coming down. He had a trunk on his shoulder. Throughout the day she had been aware of a subdued excitement among the boarders; they had stood about in groups, talking in low voices--talking about her, she believed, from the glances that were thrown over shoulders at her as she pa.s.sed. She made herself as small as she could; but when tea-time came, and then [P.192] supper, and c.h.i.n.ky had not appeared at either meal, curiosity got the better of her, and she tried to pump one of the younger girls.
Maria came up while she was speaking, and the child ran away; for the little ones aped their elders in making Laura taboo.
"What, liar? You want to stuff us you don"t know why she"s gone?" said Maria. "No, thank you, it"s not good enough. You can"t bamboozle us this time."
"Sapphira up to her tricks again, is she?" threw in the inseparable Kate, who had caught the last words. "No, by dad, we don"t tell liars what they know already.--So put that in your pipe and smoke it!"
Only bit by bit did Laura dig out their meaning: then, the horrible truth lay bare. c.h.i.n.ky had been dismissed--privately because she was a boarder--from the school. Her crime was: she had taken half-a-sovereign from the purse of one of her room-mates. When taxed with the theft, she wept that she had not taken it for herself, but to buy a ring for Laura Rambotham; and, with this admission on her lips, she pa.s.sed out of their lives, leaving Laura, her confederate, behind.--Yes, confederate; for, in the minds of most, liar and thief were synonymous.
Laura had not cared two straws for c.h.i.n.ky; she found what the latter had done, "mean and disgusting", and said so, stormily; but of course was not believed. Usually too proud to defend herself, she here returned to the charge again and again; for the hint of connivance had touched her on the raw. But she strove in vain to prove her innocence: she could not get her enemies to grasp the abysmal difference between merely making up a story about people, and laying hands on others"
property; if she could do the one, she was capable of the other; and her companions remained convinced that, if she had not actually had her fingers in some one"s purse, she had, by a love of jewellery, incited c.h.i.n.ky to the theft. And so, after a time, Laura gave up the attempt and suffered in silence; and it WAS suffering; for her schoolfellows were cruel with that intolerance, that unimaginative dullness, which makes a woman"s cruelty so hard to bear. Laura had to accustom herself to hear every word she said doubted; to hear some one called to, before her face, to attest her statements; to see her room-mates lock up their purses under her very nose.
However, only three weeks had still to run till the Christmas holidays.
She drew twenty-one strokes on a sheet of paper, which she pinned to the wall above her bed; and each morning she ran her pencil through a fresh line. She was quite resolved to beg Mother not to send her back to school: if she said she was not getting proper food, that would be enough to put Mother up in arms.
The boxes were being fetched from the lumber-rooms and distributed among their owners, when a letter arrived from Mother saying that the two little boys had sandy blight, and that Laura would not be able to come home under two or three weeks, for fear of infection. These weeks she was to spend, in company with Pin, at a watering-place down the Bay, where one of her aunts had a cottage.
The news was welcome to Laura: she had shrunk from the thought of Mother"s searching eye. And at the cottage there would be none of her grown-up relatives to face; only an old housekeeper, who was looking after a party of boys.
Hence, when speech day was over, instead of setting out on an up-country railway journey, Laura, under the escort of Miss Snodgra.s.s, went on board one of the steamers that ploughed the Bay.
"I should say sea-air"ll do you good--brighten you up a bit," said the governess affably as they drove: she was in great good-humour at the prospect of losing sight for a time of the fifty-five. "You seem to be always in the dumps nowadays."
Laura dutifully waved her handkerchief from the deck of the SILVER STAR; and the paddles began to churn. As Miss Snodgra.s.s"s back retreated down the pier, and the breach between ship and land widened, she settled herself on her seat with a feeling of immense relief. At last--at last she was off. The morning had been a sore trial to her: in all the noisy and effusive leave-taking, she was odd man out; no one had been sorry to part from her; no one had extracted a promise that she would write. Her sole valediction had been a minatory shaft from Maria: if she valued her skin, to learn to stop telling crams before she showed up there again. Now, she was free of them; she would not be humiliated afresh, would not need to stand eye to eye with anyone who knew of her disgrace, for weeks to come; perhaps never again, if Mother agreed. Her heart grew momentarily lighter. And the farther they left Melbourne behind them, the higher her spirits rose.
But then, too, was it possible, on this radiant December day, long to remain in what Miss Snodgra.s.s had called "the dumps"?--The sea was a blue-green mirror, on the surface of which they swam. The sky was a stretched sheet of blue, in which the sun hung a very ball of fire. But the steamer cooled the air as it moved; and none of the white-clad people who, under the stretched white awnings, thronged the deck, felt oppressed by the great heat. In the middle of the deck, a bra.s.s band played popular tunes.
At a pretty watering-place where they stopped, Laura rose and crossed to the opposite railing. A number of pa.s.sengers went ash.o.r.e, pushing and laughing, but almost as many more came on board, all dressed in white, and with eager, animated faces. Then the boat stood to sea again and sailed past high, gra.s.s-grown cliffs, from which a few old cannons, pointing their noses at you, watched over the safety of the Bay--in the event, say, of the j.a.panese or the Russians entering the Heads past the pretty township, and the beflagged bathing-enclosures on the beach below. They neared the tall, granite lighthouse at the point, with the flagstaff at its side where incoming steamers were signalled; and as soon as they had rounded this corner they were in view of the Heads themselves. From the distant cliffs there ran out, on either side, brown reefs, which made the inrushing water dance and foam, and the entrance to the Bay narrow and dangerous: on one side, there projected the portion of a wreck which had lain there as long as Laura had been in the world. Then, having made a sharp turn to the left, the boat crossed to the opposite coast, and steamed past barrack-like buildings lying asleep in the fierce sunshine of the afternoon; and, in due course, it stopped at Laura"s destination.
Old Anne was waiting on the jetty, having hitched the horse to a post: she had driven in, in the "shandrydan", to meet Laura. For the cottage was not on the front beach, with the hotels and boarding-houses, the fenced-in baths and great gentle slope of yellow sand: it stood in the bush, on the back beach, which gave to the open sea.
Laura took her seat beside the old woman in her linen sunbonnet, the body of the vehicle being packed full of groceries and other stores; and the drive began. Directly they were clear of the township the road as good as ceased, became a mere sandy track, running through a scrub of ti-trees.--And what sand! White, dry, sliding sand, through which the horse shuffled and floundered, in which the wheels sank and stuck.
Had one of the many hillocks to be taken, the two on the box-seat instinctively threw their weight forward; old Anne, who had a stripped wattle-bough for a whip, urged and cajoled; and more than once she handed Laura the reins and got down, to give the horse a pull. They had always to be ducking their heads, too, to let the low ti-tree branches sweep over their backs.
About a couple of miles out, the old woman alighted and slipped a rail; and having pa.s.sed the only other house within cooee, they drove through a paddock, but at a walking-pace, because of the thousands of rabbit-burrows that perforated the ground. Another slip-rail lowered, they drew up at the foot of a steepish hill, beside a sandy little vegetable garden, a shed and a pump. The house was perched on the top of the hill, and directly they sighted it they also saw Pin flying down, her sunbonnet on her neck.
"Laura, Laura! Oh, I AM glad you"ve come. What a time you"ve been!"
"Hullo, Pin.--Oh, I say, let me get out first."
"And pull up your bonnet, honey. D"you want to be after gettin"
sunstruck?"