Silverthorns

She stopped.

“Yes, I know,” said Gueda. “It is very hard for you, Charlotte.”

“No one seems really to understand except Jerry, and now you,” said Charlotte. “I am afraid mamma is rather shocked at me. I suppose grown-up people don’t understand these feelings,” she added, little suspecting that the excess of her mother’s sympathy was what made her shrink from much expression of it, and she sighed deeply. “Why do some people have everything!” she went on, reverting to her old refrain. “It really does not seem fair. You know, Gueda, that it is a great deal because we are not rich that I want to get on very well. I may – don’t think me very conceited – but I may be able to write books when I am grown-up, or to do something of the kind.”

“But you are getting on well – as well as you could possibly wish.”

Charlotte shook her head.

“The teachers don’t all think so now” she replied, “and I am losing heart. Oh, Gueda, if I don’t get the German prize!”

“You must,” said Gueda. “I wish you could like her, Charlotte.”

“No, I don’t want to like her. I only wish she would go away – or still more, that she had never come. I don’t want to like her and she doesn’t want it either.”

Gueda looked rather perplexed.

“There’s something in that,” she said. “I don’t think it’s as much your fault as might seem at first. I can’t make her out. She seems good and nice altogether; but she must be selfish. She does seem so perfectly delighted when she is praised, and even put before you; and she does not really try to make friends with us. She might make you like her.”

Something was running in Gueda’s head about the best way of winning withheld liking or affection being to put oneself in the way of receiving a service from the one to be gained over. “If Miss Meredon cared to do it with Charlotte, she might. Charlotte is so generous: if she were appealed to by the girl to help her a little, she would respond at once, I know,” thought Gueda.

“No,” agreed Charlotte with some satisfaction, “she does not try. I don’t want her to, and I don’t try myself. All the same, I am glad she doesn’t.”

“Some of the girls say she is affected,” said Gueda.

“It doesn’t prevent them all from toadying her in a disgusting way,” said Charlotte, contemptuously.

“Not all of them,” said Gueda. “Some of them are nicer than that, and are too proud to make friends with a girl who never seems able to speak to any of us naturally. Some think her manners are very ‘distinguished,’ and what one must expect from Lady Mildred’s niece.”

“Vulgar snobs!” ejaculated Charlotte.

“What can you expect?” said Gueda. “Perhaps she is really more shy than anything else, and yet I hardly think so. Now and then she seems as if she was ready to burst out laughing, and as eager to chatter and talk nonsense as any of us. And sometimes she has a very curious look in her face, as if she were almost asking pardon of us all. And oh, Charlotte, how pretty she is!”

“You needn’t repeat that. I hear it about fifty times an hour. And she certainly does not look as if she were asking pardon of me every time she is put before me,” said Charlotte. “Now do let us talk of something else, Gueda. Don’t spoil the last few days before you go.”

And Claudia, in blissful ignorance of all the discussion she evoked, was just then writing home one of her happy, almost triumphant letters, telling of new laurels gained and satisfactory opinions everywhere. She spoke warmly of Lady Mildred’s kindness, and kept silence on her strangely trying temper, as well as on the difficulties she was growing more conscious of in her school-life.

“It would be wrong, distinctly wrong,” she said to herself, “to complain of Aunt Mildred. So there, I have no choice. But about school – I wonder if mamma could say anything to help me? No, I am afraid not. I must just not mind if I am disliked.”

So she told of nothing but of good. Still Mrs Meredon, being a remarkably clever and acute woman, – a woman too of somewhat more determined and less emotional calibre than Charlotte’s gentle, sympathising mother, – read between the lines of her daughter’s letter and saw some rocks ahead.

“She is determined to make the best of everything, and that is only right,” she said to herself. “But she is too one-sided in her way of looking at things just now. I must warn her.”

And this letter brought in return some counsel to Claudia, which she had afterwards even fuller reason to appreciate.

There happened one morning to be an unusually difficult exercise to do for the French teacher. It related to some of the rules of grammar which it was evident the pupils had not thoroughly taken in. “Mademoiselle” explained them again more fully and clearly, but at the end of her dissertation she looked round the circle of faces, with their varying expressions of intelligence, indifference, or bewilderment, and sighed.

“I don’t believe you understand yet, young ladies,” she said. “One or two of you may do so perhaps – Miss Meredon?” – and a smile from Claudia confirmed her hopefulness in that quarter, – “Miss Waldron?” but Charlotte’s face was resolutely bent upon her exercise-book. “She does not understand, and she is too proud to own it,” thought the governess, who, like some others of the teachers, was rather in awe of Charlotte. “Ah, well! – Miss Knox, you Fanny, and Isabel, I am almost sure – ” she went on aloud.

“Oh, yes, indeed we understand quite well, even though we can’t quite say it,” said Isabel Lewis hastily. Anything to have done with the lesson and poor conscientious “mademoiselle,” who was so “tiresome” to-day. “You’ll see, mademoiselle, we shall do it all right when it comes up again in our exercises.”

“I am glad to hear it,” the French teacher replied in a peculiar tone. “You shall then give me the gratification you promise me without delay. For the next lesson you shall translate into French the following passage in English which I shall now dictate to you.”

And she proceeded to read aloud a passage of English especially composed to test the pupil’s comprehension of the knotty point.

Isabel made a grimace, but wrote it off readily enough. It was never her way to anticipate troubles. Who knew what might happen before the next lesson? She might discover some unanswerable reason for coaxing a holiday out of “papa”; she might have one of the convenient colds which were not much of a penance; the skies might fall! And she only laughed when her companions reproached her for having brought this extra piece of work upon them.

It was really a difficult exercise. It took all Claudia’s thorough knowledge of the rules to complete it correctly; and Charlotte, whose advantages of training in modern languages had been fewer, found herself in one or two details hopelessly baffled. But she kept this to herself; she did her best, and trusted there was not much wrong. Where was the use of speaking about it? There was no one who could help her. Mrs Waldron’s French was a long ago story; as to her companions, she was pretty sure that, with one exception, they were far more in the dark than herself. But it was new and painful to her to feel misgivings, and the very afternoon on which the exercises had to be given in she sat, her book open before her, trying to see what were her mistakes, and hoping to be able even then to correct them. She was so absorbed that she did not hear herself sigh, nor a light step approaching her in her corner.

“Miss Waldron,” said a voice she knew well, with an inflection of timidity which, till recently, happy, hearty Claudia’s tones had never known, “please forgive me for asking you if you are puzzled about that exercise. I found it very difficult, but ma – I was rather severely drilled in those rules, and I think I have got it right.”

“Indeed!” said Charlotte coldly.

“It is the last phrase that is so particularly worrying, is it not? – of course it is made to be so. Many French girls themselves would not know how to put it perfectly.”

Now it was this last phrase that to Charlotte had been a veritable ass’s bridge. And besides her ambition, she had the purer motive of a student’s real interest in thoroughly comprehending the working of the rule. As Claudia spoke she half unconsciously relaxed a little in her stiff, stand-off manner.

“Yes,” she said more frankly, “it is the last part that I cannot satisfy myself about.”

“Would you let me? – oh, please do,” said Claudia, her face flushing, her voice literally trembling with eagerness. “Might I just explain to you how I have said it to myself?” and without waiting for Charlotte’s half-hesitating reply, she ran on. In a few clear, terse sentences she put it before her listener, as all mademoiselle’s long explanations or the involved language of the grammar had failed to do. Charlotte forgot herself and her prejudices in real admiration and satisfaction.

“I see,” she exclaimed delightedly. “Miss Meredon, you have a real genius for teaching.”

“Do you really think so?” Claudia replied joyously. “And you are such a good judge. Oh, if you only – ” but she checked herself sharply. “You do work so well and so hard, Miss Waldron.”

“Yes,” said Charlotte, with a slight return of the cold moodiness which Claudia had rarely seen behind, “I don’t spare myself. I care for nothing on earth so much as for getting on well with my lessons.”

There was an intensity in her tone which almost startled Claudia. At the same time it touched a sympathetic chord.

“Oh, do you really feel so?” she exclaimed impulsively. “I think I can understand it. You have probably some very great motive as well as love of learning. Are you perhaps looking forward to making some use of your education, of all you are learning, before long – to help your parents, perhaps?” Charlotte grew crimson.

“Do you mean to say, am I being educated to be a governess?” she said haughtily. “No, Miss Meredon, I am not I think before you make such remarks you might be at the trouble to understand whom you are talking to, though you seem to think yourself of a perfectly different world from every one about you. But even in our world there are such things as well-educated ladies who are not governesses, though the idea may be a new one to you.”

Claudia’s face grew pale with distress. She clasped her hands together, while her eyes filled with tears.

“Oh, dear, what have I done? How clumsy and rude I have been – just when I did so want to be the opposite,” for her poor little overture to Charlotte had been made in deference to a suggestion of her mother’s, that without infringing Lady Mildred’s rules, she might surely find some small opportunities of showing kindliness and sympathy to her companions. “I can only say I did not – oh, indeed I did not mean to offend you.”

“You have found us all sufficiently well-bred to ask you no questions, as you evidently wished to be considered a person apart; and I can’t therefore see that you, on your side, can expect any confidences,” Charlotte said icily.

“No, no, of course not,” said Claudia nervously. “But, Miss Waldron, you are forgetting – are you not going to correct that last paragraph?” for Charlotte was bundling up her books and preparing to stalk off with what she considered great dignity.

“Certainly not. I am not going to do anything so dishonourable as to correct my exercises by yours,” said Charlotte.

“Oh, it would not be that – you know it would not be that,” said Claudia sadly. “I know what is honourable and what is not so, though you will not allow that I am nice in any way, now that I have offended you. I only explained the rule to you as mademoiselle had already done. You have not seen my exercise – you don’t know what I have put.”

But it was in vain. And the result, as might have been expected, was that Claudia’s exercise was the only correct one, and that Charlotte received for the first time a sharp reprimand from the French teacher for inattention and indifference. And for the first time the praises that were lavished upon herself gave Claudia no pleasure, but instead, real pain and distress.

Chapter Eight

The Old Legend

“Jerry,” said Charlotte suddenly, a few days after Claudia’s unlucky attempt, “it’s no use. I’ve tried and I’ve tried to like that girl, at least to have no unkind feelings to her, and it’s no good. Gueda has gone now, and we – that girl and I – seem forced to be together in everything, and I just hate it.”

“But not her,” said Jerry; “it isn’t so bad if it’s only the – the thing, the way it’s come, that you hate, not the girl herself.”

“I don’t know. I’m afraid it’s much the same, and in a queer way I think I’d not mind so much if there were anything to hate about her, but there isn’t. Sometimes I could almost fancy myself liking her awfully, and that makes it worse.”

Charlotte stopped writing altogether and gazed out of the window on to the little deserted garden, looking blacker and drearier than ever in this grim December afternoon, with a sort of despair in her face.

“In spite of her being so horrid and impertinent to you the other day – asking if you were going to be a governess – you – papa’s daughter, and with four brothers to work for you, even supposing you hadn’t a father,” said Jerry wrathfully.

“But after all, perhaps, she didn’t mean it in any horrid, patronising way. I suppose very, very rich people really don’t understand, as papa said. Everybody that isn’t as rich as they seems all much about the same to them, I suppose.”

Jerry gave a sort of growl.

“Then very rich people must be very vulgar and ill-bred,” he said.

“I don’t know,” said Charlotte. “I try to say things to myself to make me feel nicer about her, but it seems no good. I don’t speak about it to mamma, because she told me it was better to fight down such feelings in my own heart, and I could see it really made her unhappy. She is so dreadfully sympathising, and so gentle herself. I’m afraid there’s something almost fierce in me that she can scarcely understand, Jerry. But there’s one thing that’s the worst of all. I think I could stand everything else if it wasn’t for the German prize. But if she gets that – oh, Jerry, it will break my heart. And next week Herr Märklestatter will be giving out the notes for the essay. You know the prize is for the essay.”

“Is she sure to try for it?”

“Oh, yes,” said Charlotte. “The other girls are already saying that it lies between her and me. I don’t know that she has heard or thought much about it – she doesn’t hear much of the talk that goes on, and I’m sure I listen to as little as I can: it can’t possibly matter to her as much as to me. It will be the first year I have not had it since Herr Märklestatter has taught us. Oh, Jerry, isn’t it hard?”

Jerry sat silent, as was his way when his feelings were deeply moved.

“It’s more than hard, it’s unbearable,” he said at last. “I don’t care how lovely she is, and all that,” he went on after a little pause, “she must be a horrid, stuck-up, selfish creature.”

“I don’t know,” said Charlotte, for the third time. “I don’t think I do think her so in the bottom of my heart, though sometimes it does seem like it. But independently of her interfering so with me, I don’t understand her; she never tells any of us a thing. We don’t know if she is an orphan, or if she has any one she cares for, or anything. And yet there is a look in her eyes – ” and Charlotte’s own eyes took a softer expression, “a far-away look, almost sad; – though what can she have to be sad about? – she that has everything! I saw it one day when mamma was going to call for me, and I had to go half an hour sooner. I like awfully when mamma calls for me, you know, Jerry, and I suppose I looked pleased when I jumped up, and she was sitting beside me, and I was almost sure I heard her give a sort of little sob.”

“I thought you said her father and mother had died when she was a baby, and that she couldn’t remember them,” Jerry remarked.

“No; I only said very likely they had. It was at the beginning of our talking about it, when I was saying she had everything, and you tried to make out perhaps she wasn’t clever, – oh, my goodness, she not clever! – and that she was an orphan, and – and – I am sure there was another thing you said perhaps she had or hadn’t.”

“I know,” said Jerry: “it was that perhaps she had to sleep in the haunted room at Silverthorns. I just wish she had, and that the old ghost, the cruel old Osbert papa told us of, would appear to her and give her a jolly good fright, and teach her to feel for others a little.”

“She isn’t unfeeling in some ways,” said Charlotte. “One day one of the dogs at Silverthorns – it’s an old dog that belonged to Mr Osbert, and was always with him, and now it’s taken a great fancy to her, she says – well, it followed her, running after her pony-carriage all the way to school, and she never saw it till it panted up to the steps and lay there as if it was dying. She was in such a state – the tears running down her face. She ran in with it in her arms, and begged Miss Lloyd to let it stay; and when she went home again she had it packed up in a shawl beside her. Oh, she does look so nice when she drives off! The pony and everything are so perfect. But I must go on with my lessons.”

“So must I,” said Jerry; and for a few minutes there was silence.

Then Charlotte looked up again.

“Jerry,” she said, “I wish you hadn’t said that about the ghost at Silverthorns; it makes me shiver. Supposing, just supposing it did go to her, and that she was fearfully frightened, it would seem as if it was our fault somehow.”

“Rubbish!” said Jerry. “It wouldn’t be our fault; we’re not witches. Besides, it’s all nonsense.”

“I wonder if she has ever heard of it,” said Charlotte. “I wonder if there is any truth in it.”

And that evening, when all the family was together in the drawing-room, she spoke of it again to her father.

“Papa,” she said, “do you remember telling us of a haunted room at Silverthorns? Is it really true that there is one?”

“Perfectly true, as I told you, that there is a room which is said to be haunted,” replied her father. “But I personally can’t vouch for anything – at least for very little – beyond that.”

Five, nay six pairs of ears, for Mrs Waldron was nearly as eager on the subject as her children, pricked themselves up at this slight though incautious admission.

”‘Very little,’ you say, papa?” Charlotte exclaimed. “Oh, do tell us what the ‘very little’ is. Who told it you? Did you hear it at first hand, or how? and when? and from whom?”

Mr Waldron looked round him helplessly. He had spoken thoughtlessly, for even the wisest of us cannot be always on our guard. He had been half asleep, to tell the truth, when Charlotte first roused him by her question, for he had had a hard day’s work, and had driven some distance in the cold, and the arm-chair by the fire was very comfortable. He was wide awake now, however, and very much at a loss what to say. He had always, for reasons understood by his wife, avoided allusions to Silverthorns or the Osbert family; but of late, circumstances had seemed to force the place and its inhabitants upon the young Waldrons’ notice; and if he tried to back out of what he had said, it would probably only whet the interest and curiosity he deprecated. Better tell simply, and as it were unconsciously, what there was to tell.

“My dears, indeed there is nothing to interest you,” he said. “You know the legend – I told it to you the other day – that a long-ago Osbert had behaved very unjustly and cruelly, and that his spirit is supposed to be unable to rest on that account. Well – ”

“But, papa,” said Arthur, “excuse me for interrupting you, but I was thinking over the story. I don’t see that it was so very wrong of him to wish the place to remain in the family – I mean to be owned by Osberts. It is the feeling everybody has.”

Mr Waldron smiled. It amused him to see the eldest son sentiment in Arthur, though he was heir to nothing.

“I quite agree with you,” he said. “But you forget – he was really cruel, for he left his poor daughter utterly penniless, in reality to gratify the spite he had always had against her. He carried his family pride a little too far, surely? Besides, he was a hard and unfeeling landlord.”

“Oh, yes,” said Arthur, “I forgot. Of course he might have looked after his daughter without letting the place go out of the family. And what did you say was the prophecy, papa? – that he should be punished by Silverthorns going in the female line after all, isn’t it? That has never come to pass yet – there have always been Osberts there?”

“Yes; the legend is, that the unhappy ghost shall never rest till the descendants of a daughter of the house own the place. It came near it once many years ago. The then squire had only a sister, and though the place had always been left in the male line, her grandson – her son was dead – would have succeeded, failing male Osberts, had not a cousin who had not been heard of for many years turned up. He was an old man, who had been most of his life in Australia, and he never came home to enjoy his inheritance. But he had two sons: one became the squire, and did very well for himself, by marrying Lady Mildred Meredon, for she is a clever and capable woman, and he would never have left things in as good order as he did but for her. The other son is now General Osbert.”

“But, papa,” said Charlotte, whose quick wits had taken in all he said, “if the place always goes to Osberts, it must be all nonsense about Lady Mildred’s intending to leave it to this Miss Meredon, as everybody will say.”

“I don’t know,” said her father. “There have been rumours that Lady Mildred is perfectly free to do as she likes with it, others that she is bound by some arrangement to leave it to the Osberts, and that in reality she only has it for her life. Either may be true. Mr Osbert and his brother were not very friendly, and General Osbert needed money. Perhaps he was satisfied with some help from his brother during his life. And the squire was much attached to his wife, and owed much to her. She may be able to leave it to her own people. But even if not, it doesn’t matter – General Osbert has sons,” he added, as if thinking aloud.

“Papa!” exclaimed Charlotte almost indignantly, “how can you say it doesn’t matter? I think it would be the most unfair, unnatural thing to leave an old, old place like that to people who have nothing to do with it.”

“What does it matter to us?” said Ted, with a yawn. “How can you excite yourself so about other people’s affairs, Charlotte?”

But Mr Waldron stroked Charlotte’s head as she sat near him.

“I think it is very unlikely,” he said. “Mr Osbert had plenty of family feeling.”

“What would the poor ghost do if it were so?” said Jerry, so seriously that they all laughed. “Just fancy his feelings! He’d lose all chance of ever resting in peace, poor thing – for if it once went away to another family, it could never go to the descendants of a woman Osbert. Lady Mildred isn’t an Osbert. No, you needn’t laugh – I’m very sorry for the ghost,” he persisted with real concern. “It makes me feel quite fidgety. I’d like to know about how it really is.”

“Perhaps Lady Mildred would ‘count’ as a woman Osbert,” said Noble. “It would seem fair, for the ghost would surely be punished enough by its going quite away from his family.”

“Nonsense, Noble,” said Jerry irritably. “Those relations of hers —that girl,” with an accent of bitter scorn, “is not even her descendant, supposing Lady Mildred did count.”

Charlotte glanced at him uneasily. It was so unlike Jerry to speak with such a tone of any one. And she knew whence came the prejudice he showed.

“We shall have to tell you not to excite yourself next, Jerry, my boy,” said his father. “I shall wish I had not told you anything about it.”

“But you haven’t, papa,” said Charlotte. “That’s to say, we have not heard a word about the ghost yet, I mean of what you ‘could personally vouch for.’ Do tell us.”

Mr Waldron glanced at his wife. “How am I to get out of it?” his eyes seemed to ask.

“Yes,” said Mrs Waldron calmly, chiming in with Charlotte; “do tell us.”

“I had heard this old story as a child,” he began. “You know I lived in this neighbourhood as a little boy, but I don’t think I ever told you that in the old days I have stayed at Silverthorns.”