The Beth Book
no expression to her enthusiasm, nor to the discomfort she suffered
from the August sun, which streamed in on her through the blindless
window, burning her face for hours, nor to her hunger and fatigue; and
when at last they came to the great house by the river, and her
mother, having handed her over to Miss Clifford, the lady principal,
said, somewhat tearfully, "Good-bye, Beth! I hope you will be happy
here. But be a good girl." Beth answered, "Thank you. I shall try,
mamma," and kissed her as coolly as if it were her usual good-night.
"We do not often have young ladies part from their mothers so
placidly," Miss Clifford commented.
"I suppose not," Mrs. Caldwell said, sighing.
Beth felt that she was behaving horridly. There was a lump in her
throat, and she would liked to have shown more feeling, but she could
not. Now, when she would have laid aside the mask of calmness which
she had voluntarily assumed, she found herself forced to wear it.
Falsifications of our better selves are easily entered upon, but hard
to shake off. They are evil things that lurk about us, ready but
powerless to come till we call them; but, having been called, they
hold us in their grip, and their power upon us to compel us becomes
greater than ours upon them.
Mrs. Caldwell felt sore at heart when she had gone, and Beth was not
less sore. Each had been a failure in her relation to the other. Mrs.
Caldwell blamed Beth, and Beth, in her own mind, did not defend
herself. She forbore to judge.
CHAPTER XXX
St. Catherine's Mansion, the Royal Service School for Officers'
Daughters, had not been built for the purpose, but bought, otherwise
it would have been as ugly to look at as it was dreary to live in. As
it was, however, the house was beautiful, and so also were the grounds
about it, and the views of the river, the bridge with its many arches,
and the grey town climbing up from it to the height above.
Beth was still standing at the top of the steps under the great
portico, where her mother had left her, contemplating the river, which
was the first that had flowed into her experience.
"Come, come, my dear, come in!" some one behind her exclaimed
impatiently. "You're not allowed to stand there."
Beth turned and saw a thin, dry, middle-aged woman, with keen dark
eyes and a sharp manner, standing in the doorway behind her, with a
gentler-looking lady, who said, "It is a new girl, Miss Bey. I expect
she is all bewildered."
"No, I am not at all bewildered, thank you," Beth answered in her easy
way. As she spoke she saw two grown-up girls in the hall exchange
glances and smile, and wondered what unusual thing she had done.
"Then you had better come at once," Miss Bey rejoined drily, "and let
me see what you can do. Please to remember in future that the girls
are not allowed to come to this door."
She led the way as she spoke, and Beth followed her across the hall,
up a broad flight of steps opposite the entrance, down a wide corridor
to the right, and then to the right again, into a narrow class-room,
and through that again into another inner room.
"These are the fifth and sixth rooms," Miss Bey remarked,--"fifth and
sixth classes."
They were furnished with long bare tables, forms, hard wooden chairs,
a cupboard, and a set of pigeon-holes. Miss Bey sat down at the end of
the table in the "sixth," with her back to the window, and made Beth
sit on her left. There were some books, a large slate, a slate pencil,
and damp sponge on the table.
"What arithmetic have you done?" Miss Bey began.
"I've scrambled through the first four rules," Beth answered.
"Set yourself a sum in each, and do it," Miss Bey said sharply, taking
a piece of knitting from a bag she held on her arm, and beginning to
knit in a determined manner, as if she were working against time.
Beth took up the slate and pencil, and began; but the sharp
click-click of the needles worried her, and her brain was so busy
studying Miss Bey she could not concentrate her mind upon the sums.
Miss Bey waited without a word, but Beth was conscious of her keen
eyes fixed upon her from time to time, and knew what she meant.
"I'm hurrying all I can," she said at last.
"You'll have to hurry more than you can, then, in class," Miss Bey
remarked, "if this is your ordinary rate of work."
When the sums were done, she took the slate and glanced over them.
"They are every one wrong," she said; "but I see you know how to work
them. Now clean the slate, and do some dictation."
She took up a book when Beth was ready, and began to read aloud from
it. Beth became so interested in the subject that she forgot the
dictation, and burst out at last, "Well, I never knew that before."
"You are doing dictation now," Miss Bey observed severely.
"All right, go on," Beth cheerfully rejoined.
Miss Bey did not go on, however, and on looking up to see what was the
matter, Beth found her gazing at her with bent brows.
"May I ask what your name is?" Miss Bey inquired.
"Beth Caldwell."
"Then allow me to inform you, Miss Beth Caldwell, that 'all right, go
on,' is not the proper way to address the head-mistress of the Royal
Service School for Officers' Daughters."
"Thank you for telling me," Beth answered. "You see I don't know these
things. I always say that to mamma."
"Have you ever been to school before?" Miss Bey asked.
"No," Beth answered.
"Oh!" Miss Bey ejaculated, with peculiar meaning. "Then you will have
a great deal to learn."
"I suppose so," Beth rejoined. "But that's what I came for, you
know--to learn. It's high time I began!"
She fixed her big eyes on the blank wall opposite, and there was a
sorrowful expression in them. Miss Bey noted the expression, and
nodded her head several times, but there was no relaxation of her
peremptory manner when she spoke again.
"Go on, my dear," she said. "If I give as much time to the others as
you are taking, I shall not get through the new girls to-night."
Beth finished her dictation.
"What a hand!" Miss Bey exclaimed. "Wherever did you learn to write
like that?"
"I taught myself to write small on purpose," Beth replied. "You can
get so much more on to the paper."
"You had better have taught yourself to spell, then," Miss Bey
rejoined. "There are four mistakes in this one passage."
Beth balanced her pencil on her finger with an air of indifference.
She was wondering how it was that the head-mistress of the Royal
Service School for Officers' Daughters used the word "wherever" as the
vulgar do.
The examination concluded with some questions in history and
geography, which Beth answered more or less incorrectly.
"I shall put you here in the sixth," Miss Bey informed her; "but
rather for your size than for your acquirements. There is a delicate
girl, much smaller than you are, in the first."
"Then I'd rather be myself, tall and strong, in the sixth," Beth
rejoined. "If I don't catch her up, at all events I shall have more
pleasure in life, and that's something."
Again Miss Bey gazed at her; but she was too much taken aback by
Beth's readiness to correct her on the instant, although it was an
unaccustomed and a monstrous thing for a girl to address a mistress in
an easy conversational way, let alone differ from her.
She took Beth to the great class-room where the seventh and eighth
worked, and the fifth and sixth joined them for recreation and
preparation, and where also the Bible lessons were given by Miss
Clifford to the whole school.
There were a good many girls of various ages in the room, who all
looked up.
"This is a new girl," Miss Bey said, addressing them generally,--"Miss
Beth Caldwell. Please to show her where to go and what to do."
She glanced round keenly as she spoke, then left the room; and at the
same time a thin, sharp-looking little girl with short hair rose from
the table at which she was sitting and went up to Beth.
"I'm head of the fifth," she said. "Has Bey been examining you? What
class did she put you in?"
"The sixth," Beth said.
"I should have thought you'd have been in the third at least," the
head of the fifth piped, "you're so big. Here are some sixth
girls--Jessie Baker, Ina Formby, Rosa Bird."
The sixth girls were sitting at a round table, with their little desks
before them, writing letters. One of them pulled out a chair for Beth.
They had just returned from the holidays, and were in various stages
of home-sickness--some of them crying, and the rest depressed; but
they welcomed Beth kindly, as one of themselves, and inspected her
with interest.
"You can write a private letter to-day, you know," Rosa Bird said to
Beth.
"What is a private letter?" Beth asked.
"One to your mother, you know, that isn't read. You seal it up
yourself. Public letters have to be sent in open to Miss Clifford. One
week you write a public letter, and the next a private one. Hello!
here's Amy Wynne!"
A dark girl of about eighteen had entered by a door at the farther end
of the room, and was received with acclamation, being evidently
popular. Beth, who was still in her mask of calm indifference, looked
coldly on, but in herself she determined to be received like that some
day.
Most of the girls in the room jumped up, and Amy Wynne kissed one
after the other, and then shook hands with Beth.
"Are all my children back?" she asked.
"I don't know," Rosa Bird rejoined, glancing round. "They are not all
here."
"That's one of the mothers," Rosa explained to Beth when Amy Wynne had
gone again. "The first-class girls are mothers to us. You walk with
your mother in the garden, and sit with her on half-holidays, and
she's awfully good to you. I advise you to be one of Amy Wynne's
children if you can." She was interrupted by the loud ringing of a
bell in the hall. "That's for tea," Rosa added. "Come, and I'll show
you the way."
The big dining-room was downstairs in the basement, next the kitchen.
Miss Clifford dined in the next room attended by her maids of honour
(the two girls at the top of the first class for the time being) and
the rest of the class except the girls at the bottom, who were
degraded to the second-class table in the big dining-room. Here each
two classes had a separate table, at either end of which a teacher sat
on a Windsor chair. The girls had nothing but hard benches without
backs to sit on. Miss Bey, the housekeeper Miss Winch, and the head
music-mistress, irreverently called Old Tom by the girls, sat at a
separate table, where, at dinner-time, they did all the carving, and
snatched what little dinner they could get in the intervals, patiently
and foolishly regardless of their own digestions. For tea there were
great dishes of thick bread and butter on all the tables, which the
girls began to hand round as soon as grace had been said. Each class
had a big basin of brown sugar to put in the tea, which gave it a
coarse flavour. The first cup was not so bad, but the second was
nothing but hot water poured through the teapot. It was not etiquette
to take more than two. When the girls were ready for a second, they
put pieces of bread in their saucers that they might know their own
again, and passed the cups up to the teacher who poured out tea. If
any girl suspected that the cup returned to her was not her own, she
would not touch the tea. When the meal was over, one of the girls took
the sugar-basin, beat down the sugar in it flat and hard with the
spoon, did a design on the top, and put it away.
"What's that for?" Beth asked.
"That's so that we shall know our own again," Rosa answered. "But it
never lasts the proper time."
"What do you do when it's done?" said Beth.
"Do without," was the laconic rejoinder.
All the girls were talking at once.
"What a racket!" Beth exclaimed.