Now the late Mr. Gullick had been a clown of considerable merit; but, like too many artists, he was addicted beyond measure to convivial enjoyment. Maitland had befriended him in his last days, and had appointed Mrs. Gullick (and a capital appointment it was) to look after his property when he became landlord of the _Hit or Miss_.
"What a gift, sir, that child always had! Why, when she was no more than four, I well remember her going to fetch the beer, and her being a little late, and Gullick with the thirst on him, when she came in with the jug, he made a cuff at her, not to hurt her, and if the little thing didn"t drop the jug, and take the knap! Lord, I thought Gullick would "a died laughing, and him so thirsty, too."
"Take the knap?" said Maitland, who imagined that "the knap" must be some malady incident to childhood.
"Oh, sir, it"s when one person cuffs at another on the stage, you know, and the other slaps his own hand, on the far side, to make the noise of a box on the ear: that"s what we call "taking the knap" in the profession. And the beer was spilt, and the jug broken, and all--Lizer was that clever? And this is her second season, just ended, as a himp at the _Hilarity_ pantermime; and they"re that good to her, they let her bring her bearskin home with her, what she wears, you know, sir, as the Little Bear in "The Three Bears," don"t you know, sir."
Maitland was acquainted with the legend of the Great Bear, the Middle Bear, and the Little Tiny Small Bear, and had even proved, in a learned paper, that the Three Bears were the Sun, the Moon, and the Mult.i.tude of Stars in the Aryan myth. But he had not seen the pantomime founded on the traditional narrative.
"But what was the child saying about a big Bird?" he asked. "What was it that frightened her?"
"Oh, sir, I think it was just tiredness, and may be, a little something hot at that supper last night; and, besides, seeing so many queer things in pantermimes might put notions in a child"s head. But when she came home last night, a little late, Lizer was very strange. She vowed and swore she had seen a large Bird, far bigger than any common bird, skim over the street. Then when I had put her to bed in the attic, down she flies, screaming she saw the Bird on the roof. I had hard work to get her to sleep. To-day I made her lay a-bed and wear her theatre pantermime bearskin, that fits her like another skin--and she"ll be too big for it next year--just to keep her warm in that cold garret. That"s all about it, sir. She"ll be well enough in a day or two, will Lizer."
"I am sure I hope she will, Mrs. Gullick," said Maitland; "and, as I am pa.s.sing his way, I will ask Dr. Barton to call and see the little girl.
Now I must go, and I think the less we say to anyone about Miss Shields, you know, the better. It will be very dreadful for her to learn about her father"s death, and we must try to prevent Her from hearing how it happened."
"Certainly, sir," said Mrs. Gullick, bobbing; "and being safe away at school, sir, we"ll hope she won"t be told no more than she needn"t know about it."
Maitland went forth into the thick night: a half-hearted London thaw was filling the shivering air with a damp brown fog.
He walked to the nearest telegraph office, and did not observe, in the raw darkness and in the confusion of his thoughts, that he was followed at no great distance by a man m.u.f.fled up in a great-coat and a woollen comforter. The stranger almost shouldered against him, as he stood reading his telegram, and conscientiously docking off a word here and there to save threepence,
"From Robert Maitland to Miss Marlett.
"The Dovecot, Conisbeare, "Tiverton.
"I come to-morrow, leaving by 10.30 train. Do not let Margaret see newspaper. Her father dead.
Break news."
This telegram gave Maitland, in his excited state, more trouble to construct than might have been expected. We all know the wondrous badness of post-office pens or pencils, and how they tear or blot the paper when we are in a hurry; and Maitland felt hurried, though there was no need for haste. Meantime the man in the woollen comforter was buying stamps, and, finishing his bargain before the despatch was stamped and delivered, went out into the fog, and was no more seen.
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 d.i.c.ky 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 wa.s.s 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 d.i.c.ky 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 cla.s.s-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 b.u.t.ter--of extremely thick bread and surprisingly thin b.u.t.ter--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.