“Of course. What did you expect? The landlady isn’t let off her own rent, because we choose to take a holiday. There’s no saving except for the light and coal. By the way, I owe you for a third week now. I must remember! Have you decided what you are going to do?”
Claire shook her head. It was a forlorn feeling that Christmas was coming, and she had nowhere to go. Until now she had gone on in faith, feeling sure that before the time arrived, some one would remember her loneliness, and invite her if only for the day itself. Possibly Cecil in virtue of three months’ daily companionship would ask her mother’s permission to invite her friend, if only for a couple of days. Or bright, friendly Sophie Blake, who had sympathised with her loneliness, might have some proposition to make, or Mrs Willoughby, who was so interested in girls who were working for themselves, or Miss Farnborough, who knew that it was the French mistress’s first Christmas without her mother; but no such suggestion had been made. No one seemed to care.
“I must say it’s strange that no one has invited you!” said Cecil sharply. “I don’t think much of your grand friends if they can’t look after you on Christmas Day. What about the people in Brussels? Did no one send you an invitation? If you lived there for three years, surely you must know some one intimately enough to offer to go, even if they don’t suggest it.”
“It is not necessary, thank you,” said Claire with an air. “I have an open invitation to several houses, but I am saving up Brussels for Easter, when the weather will be better, and it will be more of a change. And I have an old grand-aunt in the North, but she is an invalid, confined to her room. I should be an extra trouble in the house. I shall manage to amuse myself somehow. It will be an opportunity for exploring London.”
“Oh well,” Cecil said vaguely, “when I come back!” but she spoke no word of Christmas Day.
The next week brought the various festivities with which Saint Cuthbert’s celebrated the end of the Christmas term. There was a school dance in the big class-room, a Christmas-tree party, given to the children in an East End parish, and last and most important of all the breaking-up ceremony in the local Town Hall, when an old girl, now developed into a celebrated authoress, presented the prizes, and gave an amusing account of her own schooldays, which evoked storms of applause from the audience, even Miss Farnborough smiling benignly at the recital of misdoings which would have evoked her sternest displeasure on the part of present-day pupils! Then the singing-class girls sang a short cantata, and the eldest girls gave a scene from Shakespeare, very dull and exceedingly correct, and the youngest girls acted a little French play, while the French mistress stood in the wings, ready to prompt, her face very hot, and her feet very cold, and her heart beating at express speed.
This moment was a public test of her work during the term, and she had a horror that the children would forget their parts and disgrace their leader as well as themselves. She need not have feared, however, for the publicity which she dreaded was just the stimulus needed to spur the juvenile actors to do their very best, and they shrugged, they gesticulated, they rolled their r’s, they reproduced Claire’s own little mannerisms with an aplomb which brought down the house. Claire’s lack of teaching experience might make her less sound on rules and routine, but it was obvious that she had succeeded in one important point; she had lifted “French” from the level of a task, and converted it into a living tongue.
Miss Farnborough was very gracious in her parting words to her new mistress.
“I have not come to my present position without learning to trust my perceptions,” said she. “I recognised at once that you possessed the true teaching instinct, and to-day you have justified my choice. I have had many congratulations on your pupils’ performance.” Then she held out her hand with a charming smile. “I hope you will have very pleasant holidays!”
She made no inquiries as to the way in which this young girl was to spend her leisure. She herself was worn-out with the strain of the long term, and when the morrow came she intended to pack her bag, and start off for a sunny Swiss height, where for the next few weeks it would be her chief aim to forget that she had ever seen a school. But the new French mistress turned away with a heavy heart. It seemed at that moment as if nobody cared.