Читать книгу The Bravest Girl in the School - Ethel Talbot - Страница 4

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“YOUR aunt wishes to send you both to the school where she has arranged to send Margot.”

It was the doctor who was speaking, and Gretta clutched the coffee-pot and stared with amazement at his surprising announcement.

To go to school! She, Gretta! So this was auntie’s secret! At first the shock of surprise at the unexpected news held her speechless, almost breathless; then the shock was followed by an overwhelming wave of delight. The great wish of her life, that she had never voiced to anyone before, was really to come to pass: she was to go to school—to school! She sat silent, almost stunned with excitement and joy.

“You would like to go, of course?” said her father. At the sound of his voice she glanced up, and a whole set of new feelings took the place of the delighted ones that had filled her mind a moment before.

“How selfish I am!” she said to herself. “I’d quite forgotten that I’m dad’s housekeeper. Oh, I can’t go and leave him all alone with Ann! How lonely he’d be! And he might even get ill. Sybil can go, but I don’t see how I can!”

“Well! Well!” said her father irritably. “Have you nothing to say? Your aunt has been most generous; wants you both to get the advantage of good teaching—even suggests that she will pay for violin lessons for you——”

“Oh!” Gretta’s face crimsoned with pleasure at the idea. “Dad,” she ventured, “but could you spare me?”

“Spare you! Why not?” said her father. “It’ll be the making of you. I could never have afforded the school she has chosen, and the best thanks you can give her is to make the most of her offer. It is generous in the extreme.”

“But, dad,” ventured Gretta. “What would you do? Wouldn’t you miss us?”

“Well, yes,” said her father. “But we can’t get good things for nothing in this world, and it’ll be worth while to be lonely at times if I know that you and Sybil are being turned out as your mother would have liked.” He opened his paper again, and Gretta said no more. So seldom did he speak of her mother that the child knew by his last remark that the arrangement was settled, and that he did not wish to say any more about it.

“But talk it over with your aunt when she brings back Sybil to-morrow,” he remarked, as he brushed his hat in the passage preparatory to starting on his rounds. “Good-bye, child; you mustn’t turn into a woman too soon, you know.”

He kissed her and banged the front door, and Gretta was left to a maze of excited thoughts: she was to go to school; the decision had been taken out of her hands!

How much she longed to go she believed that no one in the whole world knew. No one? Well, perhaps her fiddle did, the child thought to herself; for Gretta, since her mother’s death, had been thrown very much upon her own resources, and she would have felt even more solitary and companionless had it not been for the hours she spent with her beloved violin.

Could auntie have discovered all this, Gretta wondered—she was lovely enough for anything! For, as she had offered the violin lessons, too, she surely must have guessed how her elder niece had longed and longed for proper ones! Gretta’s mother had played and had taught her, herself, but when mother died, a year ago, there had been no one to help the child with her music, and she had been forced to muddle along alone.

“How did Auntie Tib know about my violin?” she inquired of the doctor at dinnertime that day.

“I don’t know, my dear. Probably your mother wrote to her about your music,” said the doctor, who could not distinguish one note of music from another. “She seems to wish you to keep it up at school.”

“Where is it? The school, I mean?” ventured Gretta timidly.

“Oh, a most healthy, bracing spot; sea-air and fine views, I believe. The house is built on a sandy soil, and there is every modern convenience conducive to health; sanitary arrangements splendid; you’re a pair of lucky children!”

Gretta was used to streams of eloquence that she only half understood. She waited patiently until this one was over. Evidently none of the details dear to the hearts of children were to be elicited through conversation with the doctor; she was thrown back upon her own imaginings, and waited patiently for the advent of her aunt and Sybil on the following day.

It was with a face of unusual excitement that she rushed to open the front door to them when the time arrived, and the first glance at the child’s eager face reassured Mrs. Fleming, who had feared that Gretta might have demurred against the arrangement for her father’s sake.

“You’re looking forward to school, then, Gretta?” she inquired, when Sybil had flown to acquaint Ann with the details of her visit.

“Dad says we’re to go, and he seems to think he can manage without me, and thank you very much,” said Gretta, unwontedly demonstrative in the excitement that she was feeling. “Auntie, darling, do you really mean it?—about violin lessons, too?”

“Why, of course, my dear,” said Mrs. Fleming. “Your mother told me in her letters, as you know, that you had quite a special gift in that direction. She played so beautifully herself that I should like you to have the advantages she had. Perhaps, too, Gretta, you know, you might use it in years to come. It means hard work, but—the practising, I mean.”

“Practice!” repeated Sybil, entering the room in high feather. “Is that what you’re talking about? What a stupid thing! Aren’t you telling Gretta about the hotel breakfast, auntie, and all the lots of different things the waiters brought! But she’s sure to talk about that old violin if anyone’ll listen; she’s just half-crazy about it. She twangs it from morning to night when dad’s out, and last month she gave up sugar in her tea because she’d no pocket-money and she wanted to buy a new string, and——” The child paused, breathless.

Gretta blushed crimson, but as much with pleasure at what the future held, as with annoyance at Sybil’s speech. Everything in her world seemed changed; school, music-lessons, were to come her way; she was feeling that she already had as much pleasure in prospect as a princess in a fairy-tale, when Mrs. Fleming’s next speech made her gasp.

“And we’ve got all your clothes to get, you know.”

Clothes! Gretta hadn’t given them a thought; but evidently Sybil had. “I’m to have some jumper dresses just like Margot’s,” she announced grandly. “We’ve both been measured! And brown stockings, Gretta—brown!”

Evidently with brown stockings the summit of Sybil’s happiness had been reached. Gretta could only turn her eyes wonderingly towards her aunt.

“Oh, auntie, how lovely! But—ought she to have them? She has some quite good black ones, only, of course, they’re darned.”

“Oh, Gretta, you spoil-sport! But you can’t change it, for they’re bought, aren’t they, Auntie Tib?” and she danced a jig round Mrs. Fleming’s chair.

“I spoke to your father, Gretta,” said that lady, when Sybil’s excitement had subsided, “and asked him if I might think of you three little girls as sisters while you were at school. He agreed, and understood why I wanted it, and I think you are old enough to understand, too.”

Gretta said no more after that; she did not find it so easy as Sybil did to express herself in words, but Mrs. Fleming could read the feelings in her face and felt well repaid for all that she was doing for the children. When she left again that afternoon it was with the promise that, during the fortnight that remained before the new term at the Cliff School commenced, she would undertake the buying of the children’s wardrobes, and see that all things were in readiness for the twenty-first of January.

That fortnight went by in a whirl of delight. Ann worked with a will, excited with the idea that she was to be the doctor’s housekeeper and factotum and “see if she could manage to make him really comfortable,” as Mrs. Fleming put it. The doctor forgot his worries and fell in with all the plans. Auntie came and went like a good fairy, cheerful and kind, and Sybil was in such a state of wild delight at the pleasures that school must hold for her that she could hardly wait patiently until the eventful day should arrive.

“But you’ll be as glad to get home for the holidays as you are to get away, Miss Sybil, and that’s a fact,” quoth Ann sententiously, on the last evening. “You’ll have to behave yourself where you’re going; see if you don’t!”

“That’s all you know about it!” said Sybil grandly.

But when the day had dawned at last—the twenty-first of January, and the first day of school—the throb that the little girl’s heart gave as she woke from her dreams somehow or other did not feel as though it was quite due to joyful excitement, and even Gretta was conscious of very mixed feelings, the most pronounced of which seemed to be a positive disinclination to saying good-bye to the doctor.

The children’s father appeared to be the most cheery member of the group that met at the breakfast-table. Sybil found herself for once quite unable to eat, and if it had not been for Ann’s I-told-you-so expression of countenance when she entered the room with hot plates, the child would probably have dissolved into tears before the end of the meal. Her older sister was fully occupied with her own thoughts; turning and re-turning over in her mind every possible dreadful thing that might happen! Suppose Ann should not make dad comfortable; suppose he should get ill! Suppose—suppose! It was a relief to all when the postman’s knock sounded and Sybil raced to the letter-box, taking the opportunity to mop her eyes in the loneliness of the passage as she went.

The only letter proved to be from auntie, and was merely a repetition of the plans already decided upon for the comfort of the children on their journey. “Margot and I will meet you both for lunch at York,” she wrote. “Then I will see you into the Cliffland train, and you three will travel down together.” The words came like the welcome sound of Mrs. Fleming’s cheery voice; somehow things began to feel different, and by ten o’clock, when the children were ready to start for the station with their father, Sybil’s tongue, at least, was loosed once more.

“Good-bye, Ann. When I come back I’ll tell you all about school.” Sybil was dressed in her new navy-blue suit and sported the cherished brown stockings. Her hair was plaited and tied with a ribbon bow. She felt an experienced schoolgirl already.

“Good-bye, Miss Sybil, and if they treat you badly, you just come straight back ’ome; I ’ates them schools!” and Ann, whose knowledge was altogether derived from sensational and impossible story-books, wiped her eyes with her apron in anticipation of the troubles her pets were to endure.

“Pooh!” said Sybil; “school’s not like that! Just you wait! I may come back with heaps of prizes, and even medals for all you know!”

Upstairs Gretta was clinging to her father, and wishing very hard indeed that she needn’t go. “Dad, if you want me, you’ll promise to send for me?”

“I’ll promise,” said the doctor, with a trace of a smile at her words.

“And you’ll really change your boots when they’re wet, and not catch cold! I’ve told Ann always to warm your slippers, but she’s certain to forget after the first day; and you will say if she makes the tea properly hot when you write, won’t you?”

Her last injunctions were broken in upon by Sybil, who burst upstairs in a frenzy of excitement. “The cab’s coming, and my elastic’s off my perfectly new hat! And it’s all pussy’s fault; she would play with me when I was saying good-bye to her, and I had to snap it at her!”

In the excitement of putting the finishing touches to Sybil’s wardrobe the last few minutes quickly passed, and before they could realize that they were actually off, the children found themselves kissing their hands frantically to their father, who was standing on the fast receding platform waving his handkerchief. Really and truly they were off to school!