There was no monotony in Miss Blackburne's establishment. The girls were taken in turns to operas, concerts, picture-galleries, and every kind of exhibition that might help to cultivate their minds. To be able to discuss such things was a part of their education. They were expected to describe all they saw, fluently and pleasantly, but without criticism enough to require thought and provoke argument, which is apt to be tedious; and thus was formed the habit of chatting in the genial light frothy way which does duty for conversation in society. Geraldine had not exaggerated when she called Miss Blackburne's school a forcing house for the marriage market. At that time marriage was the only career open to a gentlewoman, and the object of her education was to make her attractive. The theory then was that solid acquirements were beyond the physical strength of girls, besides being unnecessary. Showy accomplishments, therefore, were all that was aimed at; but they had to be thorough. Music, singing, drawing, dancing, French, German, Italian—whatever it might be; the girl who was learning it had the greatest attention from her master or mistress during the lesson; she was made to do it as much by the will of the teacher as by her own intelligence. This was the first experience of thorough teaching Beth had ever had, and she enjoyed it, and would have worked harder to profit by it than Miss Blackburne would allow. As it was, she made great progress with her work, while all the time the more informal but most valuable part of her education, which was directed to the strengthening of every womanly attribute, went on steadily under the influence of Miss Ella.
It would have been well for Beth if she had been left at Miss Blackburne's for the next three years; but just when the rebellious beating of her wings against the bars had ceased, and they had folded themselves contentedly behind her for awhile; just when the wild flights of her imagination were giving way to wholesome habits of thought, and her own vain dreams were being dissipated by the honest ambition to accomplish something actual—she was summoned away. Her sister Mildred had died suddenly of meningitis, and the immediate effect of the shock on Mrs. Caldwell, who had dearly loved her eldest daughter, was a kindlier feeling for Beth, and a wish to have her at home—for a time at all events. And Beth went willingly under the circumstances. She sympathised deeply with her mother, and was full of grief herself for her sister, to whom she had been tenderly attached although they had seen so little of each other. Beth was not yet sixteen, and this was the third blow that death had dealt her.
CHAPTER XXXIV
Beth had a natural love of order, and at school she had learnt the necessity for it. She did not mean to give up work when she went home; on the contrary, she determined to do more than ever. Miss Ella had taught her to be deliberate, neither to haste nor to rest, but steadily to pursue. She insisted that things to be well done must be done regularly, and Beth, in accordance with this precept, mapped out her day so as to make the most of it. She got up at seven, opened her window wider, threw the clothes back from her bed to air it, had her bath, brushed her hair; left nothing untidy lying about her room; did her good reading, the psalms and lessons; breakfasted, made her bed, studied French, went out for exercise, sewed, and read so much, all in the same order every day. She paid particular attention to her personal appearance, too, that being the one of her mother's principles which had also been most particularly enjoined by Miss Blackburne. At both of her schools marriage was the great ambition of most of the girls. At St Catherine's it meant a means of escape from many hardships; to Miss Blackburne's girls it offered the chance of a better position, and more money and luxury. There was a nicer tone among the Royal Service girls, and more reticence in their discussions of the subject than at Miss Blackburne's, where the girls were not at all high-minded, and talked of their chances with the utmost frankness, not to say coarseness; but good looks were held to be the best, if not the only means to the end in both sets. Money and accomplishments might help, but personal appearance was the great certainty; and Beth was naturally impressed with this idea like the rest. Marriage, however, was far from being the distinct object of her life; in fact, she had no distinct object at all as yet. She had always meant to do something, or rather to be something; but further than that she had not got.
Miss Blackburne had paid particular attention to the cultivation of the speaking voice, and it was from her that Beth had learnt how to round hers to richness, and modulate it so that its natural sweetness and charm were greatly enhanced. There was considerable difference of opinion about her looks. She was always striking in appearance, but dress, for one thing, altered her very much, and the state of her mind still more. People who met her on one occasion admired her exceedingly, and on the next wondered why they had thought her good-looking at all. She had the mesmeric quality which makes it impossible to escape observation, and her personality never failed to interest the intelligent whether it pleased them or not; but she was only at her best in mind, manner, and appearance when her fitful further faculty was active; then indeed she shone with a strange loveliness, a light to be felt rather than seen, and not to be described at all. At such times the mere physical beauty of other women went out in her immediate neighbourhood, and was no more thought of. It was not until she was quite mature, however, that her manner permanently acquired that subtle indefinable quality called charm, which is the outcome of a large tolerant nature and kindness of heart. It was as if she did not come into full possession of her true self until she had experienced numberless other phases of being common to the race. Hence the apparently incongruous mixture she presented in the earlier stages of her youth, her sluggish indifference at times, her excesses of energy and zeal, her variations of taste.
At first, after she left school, as was inevitable, her self-discipline was irksome enough at times, and some of the details she shirked; but not for long, because the time which accustomed duties should have occupied hung heavy on her hands, and she felt dissatisfied with herself rather than relieved when she neglected them. So by degrees her habits were formed, and in after life she found them a very present help in time of trouble, anchors which kept her from drifting to leeward, as she must have done but for their hold upon her. Some of her erratic tricks were not to be cured, but they came to be part of the day's work rather than a hindrance to it. She saw many a sunrise, for instance, and revelled with uplifted spirit in the beauty and wonder of the hour; but the soul that sang responsive to the glories of the summer dawn, the colour, the freshness, the perfume, was steeped at noon with equal energy in the book she was studying, so that, instead of losing anything, she gained that day one sunrise more.
When she left school Beth was fastidiously refined. She hurried over all the hateful words and passages in the Bible, Shakespeare, or any other book she might be reading. The words she would not even pronounce to herself, so strongly did her delicate mind revolt from a vile idea, and sicken at the expression of it. But, nevertheless, she pored patiently over every book she could get that had a great reputation, and in this way she read many not usually given to girls, and became familiarised with certain facts of life not generally supposed to be of soul-making material. But she took no harm. The soul that is shaping itself to noble purpose, the growing soul, tries more than is proper for its nourishment in its search for sustenance, but rejects all that is unnecessary or injurious, as water creatures without intelligence reject any unsuitable substance they collect with their food.
Before she had been many days at home, Beth found that her mother had made a new acquaintance, who came to the house often in a casual way like an intimate friend. He came in on the day of her arrival after dinner, and was introduced to Beth by her mother as "the doctor." Beth broke into smiles, for she recognised her long-ago acquaintance of the rocks, the doctor of her Hector-romance. And it seemed he really was a doctor; now that was a singular coincidence! In their little drawing-room she discovered him to be a bigger man than she had supposed, but otherwise he was like her first impression of him, striking because of his colouring; the red and white of his complexion, which was unusually clear for a man, and the lightness of his grey-green eyes being in peculiar contrast to the blackness of his hair. She noticed again, too, that the expression of his face when he smiled was not altogether agreeable, because his teeth were too far apart; and she also thought his finely-formed hands would have looked better had they not been so obtrusively white.
"But we have met before," he exclaimed when Beth acknowledged the introduction. "You are the young lady I helped on the rocks one day, quite a long time ago now, when you were a little girl."