A Little Princess
"Who--who ARE you talking to, Sara?" she gasped out.
Sara drew her in cautiously, but she looked as if something pleased and
amused her.
"You must promise not to be frightened--not to scream the least bit, or
I can't tell you," she answered.
Ermengarde felt almost inclined to scream on the spot, but managed to
control herself. She looked all round the attic and saw no one. And
yet Sara had certainly been speaking TO someone. She thought of ghosts.
"Is it--something that will frighten me?" she asked timorously.
"Some people are afraid of them," said Sara. "I was at first--but I am
not now."
"Was it--a ghost?" quaked Ermengarde.
"No," said Sara, laughing. "It was my rat."
Ermengarde made one bound, and landed in the middle of the little dingy
bed. She tucked her feet under her nightgown and the red shawl. She
did not scream, but she gasped with fright.
"Oh! Oh!" she cried under her breath. "A rat! A rat!"
"I was afraid you would be frightened," said Sara. "But you needn't
be. I am making him tame. He actually knows me and comes out when I
call him. Are you too frightened to want to see him?"
The truth was that, as the days had gone on and, with the aid of scraps
brought up from the kitchen, her curious friendship had developed, she
had gradually forgotten that the timid creature she was becoming
familiar with was a mere rat.
At first Ermengarde was too much alarmed to do anything but huddle in a
heap upon the bed and tuck up her feet, but the sight of Sara's
composed little countenance and the story of Melchisedec's first
appearance began at last to rouse her curiosity, and she leaned forward
over the edge of the bed and watched Sara go and kneel down by the hole
in the skirting board.
"He--he won't run out quickly and jump on the bed, will he?" she said.
"No," answered Sara. "He's as polite as we are. He is just like a
person. Now watch!"
She began to make a low, whistling sound--so low and coaxing that it
could only have been heard in entire stillness. She did it several
times, looking entirely absorbed in it. Ermengarde thought she looked
as if she were working a spell. And at last, evidently in response to
it, a gray-whiskered, bright-eyed head peeped out of the hole. Sara
had some crumbs in her hand. She dropped them, and Melchisedec came
quietly forth and ate them. A piece of larger size than the rest he
took and carried in the most businesslike manner back to his home.
"You see," said Sara, "that is for his wife and children. He is very
nice. He only eats the little bits. After he goes back I can always
hear his family squeaking for joy. There are three kinds of squeaks.
One kind is the children's, and one is Mrs. Melchisedec's, and one is
Melchisedec's own."
Ermengarde began to laugh.
"Oh, Sara!" she said. "You ARE queer--but you are nice."
"I know I am queer," admitted Sara, cheerfully; "and I TRY to be nice."
She rubbed her forehead with her little brown paw, and a puzzled,
tender look came into her face. "Papa always laughed at me," she said;
"but I liked it. He thought I was queer, but he liked me to make up
things. I--I can't help making up things. If I didn't, I don't
believe I could live." She paused and glanced around the attic. "I'm
sure I couldn't live here," she added in a low voice.
Ermengarde was interested, as she always was. "When you talk about
things," she said, "they seem as if they grew real. You talk about
Melchisedec as if he was a person."
"He IS a person," said Sara. "He gets hungry and frightened, just as
we do; and he is married and has children. How do we know he doesn't
think things, just as we do? His eyes look as if he was a person.
That was why I gave him a name."
She sat down on the floor in her favorite attitude, holding her knees.
"Besides," she said, "he is a Bastille rat sent to be my friend. I can
always get a bit of bread the cook has thrown away, and it is quite
enough to support him."
"Is it the Bastille yet?" asked Ermengarde, eagerly. "Do you always
pretend it is the Bastille?"
"Nearly always," answered Sara. "Sometimes I try to pretend it is
another kind of place; but the Bastille is generally
easiest--particularly when it is cold."
Just at that moment Ermengarde almost jumped off the bed, she was so
startled by a sound she heard. It was like two distinct knocks on the
wall.
"What is that?" she exclaimed.
Sara got up from the floor and answered quite dramatically:
"It is the prisoner in the next cell."
"Becky!" cried Ermengarde, enraptured.
"Yes," said Sara. "Listen; the two knocks meant, 'Prisoner, are you
there?'"
She knocked three times on the wall herself, as if in answer.
"That means, 'Yes, I am here, and all is well.'"
Four knocks came from Becky's side of the wall.
"That means," explained Sara, "'Then, fellow-sufferer, we will sleep in
peace. Good night.'"
Ermengarde quite beamed with delight.
"Oh, Sara!" she whispered joyfully. "It is like a story!"
"It IS a story," said Sara. "EVERYTHING'S a story. You are a story--I
am a story. Miss Minchin is a story."
And she sat down again and talked until Ermengarde forgot that she was
a sort of escaped prisoner herself, and had to be reminded by Sara that
she could not remain in the Bastille all night, but must steal
noiselessly downstairs again and creep back into her deserted bed.
10
The Indian Gentleman
But it was a perilous thing for Ermengarde and Lottie to make
pilgrimages to the attic. They could never be quite sure when Sara
would be there, and they could scarcely ever be certain that Miss
Amelia would not make a tour of inspection through the bedrooms after
the pupils were supposed to be asleep. So their visits were rare ones,
and Sara lived a strange and lonely life. It was a lonelier life when
she was downstairs than when she was in her attic. She had no one to
talk to; and when she was sent out on errands and walked through the
streets, a forlorn little figure carrying a basket or a parcel, trying
to hold her hat on when the wind was blowing, and feeling the water
soak through her shoes when it was raining, she felt as if the crowds
hurrying past her made her loneliness greater. When she had been the
Princess Sara, driving through the streets in her brougham, or walking,
attended by Mariette, the sight of her bright, eager little face and
picturesque coats and hats had often caused people to look after her.
A happy, beautifully cared for little girl naturally attracts
attention. Shabby, poorly dressed children are not rare enough and
pretty enough to make people turn around to look at them and smile. No
one looked at Sara in these days, and no one seemed to see her as she
hurried along the crowded pavements. She had begun to grow very fast,
and, as she was dressed only in such clothes as the plainer remnants of
her wardrobe would supply, she knew she looked very queer, indeed. All
her valuable garments had been disposed of, and such as had been left
for her use she was expected to wear so long as she could put them on
at all. Sometimes, when she passed a shop window with a mirror in it,
she almost laughed outright on catching a glimpse of herself, and
sometimes her face went red and she bit her lip and turned away.
In the evening, when she passed houses whose windows were lighted up,
she used to look into the warm rooms and amuse herself by imagining
things about the people she saw sitting before the fires or about the
tables. It always interested her to catch glimpses of rooms before the
shutters were closed. There were several families in the square in
which Miss Minchin lived, with which she had become quite familiar in a
way of her own. The one she liked best she called the Large Family.
She called it the Large Family not because the members of it were
big--for, indeed, most of them were little--but because there were so
many of them. There were eight children in the Large Family, and a
stout, rosy mother, and a stout, rosy father, and a stout, rosy
grandmother, and any number of servants. The eight children were always
either being taken out to walk or to ride in perambulators by
comfortable nurses, or they were going to drive with their mamma, or
they were flying to the door in the evening to meet their papa and kiss
him and dance around him and drag off his overcoat and look in the
pockets for packages, or they were crowding about the nursery windows
and looking out and pushing each other and laughing--in fact, they were
always doing something enjoyable and suited to the tastes of a large
family. Sara was quite fond of them, and had given them names out of
books--quite romantic names. She called them the Montmorencys when she
did not call them the Large Family. The fat, fair baby with the lace
cap was Ethelberta Beauchamp Montmorency; the next baby was Violet
Cholmondeley Montmorency; the little boy who could just stagger and who
had such round legs was Sydney Cecil Vivian Montmorency; and then came
Lilian Evangeline Maud Marion, Rosalind Gladys, Guy Clarence, Veronica
Eustacia, and Claude Harold Hector.
One evening a very funny thing happened--though, perhaps, in one sense
it was not a funny thing at all.
Several of the Montmorencys were evidently going to a children's party,
and just as Sara was about to pass the door they were crossing the
pavement to get into the carriage which was waiting for them. Veronica
Eustacia and Rosalind Gladys, in white-lace frocks and lovely sashes,
had just got in, and Guy Clarence, aged five, was following them. He
was such a pretty fellow and had such rosy cheeks and blue eyes, and
such a darling little round head covered with curls, that Sara forgot
her basket and shabby cloak altogether--in fact, forgot everything but
that she wanted to look at him for a moment. So she paused and looked.
It was Christmas time, and the Large Family had been hearing many
stories about children who were poor and had no mammas and papas to
fill their stockings and take them to the pantomime--children who were,
in fact, cold and thinly clad and hungry. In the stories, kind
people--sometimes little boys and girls with tender hearts--invariably
saw the poor children and gave them money or rich gifts, or took them
home to beautiful dinners. Guy Clarence had been affected to tears
that very afternoon by the reading of such a story, and he had burned
with a desire to find such a poor child and give her a certain sixpence
he possessed, and thus provide for her for life. An entire sixpence, he
was sure, would mean affluence for evermore. As he crossed the strip of
red carpet laid across the pavement from the door to the carriage, he
had this very sixpence in the pocket of his very short man-o-war
trousers; And just as Rosalind Gladys got into the vehicle and jumped
on the seat in order to feel the cushions spring under her, he saw Sara
standing on the wet pavement in her shabby frock and hat, with her old
basket on her arm, looking at him hungrily.
He thought that her eyes looked hungry because she had perhaps had
nothing to eat for a long time. He did not know that they looked so
because she was hungry for the warm, merry life his home held and his
rosy face spoke of, and that she had a hungry wish to snatch him in her
arms and kiss him. He only knew that she had big eyes and a thin face
and thin legs and a common basket and poor clothes. So he put his hand
in his pocket and found his sixpence and walked up to her benignly.
"Here, poor little girl," he said. "Here is a sixpence. I will give it
to you."
Sara started, and all at once realized that she looked exactly like
poor children she had seen, in her better days, waiting on the pavement