“I don’t know,” said Charlotte. “I try to say things to myself to make me feel nicer about her, but it seems no good. I don’t speak about it to mamma, because she told me it was better to fight down such feelings in my own heart, and I could see it really made her unhappy. She is so dreadfully sympathising, and so gentle herself. I’m afraid there’s something almost fierce in me that she can scarcely understand, Jerry. But there’s one thing that’s the worst of all. I think I could stand everything else if it wasn’t for the German prize. But if she gets that—oh, Jerry, it will break my heart. And next week Herr Märklestatter will be giving out the notes for the essay. You know the prize is for the essay.”
“Is she sure to try for it?”
“Oh, yes,” said Charlotte. “The other girls are already saying that it lies between her and me. I don’t know that she has heard or thought much about it—she doesn’t hear much of the talk that goes on, and I’m sure I listen to as little as I can: it can’t possibly matter to her as much as to me. It will be the first year I have not had it since Herr Märklestatter has taught us. Oh, Jerry, isn’t it hard?”
Jerry sat silent, as was his way when his feelings were deeply moved.
“It’s more than hard, it’s unbearable,” he said at last. “I don’t care how lovely she is, and all that,” he went on after a little pause, “she must be a horrid, stuck-up, selfish creature.”
“I don’t know,” said Charlotte, for the third time. “I don’t think I do think her so in the bottom of my heart, though sometimes it does seem like it. But independently of her interfering so with me, I don’t understand her; she never tells any of us a thing. We don’t know if she is an orphan, or if she has any one she cares for, or anything. And yet there is a look in her eyes—” and Charlotte’s own eyes took a softer expression, “a far-away look, almost sad;—though what can she have to be sad about?—she that has everything! I saw it one day when mamma was going to call for me, and I had to go half an hour sooner. I like awfully when mamma calls for me, you know, Jerry, and I suppose I looked pleased when I jumped up, and she was sitting beside me, and I was almost sure I heard her give a sort of little sob.”
“I thought you said her father and mother had died when she was a baby, and that she couldn’t remember them,” Jerry remarked.
“No; I only said very likely they had. It was at the beginning of our talking about it, when I was saying she had everything, and you tried to make out perhaps she wasn’t clever,—oh, my goodness, she not clever!—and that she was an orphan, and—and—I am sure there was another thing you said perhaps she had or hadn’t.”
“I know,” said Jerry: “it was that perhaps she had to sleep in the haunted room at Silverthorns. I just wish she had, and that the old ghost, the cruel old Osbert papa told us of, would appear to her and give her a jolly good fright, and teach her to feel for others a little.”
“She isn’t unfeeling in some ways,” said Charlotte. “One day one of the dogs at Silverthorns—it’s an old dog that belonged to Mr Osbert, and was always with him, and now it’s taken a great fancy to her, she says—well, it followed her, running after her pony-carriage all the way to school, and she never saw it till it panted up to the steps and lay there as if it was dying. She was in such a state—the tears running down her face. She ran in with it in her arms, and begged Miss Lloyd to let it stay; and when she went home again she had it packed up in a shawl beside her. Oh, she does look so nice when she drives off! The pony and everything are so perfect. But I must go on with my lessons.”