The Mark Of Cain Part 6

"Ce que j'aime dans la tartine, c'est la simplicite prime-sautiere da sa nature," answered Miss Shields.

It was one of the charms of the "matinal meal" (as the author of "Guy Livingstone" calls breakfast) that the young ladies were all compelled to talk French (and such French!) during this period of refreshment.

"Toutes choses, la cuisine exceptee, sont Francaises, dans cet etabliss.e.m.e.nt peu recreatif," went on Janey, speaking low and fast.

"Je deteste le Francais," Margaret answered, "mais je le prefere infiniment a l'Allemand."

"Comment accentuez, vous le mot prefere, Marguerite?" asked Miss Marlett, who had heard the word, and who neglected no chance of conveying instruction.

"Oh, two accents--one this way, and the other that," answered Margaret, caught unawares. She certainly did not reply in the most correct terminology.

"Vous allez perdre dix marks," remarked the schoolmistress, if incorrectly, perhaps not too severely. But perhaps it is not easy to say, off-hand, what word Miss Marlett ought to have employed for "marks."

"Voici les lettres qui arrivent," whispered Janey to Margaret, as the post-bag was brought in and deposited before Miss Marlett, who opened it with a key and withdrew the contents.

This was a trying moment for the young ladies. Miss Marlett first sorted out all the letters for the girls, which came, indubitably and unmistakably, from fathers and mothers. Then she picked out the other letters, those directed to young ladies whom she thought she could trust, and handed them over in honorable silence. These maidens were regarded with envy by the others. Among them was not Miss Harman, whose letters Miss Marlett always deliberately opened and read before delivering them.

"Il y a une lettre pour moi, et elle va la lire," said poor Janey to her friend, who, for her part, never received any letters, save a few, at stated intervals, from Maitland. These Miss Shields used to carry about in her pocket without opening them till they were all crumply at the edges. Then she hastily mastered their contents, and made answer in the briefest and most decorous manner.

"Qui est votre correspondent?" Margaret asked. We are not defending her French.

"C'est le pauvre Harry Wyville," answered Janey. "Il est sous-lieutenant dans les Berkshires a Aldershot Pourquoi ne doit il pas ecrire a moi, il est comme on diroit, mon frere."

"Est il votre parent?"

"Non, pas du tout, mais je l'ai connu pour des ans. Oh, pour des ans!

Voici, elle a deux depeches telegraphiques," Janey added, observing two orange colored envelopes which had come in the mail-bag with the letters.

As this moment Miss Marlett finished the fraternal epistle of Lieutenant Wyville, which she folded up with a frown and returned to the envelope.

"Jeanne je veux vous parler a part, apres, dans mon boudoir," remarked Miss Marlett severely; and Miss Herman, becoming a little blanched, displayed no further appet.i.te for tartines, nor for French conversation.

Indeed, to see another, and a much older lady, read letters written to one by a lieutenant at Aldershot, whom one has known for years, and who is just like one's brother, is a trial to any girl.

Then Miss Marlett betook herself to her own correspondence, which, as Janey had noticed, included _two_ telegraphic despatches in orange-colored envelopes.

That she had not rushed at these, and opened them first, proves the admirable rigidity of her discipline. Any other woman would have done so, but it was Miss Marietta rule to dispose of the pupils'

correspondence before attending to her own. "Business first, pleasure afterward," was the motto of this admirable woman.

Breakfast ended, as the girls were leaving the room for the tasks of the day, Miss Marlett beckoned Margaret aside.

"Come to me, dear, in the boudoir, after Janey Harman," said the schoolmistress in English, and in a tone to which Margaret was so unaccustomed that she felt painfully uneasy and anxious--unwonted moods for this careless maiden.

"Janey, something must have happened," she whispered to her friend, who was hardening her own heart for the dreadful interview.

"Something's _going_ to happen, I'm sure," said poor Janey, apprehensively, and then she entered the august presence, alone.

Margaret remained at the further end of the pa.s.sage, leading to what Miss Marlett, when she spoke French, called her "boudoir." The girl felt colder than even the weather warranted. She looked alternately at Miss Marietta door and out of the window, across the dead blank flats to the low white hills far away. Just under the window one of the little girls was standing, throwing crumbs, remains of the tartines, to robins and sparrows, which chattered and fought over the spoil. One or two blackbirds, with their yellow bills, fluttered shyly on the outside of the ring of more familiar birds. Up from the south a miserable blue-gray haze was drifting and shuddering, ominous of a thaw. From the eaves and the branches of the trees heavy drops kept falling, making round black holes in the snow, and mixing and melting here and there in a yellowish plash.

Margaret shivered. Then she heard the boudoir door open, and Janey came out, making a plucky attempt not to cry.

"What is it?" whispered Margaret, forgetting the dread interview before her, and her own unformed misgivings.

"She won't give me the letter. I'm to have it when I go home for good; and I'm to go home for good at the holidays," whimpered Janey.

"Poor Janey!" said Margaret, petting the blonde head on her shoulder.

"Margaret Shields, come here!" cried Miss Marlett, in a shaky voice, from the boudoir.

"Come to the back music-room when she's done with you," the other girl whispered. And Margaret marched, with a beating heart, into Miss Marlett's chamber.

"My dear Margaret!" said Miss Marlett, holding out her hands. She was standing up in the middle of the boudoir. She ought to have been sitting grimly, fortified behind her bureau; that was the position in which she generally received pupils on these gloomy occasions.

"My dear Margaret!" she repeated. The girl trembled a little as the school-mistress drew her closer, and made her sit down on a sofa.

"What has happened?" she asked. Her lips were so dry that she could scarcely speak.

"You must make up your mind to be very brave. Your father----"

"Was it an accident?" asked Margaret, suddenly. She knew pretty well what was coming. Often she had foreseen the end, which it needed no prophet to foretell. "Was it anything very dreadful?"

"Mr. Maitland does not say. You are to be called for to-day. Poor Daisy!"

"Oh, Miss Marlett, I am so very unhappy!" the girl sobbed. Somehow she was kneeling now, with her head buried in the elder lady's lap. "I have been horrid to you. I am so wretched!"

A little kindness and a sudden trouble had broken down Miss Margaret Shields. For years she had been living, like Dr. Johnson at college, with a sad and hungry heart, trying to "carry it off by her wild talk and her wit." "It was bitterness they mistook for frolic." She had known herself to be a kind of outcast, and she determined to hold her own with the other girls who had homes and went to them in the holidays. Margaret had not gone home for a year. She had learned much, working harder than they knew; she had been in the "best set" among the pupils, by dint of her cheery rebelliousness. Now she suddenly felt all her loneliness, and knew, too, that she had been living, socially, in that little society at the expense of this kind queer old Miss Marlett's feelings.

"I have been horrid to you," she repeated. "I wish I had never been born."

The school-mistress said nothing at all, but kept stroking the girl's beautiful head. Surrept.i.tiously Miss Marlett wiped away a frosty tear.

"Don't mind me," at last Miss Marlett said. "I never thought hardly of you; I understood. Now you must go and get ready for your journey; you can have any of the girls you like to help you to pack."

Miss Marlett carried generosity so far that she did not even ask which of the girls was to be chosen for this service. Perhaps she guessed that it was the other culprit.

Then Margaret rose and dried her eyes, and Miss Marlett took her in her arms and kissed her and went off to order a travelling luncheon and to select the warmest railway rug she could find; for the teacher, though she was not a very learned nor judicious school-mistress, had a heart and affections of her own. She had once, it is true, taken the word _legibus_ (dative plural of lex, a law) for an adjective of the third declension, legibus, legiba, legib.u.m; and Margaret had criticised this grammatical subtlety with an unsparing philological ac.u.men, as if she had been Professor Moritz Haupt and Miss Marlett, Orelli. And this had led to the end of Latin lessons at the Dovecot, wherefore Margaret was honored as a G.o.ddess by girls averse to studying the cla.s.sic languages.

But now Miss Marlett forgot these things, and all the other skirmishes of the past.

Margaret went wearily to her room, where she bathed her face with cold water; it could not be too cold for her, A certain numb forgetfulness seemed to steep her mind while she was thus deadening her eyes again and again. She felt as if she never wished to raise her eyes from this chilling consolation. Then, when she thought she had got lid of all the traces of her trouble, she went cautiously to the back music-room. Janey was there, moping alone, drumming on the window-pane with her fingers.

"Come to my room, Janey," she said, beckoning.

Now, to consort together in their bedrooms during school-hours was forbidden to the girls.

"Why, well only get into another sc.r.a.pe," said Janey, ruefully.

"No, come away; I've got leave for you. You're to help me to pack"

"To pack!" cried Janey. "Why, _you're_ not expelled, are you? You've done nothing. You've not even had a perfectly harmless letter from a boy who is just like a brother to you and whom you've known for years."