The School by the Sea.

by Angela Brazil.

CHAPTER I

The Interloper

Girls! Girls everywhere! Girls in the pa.s.sages, girls in the hall, racing upstairs and scurrying downstairs, diving into dormitories and running into cla.s.srooms, overflowing on to the landing and hustling along the corridor--everywhere, girls! There were tall and short, and fat and thin, and all degrees from pretty to plain; girls with fair hair and girls with dark hair, blue-eyed, brown-eyed, and grey-eyed girls; demure girls, romping girls, clever girls, stupid girls--but never a silent girl. No! Buzz-hum-buzz! The talk and chatter surged in a full, steady flow round the house till the noise invaded even that sanctuary of sanctuaries, the private study, where Miss Birks, the Princ.i.p.al, sat addressing post cards to inform respective parents of the safe arrival of the various individual members of the frolicsome crew which had just rea.s.sembled after the Christmas vacation. In ordinary circ.u.mstances such an indiscretion as squealing on the stairs or dancing in the pa.s.sages would have brought Miss Birks from her den, dealing out stern rebukes, if not visiting dire justice on the offenders; but for this one brief evening--the first night of the term--the old house was Liberty Hall. Each damsel did what seemed good in her own eyes, and talked, laughed, and joked to her heart's content.

"Let them fizz, poor dears!" said Miss Birks, smiling to herself as a special outburst of mirth was wafted up from below. "It does them good to work off steam when they arrive. They'll have to be quiet enough to-morrow. Really, the twenty make noise enough for a hundred! They're all on double-voice power to-night! Shades of the Franciscans, what a noise! It seems almost sacrilege in an old convent."

If indeed the gentle, grey-robed nuns who long, long ago had stolen silently along those very same stairs could have come back to survey the scene of their former activities, I fear on this particular occasion they would have wrung their slim, transparent hands in horror over the stalwart modern maidens who had succeeded them in possession of the ancient, rambling house. No pale-faced novices these, with downcast eyes and cheeks sunken with fasting; no timid glances, no soft ethereal footfalls or gliding garments--the old order had changed indeed, and yielded place to a rosy, racy, healthy, hearty, well-grown set of twentieth-century schoolgirls, overflowing with vigorous young life and abounding spirits, mentally and physically fit, and about as different from their mediaeval forerunners as a hockey stick is from a spindle.

Among the jolly, careless company that on this January evening held carnival in the vaulted pa.s.sages, and woke the echoes of the time-hallowed walls, no two had abandoned themselves to the fun of the moment more thoroughly than Deirdre Sullivan and Dulcie Wilc.o.x. They had attempted to dance five varieties of fancy steps on an upper landing, had performed a species of Highland fling down the stairs, and had finished with an irregular jog-trot along the lower corridor, subsiding finally, scarlet with their exertions, and wellnigh voiceless, on to the bottom step of the back staircase.

"Oh!--let's--sit here--and talk," heaved Deirdre, her power of speech returning in jerks. "I'm--tired--of ragging round--and--I've not seen you--for ages!--and oh!--there's such heaps and heaps--to tell.

Look!--she's over there!"

"Who?" queried Dulcie laconically. She was stouter than Deirdre, and, like Hamlet, "scant of breath".

"Why, she, of course!"

"Don't be a lunatic! Which she? And what she? And why she of all shes?"

gasped Dulcie, still rather convulsively and painfully.

"What 'she' could I possibly mean except the new girl?"

"You don't mean to tell me there's a new girl?"

"You don't surely mean to tell me you've never noticed her! You blind bat! Why, there she is as large as life! Can't you see her, stupid? The atrocious part of it is, she's been stuck into our bedroom!"

Dulcie sprang up, with hands outstretched in utter tragedy.

"No!" she wailed, "oh, no! no! Surely Miss Birks hasn't been heartless enough to fill up that spare bed! Oh, I'll never forgive her, never! Our ducky, chummy little room to be invaded by a third--and a stranger! It's sheer barbarous cruelty! Oh, I thought better of her! What have we done to be treated like this? It's pure and simple brutality!"

"Who's the lunatic now? Stop ranting, you goose! That bed was bound to be filled some day, though it's hard luck on us. We did pretty well to keep the place to ourselves the whole of last term. 'All good things come to an end.' I'm trying to be philosophical, and quote proverbs; all the same, 'Two's company and three's trumpery'. That's a proverb too!

You haven't told me yet what you think of our number three. She's talking to Mademoiselle over there."

"So she is! Why, if she isn't talking German, too, as pat as a native!

What a tremendous rate their tongues are going at it! I can't catch a single word. Is she a foreigner? She doesn't somehow quite suggest English by the look of her, does she?"

The new girl in question, the interloper who was to form the unwelcome third, and spoil the delightful _scene a deux_ hitherto so keenly enjoyed by the chums, certainly had a rather un-British aspect when viewed even by impartial eyes. Her pink-and-white colouring, blue eyes, and her very fair flaxen hair were distinctly Teutonic; the cut of her dress, the shape of her shoes, the tiny satchel slung by a strap round her shoulder and under one arm--so unmistakably German in type--the enamelled locket bearing the Prussian Eagle on a blue ground, all showed a slightly appreciable difference from her companions, and stamped her emphatically with the seal and signet of the "Vaterland". On the whole she might be considered a decidedly pretty girl; her features were small and clear cut, her complexion beyond reproach, her teeth even, her fair hair glossy, and she was moderately tall for her fifteen years.

Dulcie took in all these points with a long, long comprehensive stare, then subsided on to the top of the boot rack, shaking her head gloomily.

"You may call it British prejudice, but I can't stand foreigners," she remarked with a gusty sigh. "As for having one in one's bedroom--why, it's wicked! Miss Birks oughtn't to expect it!"

"Foreigners? Who's talking about foreigners?" asked Marcia Richards, one of the Sixth Form, who happened to be pa.s.sing at the moment, and overheard Dulcie's complaints. "If you mean Gerda Thorwaldson, she is as English as you or I."

"English! Listen to her! Pattering German thirteen to the dozen!"

snorted Dulcie.

"You young John Bull! Don't be insular and ridiculous! Gerda has lived in Germany, so of course she can speak German. It will be very good practice for you to talk it with her in your bedroom."

"If you think we're going to break our jaws with those abominable gutturals!"--broke out Deirdre.

"Miss Germany'll have to compa.s.s English, or hold her tongue," added Dulcie.

"Don't be nasty! You're wasting your opportunities. If I had your chance, I'd soon improve my German."

"Why didn't Miss Birks put her with you instead?" chimed the injured pair in chorus. "You're welcome to our share of her."

"Come along, you slackers!" interrupted Evie Bennett and Annie Pridwell, emerging from the dining-hall. "You're wasting time here. Betty Scott's playing for all she's worth, and everybody's got to come and dance. Pa.s.s the word on if anyone's upstairs. Are you ready? Hurry up, then!"

"Oh, I say! I'm tired!" yawned Dulcie.

"We've had enough of the light fantastic toe!" protested Deirdre.

"Little birds that can hop and won't hop must be made to hop!" chirped Evie firmly.

"How'll you make us?"

"The 'Great Mogul' has decreed that any girl who refuses to dance shall be forcibly placed upon the table and obliged to sing a solo, or forfeit all the sweets she may have brought back with her."

"'Tis Kismet!" murmured Deirdre, hauling up Dulcie from the boot rack.

"No use fighting against one's fate!" sighed Dulcie, linking arms with her chum as she walked along the pa.s.sage.

After all, it was only the younger members who were a.s.sembled in the dining-hall--the Sixth, far too superior to join in the general romping, were having a select cocoa party in the head girl's bedroom, and telling each other that the noise below was disgraceful, and they wondered Miss Birks didn't put a stop to it. (At seventeen one's judgment is apt to be severe, especially on those only a few years younger!) Miss Birks, however, who was forty-five, and wise in her generation, did not interfere, and the fun downstairs continued to effervesce. Betty Scott, seated at the piano, played with skill and zeal, and the others were soon tripping their steps with more or less effect, according to their individual grace and agility--all but two. Hilda Marriott had strained her ankle during the holidays, and could only sit on the table and sigh with envy; while Gerda Thorwaldson, the new girl, stood by the door, watching the performance. Everybody was so taken up by the joys of the moment that n.o.body realized her presence, even when whirling skirts whisked against her in pa.s.sing. Not a single one noticed her forlorn aloofness, or that the blue eyes were almost br.i.m.m.i.n.g over with tears.

Mademoiselle, the only person who had so far befriended her, had beaten a retreat, and was finishing unpacking, while the fourteen fellow pupils in the room were still entire strangers to her. As n.o.body made the slightest overture towards an introduction, and she seemed rather in the way of the dancers, Gerda opened the door, and was about to follow Mademoiselle's example, and make her escape upstairs. Her action, however, attracted the attention that had before been denied her.

"Hallo, the new girl's sneaking off!" cried Annie Pridwell, pausing so suddenly that she almost upset her partner.

"Here! Stop!"

"Where are you going?"

"You've got to stay."

"Come here and report yourself!"

The dancing had come to a brief and sudden end. Betty Scott, concluding in the middle of a bar, turned round on the music stool, and holding up a commanding finger, beckoned the stranger forward.

"Let's have a look at you," she remarked patronizingly. "I hadn't time to take you in before. Are you really German? Tell us about yourself."

"Yes, go on! Where do you come from, and all the rest of it?" urged Evie Bennett.