AT SCHOOL.
Meg was going through the ordeal that her friend had set for her, and she strung herself to endurance. She felt she was tabooed by these fashionable young ladies, and she fiercely anticipated their neglect. She avoided them; she rejected Ursula's advances with impatience.
For awhile some of the girls felt a temptation to bait this little badger, but at last either the freshness or the excitement of the sport died away. Perhaps, too, a certain amount of fear restrained them. The slap administered to Laura Harris had made an impression, and it was considered advisable not to goad the "savage" beyond bounds. Meg after awhile was very much left alone.
She was an outcast, and she felt homesick for the London cage from which she had flitted, and which the presence of a friend had cheered. For the first time, also, she realized her ignorance, and with resolute heroism she set herself to learn. She worked with astonishing zeal. At her books and lessons Meg did not feel so lonely. At church and in her walks through the pleasant country lanes the sense of her absolute isolation was lifted. In recreation hours she sat apart from her schoolfellows. There was a yew tree on the outskirts of the playground into which she climbed to read Goldsmith's "Animated Nature." She began its perusal for the sake of the donor; then, gradually, this book of wonder fascinated her. The description it gave of strange, beautiful creatures, of birds especially, enthralled her. She gathered from the pages hints of far-away countries that called to her like a voice. This little town-bred heart was seized with a passionate love of nature and a foolish love of wild flowers. As she formed one of the regiment of girls who tramped, two and two, through the country lanes, the beauty of nature seemed to comfort Meg as if the touch of a reassuring hand were laid upon her heart. She would almost forget, then, that she was an object of mockery or patronage to her fellows. In the beautiful old church she felt nearly happy. "I am out of school," she would say to herself. The voice of the organ took her immensely. It seemed to be a voice talking to God. She liked the clergyman also. He was an old gentleman who appeared to her to be endowed with great benevolence. She thought his sermons marvels of eloquence. When, in answer to her long stare, his eye sometimes rested upon her, she felt immensely distinguished and honored.
The teachers of Moorhouse were as much puzzled concerning Meg as were the girls. She knew so much of some subjects and so little of others. Miss Reeves, after a careful examination of the new pupil's acquirements, declared that Meg might beat the girls of the upper class in knowledge of some parts of history, and in familiarity with some of Shakespeare's plays; while the lower classes might overmaster her in the elements of arithmetic, geography, and other subjects.
Mr. Foster, the arithmetic master, a lank man with a large nose and a long neck, who looked like an innocent vulture, and who had never been known to give a bad mark, contenting himself with feebly rubbing out the mistakes on the slates presented to him, was bewildered by Meg's absolute ignorance of the rules of arithmetic, and by her dependence upon her fingers for counters.
"Miss Beecham is a table-rase, as was the great philosopher Descartes before he began to observe for the sake of his method," said the professor to Miss Reeves, with forefinger uplifted, for Mr. Foster was proud of making little pedantic jokes.
Madame Vallaria, the middle-aged lady who superintended the music of the establishment, teaching piano and singing from morning till night, was divided between admiration for Meg's correct ear and determination to learn, and despair over the stiffness of her fingers and her ignorance of the first elements of music. The signora was hot-tempered; her nerves were jarred by listening to incessant practice.
"No, no, it is impossible! I will not teach you—I will refuse—I will say to Miss Reeves that I cannot!" She sometimes exclaimed, addressing Meg: "Your fingers are like the chop sticks the Chinese do use for eating. You thump—thump—thump! I hear it in my sleep. It ever gives me the nightmare." Sometimes Mme. Vallaria relented and with voluble heartiness would exclaim: "Oh, Povera! your leetle heart is set to learn; you are so courageous; and your ear it is exact, like a machine made to catch the sounds. Yes, I will teach you—you shall learn it yet—the piano—never fear!"
Mr. Eyre, the shy and eminent professor who came down twice a week from London to take classes of history and English literature of younger and elder pupils, would alternately pass from delight to annoyance at Meg's answers. Her indifference to dates appeared to him a sort of moral deficiency—it amounted to contempt. Her power of realizing historical facts and characters in which she took an interest was vivid, as if she had been a spectator of the events described, and had a personal acquaintance with the actors therein. He vowed she spoke of Julius Cæsar as if she knew him, and of his murder as if it had happened yesterday and was the subject of a leader in this morning's Times. He was appalled and puzzled, he exhorted, he raged; but his eye rested expectantly upon Meg when her companions floundered behind, and the dullness of the class was relieved for him by the audacity of her answers.
"You ought to go up to London to see the coronation," he said to her one day when the theme of the lesson was Queen Elizabeth's reign, and Meg surpassed herself in the brilliancy of her descriptive replies and the astounding incorrectness of her dates.
"What coronation?" asked Meg.
"That of Queen Elizabeth."
"But she is dead and buried in Westminster Abbey," Meg rejoined blankly, being dismally dense in apprehending a joke.
"Is she?" replied Mr. Eyre with feigned astonishment, and as was his wont when he bantered his pupils, he set about biting what remained of his nails and scribbled the lessons to be learned in the following week.
"Let her go on! She will go forever and ever backward till she is stopped by the pyramid of Ghizeh!" he remarked another day as Meg placed the date of Cromwell a century too early, and was sending it back another hundred years when she found she was wrong.
Miss Grantley, the English and geography teacher to the younger class, was antagonistically chilly in her treatment of Meg. The child felt she was disliked, and with that precise and unsympathetic teacher her deficiencies came out flagrantly. Signora Vallaria's voluble wailings, Dr. Grey's jokes, did not dispirit Meg as did Miss Grantley's frosty censoriousness.
Meg was solitary, and in her solitude she grew defiant and repellent. Her heart suffered from the atmosphere of repression. As far as outward appearances went she resembled her comrades; she was dressed like her fellow-pupils, her wardrobe having been replenished under Miss Reeves' direction; but inwardly she was not of them. She sat among them like an owl among sparrows.
She observed them. As she had watched the hubbub of the lodging-house, so she now watched the routine of the school. The girls of the first class, tall, elegantly dressed, appeared to her like young goddesses.
Some of those nodded to her kindly as they passed, and she returned the salute awkwardly without a smile.
Among the girls who had tormented her on her first night, a group, headed by Miss Rosamond Pinkett, the cold-eyed, straight-backed, Roman-nosed young lady, kept up an aggressive attitude. It still appeared to Miss Pinkett that a degradation had been inflicted on the school by the introduction of the "savage," and she ignored Meg with contemptuous coldness. This young lady's bosom friend, Gwendoline Lister, the beauty of the school, had a nature addicted to romance. Her mind was like a story-book in which every page contained a thrilling incident of which she was usually the heroine.
The sudden appearance of Meg, in a costume that suggested the dress of a poor tradesman's child, her fierce refusal to betray anything concerning her antecedents except the reiteration that her mother was a lady, fired the beauty's fancy. Meg, she imagined, was the scion of a noble family, stolen by gypsies, found at last, and sent here to be educated.
"Daughter of a ballet-dancer, my dear, you mean," Miss Pinkett said with an icy sniff. "That ridiculous drawing speaks volumes."
The drawing to which Miss Pinkett alluded, and from which the Beauty had evolved her romance, was an attempt made by Meg to repeat from memory that dear fashion plate, which she had given away.
She had rudely drawn a small-mouthed, large-eyed face, the head wreathed with roses, the dress covered with roses. Underneath she had written in Roman characters, "My mother." This drawing had been found in Goldsmith's "Animated Nature," taken out by prying fingers, and had been passed from hand to hand. Where others had found food for mockery, Miss Lister had found food for her imagination.
Meg had come on the scene as Miss Pinkett was in the act of examining the sketch. With a cry she had snatched it out of the enemy's grasp, and, tearing it to bits, she had flung herself from the presence of the girls.
Ursula continued the defense of the stranger, and made advances to Meg, which the child persistently refused.
"Why won't you take my sweets?" Ursula asked once in a piqued tone.
"I don't want them," said Meg with jerky abruptness.
"Why? Is it because you have none to give in return?" demanded Ursula bluntly.
"I don't want them—that is all!" answered Meg.
"It is pride—nothing but pride!" said Ursula, turning away with a displeased gleam of her spectacles.
A few days later an incident happened which showed that Meg was not all indifferent to kindness. The spring had come and decked with lavish waste of blossoms disgraced corners as well as more favored places. It had rimmed with a fringe of velvet wallflower the top of the arid garden wall. The orange and brown blooms spread in the sunlight, swayed in the breeze, attracted the murmuring bees, and sang the praise of spring in delicate wafts of perfume.
"How delicious those wallflowers smell," said Ursula, sniffing the air with head thrown back. "It is a shame they should be unpluckable. I wish I had a handful."
Meg heard the wish as she sat perched on the yew tree. When Ursula turned away she abandoned her leafy throne, and swung herself from one of the branches on to the trellis that covered the wall. It was a high wall, but she climbed it with the precision of a woodland animal, here grasping the trellis, there planting her foot on some bit of projecting masonry. "You'll fall!" cried a chorus of voices. "To climb that wall is absolutely forbidden, Miss Beecham," called out Miss Pinkett's voice. "I will go and tell Miss Grantley," cried Laura Harris, setting off at a run. Meg, undismayed by warnings and threats, pursued her quest.
A moment later Ursula felt a gentle touch on the elbow, and a fragrant bunch of brown blossoms was thrust into her hand.
"Meg, you did not!" she cried with amazed spectacles, gazing at the child, who bore marks of her recent encounter with the perils of the wall.
Meg nodded.
Ursula buried her nose into the flowers with a hesitating expression as Miss Grantley came up, followed by girls.
"Miss Beecham, go indoors at once! You shall stay in this afternoon for this unlady-like and disobedient conduct. Ursula, those flowers must be given up!"
Meg pulls the forbidden flowers.—Page 94.
Meg went indoors without a murmur, and zealously devoted herself to the task set her as expiation of her offense. She took pleasure in its difficulty. She was glad the day was so beautiful, that the room was full of sunshine, and the wandering puffs of wind brought in messages from the odorous sweetness of the day. She was proud of being punished for Ursula's sake. It seemed to put her on a more equal footing, as if repaying her for past kindness.
Another incident that followed shortly after the wall-climbing episode proved that Meg's sense of loyalty survived amid the withering influence of loveless criticisms around her.
Miss Gwendoline Lister, because of her beauty, was a personality in the school. She suffered the penalties of celebrity. Stories were current concerning her. One averred that she had been found dissolved in tears on the discovery of a freckle upon her nose. Another rumor was current that the Beauty spent the afternoon of wet half-holidays locked up in the room she and Miss Pinkett shared in common arranging and dressing her hair in various fashions, enhancing her charms with rouge and powder, and trying on her ball dress.
Perhaps this report arose from the fact of a rouge pot having been found in the school. Some averred it was the property of Miss Lister, others declared its contents had been used by the young ladies who had taken part in a theatrical entertainment given on the occasion of breaking up for the holidays.
Meg, in her isolation, took no interest in the "rouge pot controversy." One afternoon, to her surprise, she was beckoned by Miss Pinkett into the room shared by her and Gwendoline.
The Beauty was standing near the dressing-table, a radiant vision clothed in white, with hair unbound, wreathed with roses, and with roses in the bodice of her dress.
For a moment Meg remained struck dumb with admiration, then came a sudden revolution. In her wide experience of life in the boarding-house she had known an obscure member of the theatrical profession. This little slip of the foot lights, who spent her life in alternate squalor and fairy-like splendor, had on one or two occasions dressed herself up for Meg's benefit. The child had grown to know cheeks bedabbled with paint and eyes outlined with bismuth. The face of Miss Lister brought back this acquaintance of bygone times.
"Well, what do I look like?" said Gwendoline, with her head cocked on one side and her finger-tips caressing the roses in her bodice. "You know, little monkey, you are not to tell."
Miss Pinkett watched the effect on Meg with cold curiosity.
"You look much prettier as you are every day," said Meg.
"Do I look like your mother?"
"My mother!" repeated the child, and she began to tremble.
"I copied the portrait you drew, roses and all," said the Beauty.
"My mother never painted her cheeks; she never put black under her eyes. You are like a Christy minstrel painted pink and white—that's what you are like!" said Meg, with the concentration of fury in her voice. She turned, unlocked the door, and slammed it behind her.
As she emerged out of the room the dressing bell for tea rang, and she encountered a group of girls waiting outside. They cried breathlessly:
"What are they doing inside?"
"Is not Gwendoline dressing up? Does she rouge her cheeks?"
"I saw a bit of a white dress."
"I did—I did! Tell us, Meg—Meg!"
But Meg did not answer. She tore along the passage and up the stairs till she came to a solitary attic. She flung herself down on the floor and hammered the insensate boards with her fists. In her untamed heart she would have wished to wipe the insult from her mother's memory by thus maltreating the painted cheeks of Miss Lister.
When the tea bell rang Meg went downstairs.
"Where are Miss Pinkett and Miss Lister?" asked Miss Reeves, after she had said grace, glancing down the table.
"They have not come down yet from their room, madam," said the attending parlor-maid.
"Miss Lister is dressing up. Miss Beecham was there—she knows," said Laura Harris, who might be relied upon for giving information on the doings of the other girls.
"Miss Beecham knows!" repeated some other voices.
"Miss Lister puts paint on her cheeks," resumed Laura, growing more explicit.
"I hope not!" said Miss Reeves, with an anxious brow, and her eye rested upon Meg.
"I heard it said before by Miss Reeves' young laidees," put in Signora Vallaria, rolling her dark eyes. "Tell, my leetle Meg, what they were doing, the silly young laidees, when they call you in?"
At this moment Miss Pinkett and Gwendoline entered. The Beauty's face was shining with soap.
"What were you doing in your room, young ladies?" asked Miss Reeves gravely.
"I suppose, madam, Miss Beecham has been telling," replied Miss Pinkett.
"No, we are waiting for her answer to the question I have just put to you."
Meg was conscious of every eye being turned upon her—Miss Reeves sternly questioning, Miss Pinkett coldly supercilious, Gwendoline, with pursed lips, imploring. She stood up, her little red lips closed tightly, her heart fiercely divided between a desire for vengeance and a sense of loyalty. After a pause she said:
"They called me into the room to make fun of a portrait of my mother which I had drawn."
A murmur of comical disappointment from the girls round the table, an expression of relief on the faces of the two culprits, greeted this answer.
"It was such an absurd portrait, madam," said Miss Pinkett in an explanatory tone; "a lady suffering from the mumps wearing a wreath of roses."
A titter went round the table.
"Hush!" said Miss Reeves seriously. "It is unkind to laugh at the child. Sit down, young ladies."
"It was awfully good of you, Meg, not to tell about me," said Gwendoline that evening, when she got Meg alone. "I am awfully obliged. I am sorry I offended you. Will you forgive me?"
"No!" said Meg emphatically, turning her back upon the Beauty and walking stiffly away.