“I wonder too,” echoed Madeline, with a profound sigh.
Madeline West had been born in Melbourne, and sent home at the age of seven to Mrs. Harper’s establishment, where she had remained for ten years. From a skinny, elf-like, wildly excitable child, she had grown up into an extremely pretty girl, with what the drawing-master termed “wonderful colouring.” Her hair, eyebrows, and lashes were dark, her eyes two shades lighter, but it was in her complexion and the exquisite modelling of her head and features that her chief beauty lay. Her head was small, and beautifully set upon her shoulders; her skin was of creamy fairness, with a faint shade of carmine in her cheeks—a colour so delicate that it went and came at a look or word. She was tall, slight, and wonderfully graceful; full of vivacity, activity, versatility and resource, ready to throw herself warmly into any scheme for amusement or mischief—that was to say, twelve months previously. She was by far the most striking-looking and admired of Mrs. Harper’s forty boarders, and, notwithstanding this drawback to feminine goodwill, was a great favourite with pupils, teachers, and servants. Her popularity had even survived that terrible test of altered circumstances—that dire fall from the wealthy Australian heiress to the unpaid slavey of the establishment. She changed, of course, her ringing laugh and her happy air; her merry repartee and snatches of songs had disappeared with the pretty frocks and hats and shoes which she had loved so well. She was developing a staid, grown-up manner, according to her fellow-pupils; she held back from their advances—abdicated of her own accord, and her place as queen of the school was filled, after a decent interregnum, by a rich Cockney, who was as lavish of her shillings, as she was frugal in the matter of h’s, and who, according to Flo Blewitt, was “a harmless, good-natured, vulgar, poor creature.”
It must not be supposed that Madeline West did not keenly feel her altered position. Many a bitter tear she shed in secret; many a sleepless hour she lay awake, when all her companions—with only to-morrow’s lessons on their minds—were slumbering peacefully in the arms of Morpheus. Every small indignity, every slighting speech and sharp glance entered as an iron into her soul, but she made no remonstrance or reply; her swiftly changing colour was the sole index to her feelings, and what were a school-girl’s—a pauper school-girl’s—feelings to Mrs. Harper? To tell the truth, Madeline had never asserted herself even in her days of sunshine. She never could face an unpleasant situation; she put aside a crisis with a laugh or a gay word; her sensitive, luxurious nature shrank instinctively from all unpleasant things. She was a moral coward, though no one suspected it.
The present clouds on her sky had brought out, in an unexpected manner, unexpected depths in her character. Madeline, the humble semi-nursemaid, was an industrious, prudent, self-possessed person, who laboured gravely, doggedly from morning to night, a totally different girl to the extravagant, generous, easy-going Madeline, the butterfly who had fluttered the happy hours away for nine whole years. She was now at another seminary. Adversity is said to be an excellent school, and offers a fine test of character. Anomalous as it sounds, Madeline West had risen to the state of life into which she had fallen.
CHAPTER II.
NO NEWS.
Three months had passed, and still no sign or token from Mr. Robert West. How anxiously his daughter’s eyes followed Miss Selina’s skinny fingers, as they dealt out the letters every morning during breakfast time—these letters having previously been thoroughly turned over, examined, felt, and even smelt, by that lady and her relatives. It was always the same in answer to Madeline’s unspoken appeal. “No, nothing for you, Madeline,” or, “No letter yet, Miss West,” according to the frame of mind in which Miss Selina found herself. And then Mrs. Harper, who was seated behind an immense copper tea apparatus, would peer round it, with her keen little eyes and bobbing grey curls, and shake her head at the pupil-teacher, in a manner which signified that she did not approve of her at all! As if poor Madeline was not sick with hope deferred, and wild with a frenzied desire to get away and never pass another night under that lady’s roof-tree; only there was one big but, one immense drawback to her own most eager wishes, she had nowhere else to go.
The Miss Harpers, who were fully alive to Madeline’s value, were by no means equally anxious for her departure. She corrected exercises, ruled copybooks, relieved them of several distasteful duties, and took the little ones’ music—an agonizing ordeal. She really did as much as any two paid teachers, and—an ecstatic fact—for nothing! Moreover, they had the delicious sensation that they were performing a charitable action all the time, and looked primly self-conscious and benevolent when their friends exclaimed: “How good of you, you dear, kind, Christian people, to keep that unfortunate Australian girl!”
Miss Selina, who was forty, with a complexion like that of a wax doll who has been left lying in the sun, would sigh softly and murmur the word “duty,” when perhaps at that very moment the unfortunate Australian was fulfilling the least agreeable of hers—putting those fretful, ungovernable, sickly little Anglo-Indians to bed—and to sleep.
They were too young for school routine; spoiled, fractious, disobedient, and mischievous, they were Madeline’s almost entire charge. Happy Madeline!
It is winter when we once more enter the schoolroom at Harperton, a bitterly cold day, and the small fire behind the wire screen does not half heat that great bare apartment, with its numerous doors and windows. Those at a distance are “out in the cold” indeed, for a double file of girls is gathered closely round the fender, talking four at a time, and making noise enough for a rookery. This is the half-hour after tea, and exclusively their own; they are indemnifying themselves for many hours of silence and French—which almost amounts to the same thing. Their speech is vigorous and unpolished, for no teacher is present except Madeline—if teacher she can be called. She is standing at a remote desk, mounting a drawing by the light of a cheap little hand-lamp. The gas is never turned on in the schoolroom until half-past six, because the twilight is so delightful (so economical they meant), quoth the thrifty Miss Harpers.