The Golden Calf | Page 4

conducted by Miss Pillby.
She had her own studies, and she was eager to improve herself, for that
career of governess in a gentleman's family was the only future open to
her. She used to read the advertisements in the governess column of the
Times supplement, and it comforted her to see that an all-accomplished
teacher demanded from eighty to a hundred a year for her services. A
hundred a year was Ida's idea of illimitable wealth. How much she
might do with such a sum! She could dress herself handsomely, she
could save enough money for a summer holiday in Normandy with her
neglectful father and her weak little vulgar step-mother, and the
half-brother, whom she loved better than anyone else in the world.
The thought of this avenue to fortune gave her fortitude. She braced
herself up, and set herself valourously to unriddle the perplexities of a
nocturne by Chopin.
'After all I have only to work on steadily,' she told herself; 'there will
come an end to my slavery.'
Presently she began to laugh to herself softly:
'I wonder whether old Pew has looked at my caricatures,' she thought,
'and whether she'll treat me any worse on account of them?'

She finished her hour's practice, put her music back into her portfolio,
which lived in an ancient canterbury under the ancient piano, and went
to the room where she slept, in company with seven other spirits, as
mischievous and altogether evilly disposed as her own.
Mauleverer Manor had not been built for a school, or it would hardly
have been called a manor. There were none of those bleak, bare
dormitories, specially planned for the accommodation of thirty
sleepers--none of those barrack-like rooms which strike desolation to
the soul. With the exception of the large classroom which had been
added at one end of the house, the manor was very much as it had been
in the days of the Mauleverers, a race now as extinct as the Dodo. It
was a roomy, rambling old house of the time of the Stuarts, and bore
the date of its erection in many unmistakable peculiarities. There were
fine rooms on the ground floor, with handsome chimney-pieces and
oak panelling. There were small low rooms above, curious old passages,
turns and twists, a short flight of steps here, and another flight there,
various levels, irregularities of all kinds, and, in the opinion of every
servant who had ever lived in the house, an unimpeachable ghost. All
Miss Pew's young ladies believed firmly in that ghost; and there was a
legend of a frizzy-haired girl from Barbados who had seen the ghost,
and had incontinently gone out of one epileptic fit into another, until
her father had come in a fly--presumably from Barbados--and carried
her away for ever, epileptic to the last.
Nobody at present located at Mauleverer Manor remembered that
young lady from Barbados, nor had any of the existing pupils ever seen
the ghost. But the general faith in him was unshaken. He was described
as an elderly man in a snuff-coloured, square-cut coat, knee-breeches,
and silk stockings rolled up over his knees. He was supposed to be one
of the extinct Mauleverers; harmless and even benevolently disposed;
given to plucking flowers in the garden at dusk; and to gliding along
passages, and loitering on the stairs in a somewhat inane manner. The
bolder-spirited among the girls would have given a twelve-month's
pocket money to see him. Miss Pillby declared that the sight of that
snuff-coloured stranger would be her death.

'I've a weak 'art, you know,' said Miss Pillby, who was not mistress of
her aspirates,--she managed them sometimes, but they often evaded
her,--'the doctor said so when I was quite a little thing.'
'Were you ever a little thing, Pillby?' asked Miss Rylance with superb
disdain, the present Pillby being long and gaunt.
And the group of listeners laughed, with that frank laughter of school
girls keenly alive to the ridiculous in other people. There was as much
difference in the standing of the various bedrooms at Mauleverer
Manor as in that of the London squares, but in this case it was the
inhabitants who gave character to the locality. The five-bedded room
off the front landing was occupied by the stiffest and best behaved of
the first division, and might be ranked with Grosvenor Square or
Lancaster Gate. There were rooms on the second floor where girls of
the second and third division herded in inelegant obscurity, the
Bloomsbury and Camden Town of the mansion. On this story, too,
slept the rabble of girls under twelve--creatures utterly despicable in the
minds of girls in their teens, and the rooms they inhabited ranked as
low as St. Giles's.
Ida Palliser was fortunate enough to have a bed in the