Sarah's School Friend Part 9

So George went off, his parting words to Sarah being, 'Don't worry. Just be as nice to her as you can, and don't, for goodness' sake, be ashamed of being what you are, for you have nothing to be ashamed of.'

'I don't think that,' said Sarah.

'We need be ashamed of nothing in this world except doing wrong,' said George; and the motor started with a hoot of approval of this worthy sentiment.

Sarah waved her hand to her brother, and stood watching him until the motor was hidden behind the trees and a bend in a long avenue, and then turned back to the house, her head bent towards the gravel-path, the pebbles of which she kicked with her feet, to the distinct disapproval of the young gardener who had just rolled it, and viewed this destruction of his work from a distance.

'Ashamed of nothing but doing wrong!' she soliloquised. 'That's not true.

One is ashamed of having dirty hands or muddy boots; there's nothing wrong in that.' She turned impulsively as if to say this to her brother, and have the last word; but that being an impossibility, she was reduced to arguing the question out with herself, as Sarah had a habit of doing.

The only person she ever consulted, or whose advice or criticism she accepted, was her uncle Howroyd. But this question she could not ask him, for Sarah hardly liked to own to herself that she was a little ashamed of her uncle Howroyd; at least, not exactly ashamed, but she did not mean to take Horatia Cunningham to see him or the old-fashioned mill-house in which William Howroyd and his father had lived for three or four generations.

So Sarah was reduced to herself as an authority upon this question for the present, and not being by any means a safe authority, she did not get a wise answer, which might have saved her a great deal of vexation and annoyance; for Sarah decided that George was quite wrong. There were things which were not wrong, and yet one could not help being ashamed of them; and one thing Sarah was ashamed of was having parents who were not only uneducated, but had unrefined ideas.

Sarah had one day-dream, absurd as it may seem, of which she never spoke.

Sarah always cherished the hope that she might some day find that she and her brother were not really George and Sarah Clay, but adopted children of Mark Clay, and that by-and-by the news would be broken to them. And yet Sarah was a well-educated, intelligent girl of sixteen, and lived in the twentieth century. The fancy arose from a remark her father once made when she was quite a child: 'They are not my children; they are a cut above me. They've got their mother's features, but they'll have nothing of me but my money.' And upon this half-bitter, half-proud speech of Mark Clay's Sarah built her romance, which varied as she invented different explanations of the mystery from time to time; but her favourite one was that her mother first married a lord who was ashamed of his wife, and would not acknowledge his children until they were grown up and properly educated; and Sarah used to picture the reconciliation between them and their proud relatives, for whose benefit she composed many fine speeches full of reproof and final forgiveness.

This may be a little excuse for her want of respect to her father, Mark Clay, by speaking of whom, it will be remembered, as 'your husband' she used to anger her mother. She even half-thought of telling Horatia this tale; but Horatia had a way of turning everything into ridicule, and one of the many things that Sarah could not stand was being laughed at.

The same motor that took George Clay to the station took Sarah that afternoon to meet Horatia Cunningham, who was to arrive at six o'clock, and who persisted in arriving at that hour, although Sarah had written to her and warned her it was the hour when the mill-hands came out; she said she did not mind at all, and supposed that she would be quite safe in a motor with its smart chauffeur; and Sarah, looking so fresh and dainty that many a one turned and looked after the millionaire's pretty daughter, started off for the station, and not one of them guessed she was feeling nervous, and wished with all her might that she were going on another errand. The girl even wished that something might have happened to prevent her friend from coming; but when the train stopped she saw the wish was vain, for Horatia's face was smiling at her from a window, and Sarah forgot her fears for the moment, and smiled back a welcome.

CHAPTER VII.

HORATIA'S ARRIVAL.

Sarah stepped forward to help Horatia down from the carriage, and suddenly her expression changed to one of mingled surprise and annoyance; seeing which, the young visitor, with a merry laugh, jumped from the carriage to the platform, ignoring the steps and Sarah's outstretched hand.

'There! I said so, didn't I, Nanny?' she cried, turning to her maid, a highly respectable, middle-aged woman, with as good-humoured a face as her young charge.--'Sarah, I said the minute you saw us come out of a third-cla.s.s carriage you would put on that shocked face of yours. That's partly why I did it.'

'You must excuse Miss Horatia, miss. She's full of mischief, and she got into this carriage at the junction without my seeing what cla.s.s it was, or I would never have allowed her to do such a thing as arrive here third, with you to meet her, and the "chauffer" and all,' said Horatia's maid.

'Oh, bother the chauffeur! It's nothing to do with him which cla.s.s I travel!' exclaimed Horatia, who, to do her justice, had no idea that the chauffeur was just behind her. That individual was far too well trained to give any sign of having heard this remark, though it was very different from the way his present employers treated him. Mark Clay bullied his servants, and his timid little wife hardly dared to speak to them. Sarah was very reserved, except with Naomi; while George was as courteous to a beggar as to a lord, having but one manner with them all.

When Horatia saw what she had done she made a funny little face, and said in an undertone to Sarah, 'I say, Sarah, can't we walk to your house?'

'I don't think we had better. We shall meet the mill-hands coming out, and mother does not like us to do that,' said Sarah.

'Oh, of course, if your mother does not allow it, we can't; but do you think I had better apologise to your man?' she suggested.

'Apologise? Pray, don't think of such a thing! But I suppose you are only saying that to shock me, though why that should amuse you so much I can't think,' observed Sarah.

'You would if you could see your own face; but I really didn't get into that railway-carriage only to shock you. I got in to hear Yorkshire people talk. I saw some country men and women get in, and I just followed them; and, oh Sarah, what does "ginnel" mean, and a "fettle"?'

'I don't know what a "ginnel" is; but "fettle" is a verb. A fettler is the man who cleans the machines in the mill. I have heard the people here talk of "fettling" the hearth when they mean "clean up." And old Matthew, a mill-hand, said the other day he didn't feel in a grand fettle. I suppose he meant "well."'

'A ginnel's a narrow pa.s.sage, miss. Yon's a ginnel we are just pa.s.sing,'

said the chauffeur to Horatia, slowing down as they pa.s.sed what is generally called an alley, to which he pointed.

'Oh, thank you very much,' said Horatia genially, and added to Sarah, as she squeezed her arm, 'Oh Sarah, I am enjoying myself so much!'

Her happiness was infectious, and Sarah turned to her visitor with an amused smile. 'Why, what can you find to enjoy already?' she asked, with some reason, for they were going almost at walking pace through the town, because of the crowds that poured into the streets from almost every side-turning, so that it could not be the exhilarating motion of motoring that she liked so much.

'Everything! Seeing all those people and hearing people talk Yorkshire,'

cried Horatia.

'The people are just like poor people anywhere, only rather dirtier; and I don't like their way of speaking--they have such rough, loud voices,'

replied Sarah.

'I think that kind of sing-song they have is musical, and they are not a bit like our villagers; I don't know how, but they are not,' said Horatia, glancing about her, and almost jumping up and down in her eagerness to see all there was to be seen, as they drove slowly along the narrow, and at this time crowded, streets of the grimy manufacturing town.

'Oh, oh, look, Nanny, at that lovely river all purple!' she cried enthusiastically.

'Well, really, Miss Horatia, I can't say that I do admire that. It looks shocking dirty,' said the maid.

'It is. It's lovely before it gets to Ousebank; but it's so polluted by the mills turning all their horrid dyes and things into it that fish can't live in it,' observed Sarah in tones of disgust.

'Well, I call it a lovely colour. Just think how delightful--when you get tired of a dress one colour, you have just got to dip it into the river when the water's the colour you want, and, hey, presto! there you are with a new dress!'

Even the chauffeur on the seat in front let his face relax into a smile at Horatia's chatter; but Sarah, though she laughed, said decidedly, 'I'd rather send my dresses to proper dyers than put them into that dirty water; and I'd rather see the river clean, and so would you if you lived here.'

They had got clear of the town now, and Horatia, having nothing to look at except an ugly row of cottages, in which even she could not find anything to admire, turned her attention to the car, which she declared most luxurious, and ever so much better than her father's.

'We can go out in it as much as you like, if you like motoring, and go for picnics in the country,' suggested Sarah.

'That will be very nice; but I want to see your mill first,' said Horatia. 'Is it near the house?'

'No; we pa.s.sed it just now, when you said, "What a big stream of people"!' answered Sarah.

'But they didn't know you,' objected the other.

'Oh yes, they did--by sight, I mean. But what difference would that make?

You don't expect them to nod to me, do you?'

'All our villagers do to me, even though I don't know them by sight,'

said Horatia.

'Then they are different from our people, and perhaps there are not so many. We have over eight hundred men in our mill, besides women and boys.'

Horatia began to see that Sarah did not care to talk about mill-people, as she called them in her mind, and as they entered the park at the moment, and the house in another moment, she found other subjects for conversation.

Horatia was a year younger than Sarah and more than a head shorter, and a greater contrast than the two presented could not be imagined: the one tall, slender, dignified, with regular features and clear complexion; and the other short, square-set, with snub-nose and freckled skin, a face only redeemed from plainness by its merry, twinkling eyes and good-humoured mouth, which was always broadening into a smile.

Mrs Clay had seen Horatia Cunningham's photograph, so that she was prepared for a girl with a homely face; but most photographs flatter, and Mrs Clay had not expected to see any one quite so ordinary in appearance, 'an' that plainly dressed,' as she confided to her husband. However, she came forward with a hearty welcome, and as soon as Horatia smiled at her she forgot the slight shock her young guest's appearance had given her.

Horatia jumped out of the car as she had jumped out of the train. 'It is so kind of you to have me; and what a lovely view you have! One would never think the town was so near. I suppose it is hidden behind those trees?' she said.