A Fluttered Dovecote

by George Manville Fenn

Do you mean to tell me that they did not both know how they were deceiving one another? Stuff! Of course they did, and they both liked it. Mamma praised Mrs Blount, and Mrs Blount praised mamma and her “sweet child”; and I declare it was just like what the dreadful American man said in his horrid, low, clever book—that was so funny, and yet one felt ashamed at having laughed—where he writes to the newspaper editor to puff his show, and promises to return the favour by having all his printing done at his office; and papa read it so funnily, and called it “reciprocity of allaying the irritation of the dorsal region,” which we said was much more refined than Mr Artemus Ward’s way of putting it.

I was quite ashamed of mamma, that I was, for it did seem so little; and, oh! how out of patience I was! But there, that part of the interview came to an end, and a good thing too; for I knew well enough a great deal of it was to show off before me, for of course Mrs Blount had shown mamma the drawings and things before.

So then we were taken over the place, and introduced to the teachers and the pupils who had returned, and there really did seem to be some nice girls; but as for the teachers—of all the old, yellow, spectacled things I ever did see, they were the worst; while as for the German Fraülein, I don’t know what to say bad enough to describe her, for I never before did see any one so hooked-nosed and parroty.

Then we went upstairs to see the dormitories—there were no bedrooms—and afterwards returned to the drawing-room, where the lady principal kissed me on both cheeks and said I was most welcome to her establishment, and I declare I thought she meant to bite me, for her dreadful teeth went snap, though perhaps, like mamma’s, they were not well under control.

Then mamma had some sherry, and declared that she was more enchanted with the place than she had been at her last visit; and she hoped I should be very happy and very good, and make great progress in my studies. When Mrs Blount said she was quite certain that I should gratify my parents’ wishes in every respect, and be a great credit to the establishment; and I knew she was wondering all the time how many silk dresses and how many bonnets I had brought, for everything about the place was show, show always, and I soon found out how the plainly-dressed girls were snubbed and kept in the background. As for Miss Grace Murray, the half-teacher, half-pupil, who had her education for the assistance she gave with the younger girls, I’m sure it was shameful—such a sweet, gentle, lovable girl as she was—shameful that she should have been so ill-treated. I speak without prejudice, for she never was any friend of mine, but always distrusted me, and more than once reported what I suppose she was right in calling flippant behaviour; but I could not help it. I was dreadfully wicked while at the Cedars.

At last the fly bore mamma away, and I wanted to go to my dormitory, to try and swallow down my horrible grief and vexation, which would show itself; while that horrible Mrs Blunt—I won’t call her anything else, for her husband’s name was spelt without the “o,” and he was a painter and glazier in Tottenham Court Road—that horrible Mrs Blunt kept on saying that it was a very proper display of feeling, and did me great credit; and patting me on the back and calling me “my child,” when all the time I could have boxed her ears.

There I was, then, really and truly once more at school, and all the time feeling so big, and old, and cross, and as if I was being insulted by everything that was said to me.

The last months I spent at Guisnes the sisters made pleasant for me by behaving with a kind of respect, and a sort of tacit acknowledgment that I was no longer a child; and, oh, how I look back now upon those quiet, retired days! Of course they were too quiet and too retired; but then anything seemed better than being brought down here; while as to religion, the sisters never troubled themselves about my not being the same as themselves, nor tried to make a convert of me, nor called me heretic, or any of that sort of thing. All the same it was quite dreadful to hear Aunt Priscilla go on at papa when I was at home for the vacation, telling him it was sinful to let me be at such a place, and that it was encouraging the sisters to inveigle me into taking the veil. That we should soon have the Papists overrunning the country, and relighting the fires in Smithfield, and all such stuff as that; while papa used very coolly to tell her that he most sincerely hoped that she would be the first martyr, for it would be a great blessing for her relatives.

That used to offend her terribly, and mamma too; but it served her right for making such a fuss—the place being really what they called a pension, and Protestant and Catholic young ladies were there together. Plenty of them were English, and the old sisters were the dearest, darlingest, quietest, lovablest creatures that ever lived, and I don’t believe they would have roasted a fly, much more an Aunt Priscilla.