There was a pause.

Then the tormentors began again.

"Are you sure you would know a lady if you saw one?"

"Would you call the grocer's wife a lady because she wears a silk dress?" demanded the Roman-nosed young lady in her chilly voice.

"No," said Meg with concentration.

"Does a lady go about playing the street-organ?" asked a fat, stupid-faced girl.

"No," again said Meg fiercely. Then addressing the a.s.sembly generally, but looking especially at the high-nosed young lady, she went on: "Why do you want to know all those things about me? It's idle curiosity--that's what I call it. And if my dress is ugly, what is that to you? I come here to learn lessons and to be a lady."

"But do you know what it is to be a lady?" replied the girl.

"One is born, not made a lady," said another.

"If," said Meg, trembling with energy, looking round on her persecutors, "to be a born lady makes one laugh at another because she's badly dressed, and to mock her because she's not got fine manners, then to be a born lady is to be vulgar and cruel--that's what I think."

For a moment there was silence; then the stupid-looking girl, coming close to Meg and thrusting her face near hers, said in a jeering drawl:

"I saw you and your mother selling matches in Bond Street last Easter holidays. Your mother had a red handkerchief round her head and a monkey under her arm."

"That is a falsehood!" said Meg. Up flashed the little brown hand and came down with a slap on the dull, mocking face.

There was a hubbub.

Cries of "She's a savage!" "A gypsy!"

"We will tell Miss Reeves," was vociferated on all sides.

Above the tumult rose the voice of Ursula:

"You deserved that slap, Laura Harris. Miss Beecham had told us her mother was dead. She has been teased too much."

A bell sounded and the head-mistress, followed by the other teachers and the servants, entered the room.

"Silence, young ladies," said Miss Reeves.

Prayer-time had come at Moorhouse.

CHAPTER VII.

AT SCHOOL.

Meg was going through the ordeal that her friend had set for her, and she strung herself to endurance. She felt she was tabooed by these fashionable young ladies, and she fiercely antic.i.p.ated their neglect.

She avoided them; she rejected Ursula's advances with impatience.

For awhile some of the girls felt a temptation to bait this little badger, but at last either the freshness or the excitement of the sport died away. Perhaps, too, a certain amount of fear restrained them. The slap administered to Laura Harris had made an impression, and it was considered advisable not to goad the "savage" beyond bounds. Meg after awhile was very much left alone.

She was an outcast, and she felt homesick for the London cage from which she had flitted, and which the presence of a friend had cheered. For the first time, also, she realized her ignorance, and with resolute heroism she set herself to learn. She worked with astonishing zeal. At her books and lessons Meg did not feel so lonely. At church and in her walks through the pleasant country lanes the sense of her absolute isolation was lifted. In recreation hours she sat apart from her schoolfellows.

There was a yew tree on the outskirts of the playground into which she climbed to read Goldsmith's "Animated Nature." She began its perusal for the sake of the donor; then, gradually, this book of wonder fascinated her. The description it gave of strange, beautiful creatures, of birds especially, enthralled her. She gathered from the pages hints of far-away countries that called to her like a voice. This little town-bred heart was seized with a pa.s.sionate love of nature and a foolish love of wild flowers. As she formed one of the regiment of girls who tramped, two and two, through the country lanes, the beauty of nature seemed to comfort Meg as if the touch of a rea.s.suring hand were laid upon her heart. She would almost forget, then, that she was an object of mockery or patronage to her fellows. In the beautiful old church she felt nearly happy. "I am out of school," she would say to herself. The voice of the organ took her immensely. It seemed to be a voice talking to G.o.d. She liked the clergyman also. He was an old gentleman who appeared to her to be endowed with great benevolence. She thought his sermons marvels of eloquence. When, in answer to her long stare, his eye sometimes rested upon her, she felt immensely distinguished and honored.

The teachers of Moorhouse were as much puzzled concerning Meg as were the girls. She knew so much of some subjects and so little of others.

Miss Reeves, after a careful examination of the new pupil's acquirements, declared that Meg might beat the girls of the upper cla.s.s in knowledge of some parts of history, and in familiarity with some of Shakespeare's plays; while the lower cla.s.ses might overmaster her in the elements of arithmetic, geography, and other subjects.

Mr. Foster, the arithmetic master, a lank man with a large nose and a long neck, who looked like an innocent vulture, and who had never been known to give a bad mark, contenting himself with feebly rubbing out the mistakes on the slates presented to him, was bewildered by Meg's absolute ignorance of the rules of arithmetic, and by her dependence upon her fingers for counters.

"Miss Beecham is a _table-rase_, as was the great philosopher Descartes before he began to observe for the sake of his method," said the professor to Miss Reeves, with forefinger uplifted, for Mr. Foster was proud of making little pedantic jokes.

Madame Vallaria, the middle-aged lady who superintended the music of the establishment, teaching piano and singing from morning till night, was divided between admiration for Meg's correct ear and determination to learn, and despair over the stiffness of her fingers and her ignorance of the first elements of music. The signora was hot-tempered; her nerves were jarred by listening to incessant practice.

"No, no, it is impossible! I will not teach you--I will refuse--I will say to Miss Reeves that I cannot!" She sometimes exclaimed, addressing Meg: "Your fingers are like the chop sticks the Chinese do use for eating. You thump--thump--thump! I hear it in my sleep. It ever gives me the nightmare." Sometimes Mme. Vallaria relented and with voluble heartiness would exclaim: "Oh, Povera! your leetle heart is set to learn; you are so courageous; and your ear it is exact, like a machine made to catch the sounds. Yes, I will teach you--you shall learn it yet--the piano--never fear!"

Mr. Eyre, the shy and eminent professor who came down twice a week from London to take cla.s.ses of history and English literature of younger and elder pupils, would alternately pa.s.s from delight to annoyance at Meg's answers. Her indifference to dates appeared to him a sort of moral deficiency--it amounted to contempt. Her power of realizing historical facts and characters in which she took an interest was vivid, as if she had been a spectator of the events described, and had a personal acquaintance with the actors therein. He vowed she spoke of Julius Caesar as if she knew him, and of his murder as if it had happened yesterday and was the subject of a leader in this morning's _Times_. He was appalled and puzzled, he exhorted, he raged; but his eye rested expectantly upon Meg when her companions floundered behind, and the dullness of the cla.s.s was relieved for him by the audacity of her answers.

"You ought to go up to London to see the coronation," he said to her one day when the theme of the lesson was Queen Elizabeth's reign, and Meg surpa.s.sed herself in the brilliancy of her descriptive replies and the astounding incorrectness of her dates.

"What coronation?" asked Meg.

"That of Queen Elizabeth."

"But she is dead and buried in Westminster Abbey," Meg rejoined blankly, being dismally dense in apprehending a joke.

"Is she?" replied Mr. Eyre with feigned astonishment, and as was his wont when he bantered his pupils, he set about biting what remained of his nails and scribbled the lessons to be learned in the following week.

"Let her go on! She will go forever and ever backward till she is stopped by the pyramid of Ghizeh!" he remarked another day as Meg placed the date of Cromwell a century too early, and was sending it back another hundred years when she found she was wrong.

Miss Grantley, the English and geography teacher to the younger cla.s.s, was antagonistically chilly in her treatment of Meg. The child felt she was disliked, and with that precise and unsympathetic teacher her deficiencies came out flagrantly. Signora Vallaria's voluble wailings, Dr. Grey's jokes, did not dispirit Meg as did Miss Grantley's frosty censoriousness.

Meg was solitary, and in her solitude she grew defiant and repellent.

Her heart suffered from the atmosphere of repression. As far as outward appearances went she resembled her comrades; she was dressed like her fellow-pupils, her wardrobe having been replenished under Miss Reeves'

direction; but inwardly she was not of them. She sat among them like an owl among sparrows.

She observed them. As she had watched the hubbub of the lodging-house, so she now watched the routine of the school. The girls of the first cla.s.s, tall, elegantly dressed, appeared to her like young G.o.ddesses.

Some of those nodded to her kindly as they pa.s.sed, and she returned the salute awkwardly without a smile.

Among the girls who had tormented her on her first night, a group, headed by Miss Rosamond Pinkett, the cold-eyed, straight-backed, Roman-nosed young lady, kept up an aggressive att.i.tude. It still appeared to Miss Pinkett that a degradation had been inflicted on the school by the introduction of the "savage," and she ignored Meg with contemptuous coldness. This young lady's bosom friend, Gwendoline Lister, the beauty of the school, had a nature addicted to romance. Her mind was like a story-book in which every page contained a thrilling incident of which she was usually the heroine.

The sudden appearance of Meg, in a costume that suggested the dress of a poor tradesman's child, her fierce refusal to betray anything concerning her antecedents except the reiteration that her mother was a lady, fired the beauty's fancy. Meg, she imagined, was the scion of a n.o.ble family, stolen by gypsies, found at last, and sent here to be educated.

"Daughter of a ballet-dancer, my dear, you mean," Miss Pinkett said with an icy sniff. "That ridiculous drawing speaks volumes."

The drawing to which Miss Pinkett alluded, and from which the Beauty had evolved her romance, was an attempt made by Meg to repeat from memory that dear fashion plate, which she had given away.