My School-Days | Page 4

fingers held well away from my pinafore--till
Mrs. Fairfield's heavy step and jingling keys came to release me. Then
she would sponge my hands and face and send me away clean, replete,
and with a better heart for the eternal conflict with long division.
I fancy that when Miss Fairfield came downstairs again she changed
the field of my arithmetical studies; for during the spring I seem to
remember a blessed respite from my troubles. It is true that Miss -----
was away, staying with friends.
I was very popular at school that term I remember, for I had learned to
make dolls' bedsteads out of match-boxes during the holidays, and my
eldest sister's Christmas present provided me with magnificent
hangings for the same. Imagine a vivid green silk sash, with brilliant
butterflies embroidered all over it in coloured silk and gold thread. A
long sash, too, from which one could well spare a few inches at a time
for upholstery. I acquired many marbles, and much gingerbread, and
totally eclipsed Cissy Thomas who bad enjoyed the fleeting sunshine of
popular favour on the insecure basis of paper dolls. Over my memory
of this term no long division cast its hateful shade, and the scolding my
dear mother gave me when she saw my sashes' fair proportions docked
to a waistband and a hard knot, with two brief and irregular ends, was

so gentle that I endured it with fortitude, and considered my ten weeks
of popularity cheaply bought. I went back to school in high spirits with
a new set of sashes and some magnificent pieces of silk and lace from
my mother's lavendered wardrobe.
But no one wanted dolls' beds anymore; and Cissy Thomas had brought
back a herbarium: the others all became botanists, and I, after a faint
effort to emulate their successes, fell back on my garden.
The seeds I had set in the spring had had a rest during the Easter
holidays, and were already sprouting greenly, but alas, I never saw
them flower. Long division set in again. Again, day after day, 1 sat
lonely in the schoolroom--now like a furnace--and ate my dry bread
and milk and water in the depths of disgrace, with the faux
commencements and those revolting sums staring at me from my
tear-blotted slate.
Night after night I cried myself to sleep in my bed--whose coarse
home-spun sheets were hotter than blankets--because I could not get
the answers right. Even Miss Fairfield, I fancied, began to look coldly
on me, and the other children naturally did not care to associate with
one so deficient in arithmetic.
One evening as I was sitting as usual sucking the smooth, dark slate
pencil, and grieving over my troubles with the heart-broken misery of a
child, to whom the present grief looks eternal, I heard a carriage drive
up to the door. Our schoolroom was at the back, and I was too much
interested in a visitor--especially one who came at that hour and in a
carriage--to be able to bear the suspense of that silent schoolroom, so I
cautiously opened its door and crept on hands and knees across the
passage and looked down through the bannisters. They were opening
the door. It was a lady, and Mrs. Fairfield came out of the dining-room
to meet her. It was a lady in a black moire antique dress and Paisley
shawl of the then mode. It was a lady whose face I could not see,
because her back was to the red sunset light; but at that moment she
spoke, and the next I was clinging round the moue skirts with my bead
buried in the Paisley shawl. The world, all upside down, had suddenly
righted itself. I, who had faced it alone, now looked out at it from the

secure shelter of a moiré screen--for my mother had come to see me.
I did not cry myself to sleep that night, because my head lay on her arm.
But even then I could not express bow wretched I had been. Only when
I heard that my mother was going to the South of France with my
sisters, I clung about her neck, and with such insistence implored her
not to leave me--not to go without me, that I think I must have
expressed my trouble without uttering it, for when, after three delicious
days of drives and walks, in which I had always a loving hand to hold,
my mother left Stamford, she took me--trembling with joy like a
prisoner reprieved--with her.
And I have never seen--or wished to see--Stamford again.

PART III.
SOUTH WITH THE SWALLOWS.
WITH what delicious thrills of anticipation and excitement I packed
my doll's clothes on the eve of our journey! I had a little tin trunk with