Silverthorns

“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.”