by a man muffled up in a great-coat and a woollen comforter. The stranger almost shouldered against him, as he stood reading his telegram, and conscientiously docking off a word here and there to save threepence,
“From Robert Maitland to Miss Marlett.
“The Dovecot, Conisbeare,
“Tiverton.
“I come to-morrow, leaving by 10.30 train. Do
not let Margaret see newspaper. Her father dead.
Break news.”
This telegram gave Maitland, in his excited state, more trouble to construct than might have been expected. We all know the wondrous badness of post-office pens or pencils, and how they tear or blot the paper when we are in a hurry; and Maitland felt hurried, though there was no need for haste. Meantime the man in the woollen comforter was buying stamps, and, finishing his bargain before the despatch was stamped and delivered, went out into the fog, and was no more seen.
CHAPTER IV. – Miss Marlett’s
Girls’ schools are chilly places. The unfortunate victims, when you chance to meet them, mostly look but half-alive, and dismally cold. Their noses (however charming these features may become in a year or two, or even may be in the holidays) appear somehow of a frosty temperature in the long dull months of school-time. The hands, too, of the fair pupils are apt to seem larger than common, inclined to blue in color, and, generally, are suggestive of inadequate circulation. À tendency to get as near the fire as possible (to come within the frontiers of the hearth-rug is forbidden), and to cower beneath shawls, is also characteristic of joyous girlhood – school-girlhood, that is. In fact, one thinks of a girls’ school as too frequently a spot where no one takes any lively exercise (for walking in a funereal procession is not exercise, or Mutes might be athletes), and where there is apt to be a pervading impression of insufficient food, insufficient clothing, and general unsatisfied tedium.
Miss Marlett’s Establishment for the Highest Education of Girls, more briefly known as “The Dovecot, Conisbeare,” was no exception, on a particularly cold February day – the day after Dicky Shields was found dead – to these pretty general rules. The Dovecot, before it became a girls’ school, was, no doubt, a pleasant English home, where “the fires wass coot,” as the Highlandman said. The red-brick house, with its lawn sloping down to the fields, all level with snow, stood at a little distance from the main road, at the end of a handsome avenue of Scotch pines. But the fires at Miss Marlett’s were not good on this February morning. They never were good at the Dovecot. Miss Marlett was one of those people who, fortunately for themselves, and unfortunately for persons dwelling under their roofs, never feel cold, or never know what they feel. Therefore, Miss Marlett never poked the fire, which, consequently used to grow black toward its early death, and was only revived, at dangerously long intervals, by the most minute doses of stimulant in the shape of rather damp small coals. Now, supplies of coal had run low at the Dovecot, for the very excellent reason that the roads were snowed up, and that convoys of the precious fuel were scarcely to be urged along the heavy ways.
This did not matter much to the equable temperature of Miss Marlett; but it did matter a great deal to her shivering pupils, three of whom were just speeding their morning toilette, by the light of one candle, at the pleasant hour of five minutes to seven on a frosty morning.
“Oh dear,” said one maiden – Janey Harman by name – whose blonde complexion should have been pink and white, but was mottled with alien and unbecoming hues, “why won’t that old Cat let us have fires to dress by? Gracious, Margaret, how black your fingers are!”
“Yes; and I cant get them clean,” said Margaret, holding up two very pretty dripping hands, and quoting, in mock heroic parody:
“Ho, dogs of false Tarentum,
Are not my hands washed white?”
“No talking in the bedrooms, young ladies,” came a voice, accompanied by an icy draught, from the door, which was opened just enough to admit a fleeting vision of Miss Mariettas personal charms.
“I was only repeating my lay, Miss Marlett,” replied the maiden thus rebuked, in a tone of injured innocence —
“‘Ho, dogs of false Tarentum,’”
– and the door closed again on Miss Marlett, who had not altogether the best of it in this affair of outposts, and could not help feeling as if “that Miss Shields” was laughing at her.
“Old Cat!” the young lady went on, in a subdued whisper. “But no wonder my hands were a little black, Janey. You forget that it’s my week to be Stoker. Already, girls, by an early and unexpected movement, I have cut off some of the enemy’s supplies.”
So speaking, Miss Margaret Shields proudly displayed a small deposit of coals, stored, for secrecy, in the bottom of a clothes-basket.
“Gracious, Daisy, how clever! Well, you are something like a stoker,” exclaimed the third girl, who by this time had finished dressing: “we shall have a blaze to-night.”
Now, it must be said that at Miss Marlett’s school, by an unusual and inconsistent concession to comfort and saniitary principles, the elder girls were allowed to have fires in their bed-rooms at night, in winter. But seeing that these fires resembled the laughter of the wicked, inasmuch as they were brief-lived as the crackling of thorns under pots, the girls were driven to make predatory attacks on fuel wherever it could be found. Sometimes, one is sorry to say, they robbed each other’s fireplaces, and concealed the coal in their pockets. But this conduct – resembling what is fabled of the natives of the Scilly Islands, that they “eke out a precarious livelihood by taking in each other’s washing” – led to strife and bickering; so that the Stoker for the week (as the girl appointed to collect these supplies was called) had to infringe a little on the secret household stores of Miss Marlett. This week, as it happened, Margaret Shields was the Stoker, and she so bore herself in her high office as to extort the admiration of the very housemaids.
“Even the ranks of Tusculum
Could scarce forbear to cheer,”
if we may again quote the author who was at that time Miss Shields’ favorite poet. Miss Shields had not studied Mr. Matthew Arnold, and was mercifully unaware that not to detect the “pinchbeck” in the Lays is the sign of a grovelling nature.
Before she was sent to Miss Marlett’s, four years ere this date, Margaret Shields’ instruction had been limited. “The best thing that could be said for it,” as the old sporting prophet remarked of his own education, “was that it had been mainly eleemosynary.” The Chelsea School Board fees could but rarely be extracted from old Dicky Shields. But Robert Maitland, when still young in philanthropy, had seen the clever, merry, brown-eyed child at some school treat, or inspection, or other function; had covenanted in some sort with her shiftless parent; had rescued the child from the streets, and sent her as a pupil to Miss Marlett’s. Like Mr. Day, the accomplished author of “Sandford and Merton,” and creator of the immortal Mr. Barlow, Robert Maitland had conceived the hope that he might have a girl educated up to his own intellectual standard, and made, or “ready-made,” a helpmate meet for him. He was, in a more or less formal way, the guardian of Margaret Shields, and the ward might be expected (by anyone who did not know human nature any better) to blossom into the wife.
Maitland could “please himself,” as people say; that is, in his choice of a partner he had no relations to please – no one but the elect young lady, who, after all, might not be “pleased” with alacrity.
Whether pleased or not, there could be no
