The Mark Of Cain
Arithmetic and algebra were not this scholar’s forte; and no young lady in Miss Marlett’s establishment was so hungry, or so glad when eight o’clock struck and the bell rang for breakfast, as Margaret Shields.
Breakfast at Miss Marlett’s was not a convivial meal. There was a long narrow table, with cross-tables at each end, these high seats, or dais, being occupied by Miss Marlett and the governesses. At intervals down the table were stacked huge piles of bread and butter – of extremely thick bread and surprisingly thin butter – each slice being divided into four portions. The rest of the banquet consisted solely of tea. Whether this regimen was enough to support growing girls, who had risen at seven, till dinnertime at half-past one, is a problem which, perhaps, the inexperienced intellect of man can scarcely approach with confidence. But, if girls do not always learn as much at school as could be desired, intellectually speaking, it is certain that they have every chance of acquiring Spartan habits, and of becoming accustomed (if familiarity really breeds contempt) to despise hunger and cold. Not that Miss Marlett’s establishment was a Dothegirls Hall, nor a school much more scantily equipped with luxuries than others. But the human race has still to learn that girls need good meals just as much as, or more than, persons of maturer years. Boys are no better off at many places; but boys have opportunities of adding bloaters and chops to their breakfasts, which would be considered horribly indelicate and insubordinate conduct in girls.
“Est ce que vous aimez les tartines à l’Anglaise,” said Janey Harman to Margaret.
“Ce que j’aime dans la tartine, c’est la simplicité prime-sautière 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 exceptée, sont Françaises, dans cet établissement peu recréatif,” went on Janey, speaking low and fast.
“Je déteste le Français,” Margaret answered, “mais je le préfère infiniment à l’Allemand.”
“Comment accentuez, vous le mot préfère, 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 à Aldershot Pourquoi ne doit il pas écrire à moi, il est comme on diroit, mon frère.”
“Est il votre parent?”
“Non, pas du tout, mais je l’ai connu pour des ans. Oh, pour des ans! Voici, elle à deux dépêches télégraphiques,” 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 à part, après, dans mon boudoir,” remarked Miss Marlett severely; and Miss Herman, becoming a little blanched, displayed no further appetite 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 passage, 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. Surreptitiously 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, legibum; and Margaret had criticised this grammatical subtlety with an unsparing philological acumen, 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 goddess by girls averse to studying the classic 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 scrape,” 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.”
Margaret only beckoned again and turned away, Janey following in silence and intense curiosity.
When they reached their room, where Margaret’s portmanteau had already been placed, the girl began to put up such things as she would need for a short journey. She said nothing till she had finished, and then she sat down on a bed and told Janey what she had learned; and the pair “had a good cry,” and comforted each other as well as they might.
“And what are you going to do?” asked Janey, when, as Homer says, “they had taken their fill of chilling lamentations.”
“I don’t know!”
“Have you no one else in all the world?”
“No one at all. My mother died when I was a little child, in Smyrna. Since then we have wandered all about; we were a long time in Algiers, and we were at Marseilles, and then in London.”
“But you have a guardian, haven’t you?”
“Yes; he sent me here. And, of course, he’s been very kind, and done everything for me; but he’s quite a young man, not thirty, and he’s so stupid, and so stiff, and thinks so much about Oxford, and talks so like a book. And he’s so shy, and always seems to do everything, not because he likes it, but because he thinks he ought to. And, besides – ”
But Margaret did not go further in her confessions, nor explain more lucidly why she had scant affection for Mait-land of St. Gatien’s.
“And had your poor father no other friends who could take care of you?” Janey asked.
“There was a gentleman who called now and then; I saw him twice. He had been an officer in father’s ship, I think, or had known him long ago at sea. He found us out somehow in Chelsea. There was no one else at all.”
“And you don’t know any of your father’s family?”
“No,” said Margaret, wearily. “Ob, I have forgotten to pack up my prayer-book.” And she took up a little worn volume in black morocco with silver clasps. “This was a book my father gave me,” she said. “It has a name on it – my grandfather’s, I suppose – ‘Richard Johnson, Linkheaton, 1837.’” Then she put the book in a pocket of her travelling cloak.
“Your mother’s father it may have belonged to,” said Janey.
“I don’t know,” Margaret replied, looking out of the window.
“I hope you won’t stay away long, dear,” said Janey, affectionately.
“But you are going, too, you know,” Margaret answered, without much tact; and Janey, reminded of her private griefs, was about to break down, when the wheels of a carriage were heard laboring slowly up the snow-laden drive.
“Why, here’s some one coming!” cried Janey, rushing to the window. “Two horses! and a gentleman all in furs. Oh, Margaret, this must be for you!”
CHAPTER V. – Flown
Maitland’s reflections as, in performance of the promise he had telegraphed, he made his way to the Dovecot were deep and distracted. The newspapers with which he had littered the railway carriage were left unread: he had occupation enough in his own thoughts. Men are so made that they seldom hear even of a death without immediately considering its effects on their private interests. Now, the death of Richard Shields affected Maitland’s purposes both favorably and unfavorably. He had for some time repented of the tacit engagement (tacit as far as the girl was concerned) which bound him to Margaret. For some time he had been dimly aware of quite novel emotions in his own heart, and of a new, rather painful, rather pleasant, kind of interest in another lady. Maitland, in fact, was becoming more human than he gave himself credit for, and a sign of his awakening nature was the blush with which he had greeted, some weeks before, Barton’s casual criticism on Mrs. St. John Deloraine.
Without any well-defined ideas or hopes, Maitland had felt that his philanthropic entanglement – it was rather, he said to himself, an entanglement than an engagement – had become irksome to his fancy. Now that the unfortunate parent was out of the way, he felt that the daughter would not be more sorry than himself to revise the relations in which they stood to each other. Vanity might have prevented some men from seeing this; but Maitland had not vitality enough for a healthy conceit. A curious “aloofness” of nature permitted him to stand aside, and see himself much as a young lady was likely to see him. This disposition is rare, and not a source of happiness.
On the other hand, his future relations to Margaret formed a puzzle inextricable. He could not at all imagine how he was to dispose of so embarrassing a protégée. Margaret was becoming too much of a woman to be left much longer at school; and where was she to be disposed of?
“I might send her to Girton,” he thought; and then, characteristically, he began to weigh in his mind the comparative educational merits of Girton and Somerville Hall. About one thing only was he certain: he must consult his college mentor, Bielby of St. Gatien’s, as soon as might be. Too long had this Rasselas – occupied, like the famous Prince of Abyssinia, with the choice of life– neglected to resort to his academic Imlac. In the meantime he could only reflect that Margaret must remain as a pupil at Miss Marlett’s. The moment would soon be arriving when some other home, and a chaperon instead of a school-mistress, must be found for this peculiar object of philanthropy and outdoor relief.
Maitland was sorry he had not left town by the nine o’clock train. The early dusk began to gather, gray and damp; the train was late, having made tardy progress through the half-melted snow. He had set out from Paddington by the half-past ten express, and a glance at the harsh and crabbed page of Bradshaw will prove to the most sceptical that Maitland could not reach Tiverton much before six. Half frozen, and in anything but a happy temper, he engaged a fly, and drove off, along heavy miserable roads, to the Dovecot.
Arriving at the closed and barred gates of that vestal establishment, Maitland’s cabman “pulled, and pushed, and kicked, and knocked” for a considerable time, without manifest effect. Clearly the retainers of Miss Marlett had secured the position for the night, and expected no visitors, though Maitland knew that he ought to be expected. “The bandogs bayed and howled,” as they did round the secret bower of the Lady of Brauksome; and lights flitted about the windows. When a lantern at last came flickering up to the gate, the bearer of it stopped to challenge an apparently unlooked-for and unwelcome stranger.
“Who are you? What do you want?” said a female voice, in a strong Devonian accent.
“I want Miss Marlett,” answered Maitland.
There was some hesitation. Then the porter appeared to reflect that a burglar would not arrive in a cab, and that a surreptitious lover would not ask for the schoolmistress.
The portals were at length unbarred and lugged apart over the gravel, and Maitland followed the cook (for she was no one less) and the candle up to the front door. He gave his card, and was ushered into the chamber reserved for interviews with parents and guardians. The drawing-room had the air and faint smell of a room very seldom occupied. All the chairs were so elegantly and cunningly constructed that they tilted up at intervals, and threw out the unwary male who trusted himself to their hospitality. Their backs were decorated with antimacassars wrought with glass beads, and these, in the light of one dip, shone fitfully with a frosty lustre. On the round table in the middle were volumes of “The Mothers of England,” “The Grandmothers of the Bible,” Blair “On the Grave,” and “The Epic of Hades,” the latter copiously and appropriately illustrated. In addition to these cheerful volumes there were large tomes of lake and river scenery, with gilt edges and faded magenta bindings, shrouded from the garish light of day in drab paper covers.
The walls, of a very faint lilac tint, were hung with prize sketches, in water colors or in pencil, by young ladies who had left. In the former works of art, distant nature was represented as, on the whole, of a mauve hue, while the foreground was mainly composed of burnt-umber rocks, touched up with orange. The shadows in the pencil drawings had an agreeably brilliant polish, like that which, when conferred on fenders by Somebody’s Patent Dome-Blacklead, “increases the attractions of the fireside,” according to the advertisements. Maitland knew all the blacklead caves, broad-hatted brigands, and pea-green trees. They were old acquaintances, and as he fidgeted about the room he became very impatient.
At last the door opened, and Miss Marlett appeared, rustling in silks, very stiff, and with an air of extreme astonishment.
“Mr. Maitland?” she said, in an interrogative tone.
“Didn’t you expect me? Didn’t you get my telegram?” asked Maitland.
It occurred to him that the storm might have injured the wires, that his message might never have arrived, and that he might be obliged to explain everything, and break his bad news in person.
“Yes, certainly. I got both your telegrams. But why have you come here?”
“Why, to see Margaret Shields, of course, and consult you about her. But what do you mean by both my telegrams?”
Miss Marlett turned very pale, and sat down with unexpected suddenness.
“Oh, what will become of the poor girl?” she cried, “and what will become of me? It will get talked about. The parents will hear of it, and I am ruined.”
The unfortunate lady passed her handkerchief over her eyes, to the extreme discomfiture of Maitland. He could not bear to see a woman cry; and that Miss Marlett should cry – Miss Marlett, the least melting, as he had fancied, of her sex – was a circumstance which entirely puzzled and greatly disconcerted him.
He remained silent, looking at a flower in the pattern of the carpet, for at least a minute.
“I came here to consult you, Miss Marlett, about what is to become of the poor girl; but I do not see how the parents of the other young ladies are concerned. Death is common to all; and Margaret’s father, though his life was exposed to criticism, cannot be fairly censured because he has left it And what do you mean, please, by receiving both my telegrams? I only #sent one, to the effect that I would leave town by the 10.30 train, and come straight to you. There must be some mistake somewhere. Can I see Miss Shields?”
“See Miss Shields! Why, she’s gone! She left this morning with your friend,” said Miss Marlett, raising a face at once mournful and alarmed, and looking straight at her visitor.
“She’s gone! She left this morning with my friend!” repeated Maitland. He felt like a man in a dream.
“You said in your first telegram that you would come for her yourself, and in your second that you were detained, and that your friend and her father’s friend, Mr. Lithgow, would call for her by the early train; so she went with him.”
“My friend, Mr. Lithgow! I have no friend, Mr. lithgow,” cried Maitland; “and I sent no second telegram.”
“Then who did send it, sir, if you please? For I will show you both telegrams,” cried Miss Marlett, now on her defence; and rising, she left the room.
While Miss Marlett was absent, in search of the telegrams, Maitland had time to reflect on the unaccountable change in the situation. What had become of Margaret? Who had any conceivable interest in removing her from school at the very moment of her father’s accidental death? And by what possible circumstances of accident or fraud could two messages from himself have arrived, when he was certain that he had only sent one?
The records of somnambulism contain no story of a person who despatched telegrams while walking in his sleep. Then the notion occurred to Maitland that his original despatch, as he wrote it, might have been mislaid in the office, and that the imaginative clerk who lost it might have filled it up from memory, and, like the examinees in the poem, might
“Have wrote it all by rote,And never wrote it right.”But the fluttering approach of such an hypothesis was dispersed by the recollection that Margaret had actually departed, and (what was worse) had gone off with “his friend, Mr. Lithgow.” Clearly, no amount of accident or mistake would account for the appearance of Mr. Lithgow, and the disappearance of Margaret.
It was characteristic of Maitland that within himself he did not greatly blame the schoolmistress. He had so little human nature – as he admitted, on the evidence of his old college tutor – that he was never able to see things absolutely and entirely from the point of view of his own interests. His own personality was not elevated enough to command the whole field of human conduct. He was always making allowances for people, and never felt able to believe himself absolutely in the right, and everyone else absolutely in the wrong. Had he owned a more full-blooded life, he would probably have lost his temper, and “spoken his mind,” as the saying is, to poor Miss Marlett She certainly should never have let Margaret go with a stranger, on the authority even of a telegram from the girl’s guardian.
