The Manor School

by L. T. Meade

In the corridor outside Susan Marsh was waiting. She had the most peculiar face Christian had ever seen in her life. It was not only plain, it was downright ugly; there was not one feature in harmony with another. She was very tall and very awkward in her movements. Her complexion was of a dull mud color; her hair was a dull, very light brown; her eyes were small, her nose broad at the nostrils and very retroussé, her mouth wide. She had good teeth, but otherwise scarcely a redeeming feature. The expression of her face was as little pleasing as were her features. Nevertheless this girl had an extraordinary power over her fellows; she was never seen without a following, and many a little girl looked at her with a mingling of awe and terror as she waited now for Christian.

"So you are coming, Star," she said. "Well so much the better; we'll have some fun. Cheer up, victim; it's your night to go through the ceremony."

"But what is it?" said Christian.

"You will know, my pretty victim, when the time comes. We always have it in the big attic. It is great fun; it is the most delightful time in our lives. We were all very keen for your arrival, but you don't suppose it was simply for the sake of enjoying the first night of your sweet society? Nothing of the kind. It was on account of the ordeal. The ordeal is such fun!"

"Don't mind half she is saying," said Star Lestrange. "But come along, Christian. It is quite true; there is an ordeal, and you must go through it before you can really be what we pride ourselves on being—a Penwernian."

They now turned and went upstairs, past the nice rooms where the girls' bedrooms were located, and up again some narrow stairs, until, having opened an attic door, Christian found herself in a huge attic which ran right across the front of the house. This room had evidently been got ready for a ceremony. Candles in tin sconces were arranged along the wall; each sconce was fastened in its place by a small tack, and as the girls entered a short, very dark, stoutly built girl was going from one to the other lighting them. When the illumination was at last complete, from twenty to thirty candles were burning in the front attic.

Christian had a curious feeling that she was back again in the attic at home. When she got upstairs her fears suddenly left her. She was to be the heroine of probably a very disagreeable adventure, but had she not herself from her earliest days encountered adventures of all sorts in the attic at home? What thrilling moments had not her dolls lived through? What times of ecstasy had been hers when she was Joan of Arc! Oh, that night when she had imagined herself tied to the stake! Had she not really tied herself to the post of the old bedstead, and had she not crowded round her torn pieces of paper, and shut her eyes, and tried to imagine the upward ascent of the flames? Had she not, finally, almost screamed in her agony, for had not real pains taken possession of her, so vivid and intense had been her imagination?

"After all," she said to herself, "I have my bodyguard, and they do look faithful, and nothing can be worse than what I lived through in imagination before now."

When Christian's eyes grew accustomed to the gloom she perceived that every single girl in the school, except three or four of the sixth form, was present. They seemed to her to have augmented in numbers, and to be a great deal more than the forty girls she had been told lived at Penwerne Manor. They stood about in groups, and all looked eager and pleased.

Christian noticed that a large wooden bowl had been placed upon the ground almost in the center of the attic, and a little straw chair, of a twisted, crooked, rickety, and decrepit nature, stood within a few feet of the wooden bowl. She herself remained near the door, and she was surprised as she entered the room to notice that Star Lestrange immediately left her and walked right across the attic to the farther end, where she sat down on a turned-up box.