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A LITTLE PRINCESS (Part 1)

BEING THE WHOLE STORY OF SARA CREWE NOW TOLD FOR THE FIRST TIME

THE WHOLE OF THE STORY

I do not know whether many people realize how much more than is ever written there really is in a story—how many parts of it are never told—how much more really happened than there is in the book one holds in one’s hand and pores over. Stories are something like letters. When a letter is written, how often one remembers things omitted and says, “Ah, why did I not tell them that?” In writing a book one relates all that one remembers at the time, and if one told all that really happened perhaps the book would never end. Between the lines of every story there is another story, and that is one that is never heard and can only be guessed at by the people who are good at guessing. The person who writes the story may never know all of it, but sometimes he does and wishes he had the chance to begin again.

When I wrote the story of “Sara Crewe” I guessed that a great deal more had happened at Miss Minchin’s than I had had time to find out just then. I knew, of course, that there must have been chapters full of things going on all the time; and when I began to make a play out of the book and called it “A Little Princess,” I discovered three acts full of things. What interested me most was that I found that there had been girls at the school whose names I had not even known before. There was a little girl whose name was Lottie, who was an amusing little person; there was a hungry scullery-maid who was Sara’s adoring friend; Ermengarde was much more entertaining than she had seemed at first; things happened in the garret which had never been hinted at in the book; and a certain gentleman whose name was Melchisedec was an intimate friend of Sara’s who should never have been left out of the story if he had only walked into it in time. He and Becky and Lottie lived at Miss Minchin’s, and I cannot understand why they did not mention themselves to me at first. They were as real as Sara, and it was careless of them not to come out of the story shadowland and say, “Here I am—tell about me.” But they did not—which was their fault and not mine. People who live in the story one is writing ought to come forward at the beginning and tap the writing person on the shoulder and say, “Hallo, what about me?” If they don’t, no one can be blamed but themselves and their slouching, idle ways.

After the play of “A Little Princess” was produced in New York, and so many children went to see it and liked Becky and Lottie and Melchisedec, my publishers asked me if I could not write Sara’s story over again and put into it all the things and people who had been left out before, and so I have done it; and when I began I found there were actually pages and pages of things which had happened that had never been put even into the play, so in this new “Little Princess” I have put all I have been able to discover.

—FRANCES HODGSON BURNETT.

CHAPTER I

SARA

Once on a dark winter’s day, when the yellow fog hung so thick and heavy in the streets of London that the lamps were lighted and the shop windows blazed with gas as they do at night, an odd-looking little girl sat in a cab with her father and was driven rather slowly through the big thoroughfares.

She sat with her feet tucked under her, and leaned against her father, who held her in his arm, as she stared out of the window at the passing people with a queer old-fashioned thoughtfulness in her big eyes.

She was such a little girl that one did not expect to see such a look on her small face. It would have been an old look for a child of twelve, and Sara Crewe was only seven. The fact was, however, that she was always dreaming and thinking odd things and could not herself remember any time when she had not been thinking things about grown-up people and the world they belonged to. She felt as if she had lived a long, long time.

At this moment she was remembering the voyage she had just made from Bombay with her father, Captain Crewe. She was thinking of the big ship, of the Lascars passing silently to and fro on it, of the children playing about on the hot deck, and of some young officers’ wives who used to try to make her talk to them and laugh at the things she said.

Principally, she was thinking of what a queer thing it was that at one time one was in India in the blazing sun, and then in the middle of the ocean, and then driving in a strange vehicle through strange streets where the day was as dark as the night. She found this so puzzling that she moved closer to her father.

“Papa,” she said in a low, mysterious little voice which was almost a whisper, “papa.”

“What is it, darling?” Captain Crewe answered, holding her closer and looking down into her face. “What is Sara thinking of?”

“Is this the place?” Sara whispered, cuddling still closer to him. “Is it, papa?”

“Yes, little Sara, it is. We have reached it at last.” And though she was only seven years old, she knew that he felt sad when he said it.

It seemed to her many years since he had begun to prepare her mind for “the place,” as she always called it. Her mother had died when she was born, so she had never known or missed her. Her young, handsome, rich, petting father seemed to be the only relation she had in the world. They had always played together and been fond of each other. She only knew he was rich because she had heard people say so when they thought she was not listening, and she had also heard them say that when she grew up she would be rich, too. She did not know all that being rich meant. She had always lived in a beautiful bungalow, and had been used to seeing many servants who made salaams to her and called her “Missee Sahib,” and gave her her own way in everything. She had had toys and pets and an ayah who worshipped her, and she had gradually learned that people who were rich had these things. That, however, was all she knew about it.

During her short life only one thing had troubled her, and that thing was “the place” she was to be taken to some day. The climate of India was very bad for children, and as soon as possible they were sent away from it—generally to England and to school. She had seen other children go away, and had heard their fathers and mothers talk about the letters they received from them. She had known that she would be obliged to go also, and though sometimes her father’s stories of the voyage and the new country had attracted her, she had been troubled by the thought that he could not stay with her.

“Couldn’t you go to that place with me, papa?” she had asked when she was five years old. “Couldn’t you go to school, too? I would help you with your lessons.”

“But you will not have to stay for a very long time, little Sara,” he had always said. “You will go to a nice house where there will be a lot of little girls, and you will play together, and I will send you plenty of books, and you will grow so fast that it will seem scarcely a year before you are big enough and clever enough to come back and take care of papa.”

She had liked to think of that. To keep the house for her father; to ride with him, and sit at the head of his table when he had dinner-parties; to talk to him and read his books—that would be what she would like most in the world, and if one must go away to “the place” in England to attain it, she must make up her mind to go. She did not care very much for other little girls, but if she had plenty of books she could console herself. She liked books more than anything else, and was, in fact, always inventing stories of beautiful things and telling them to herself. Sometimes she had told them to her father, and he had liked them as much as she did.

“Well, papa,” she said softly, “if we are here I suppose we must be resigned.”

He laughed at her old-fashioned speech and kissed her. He was really not at all resigned himself, though he knew he must keep that a secret. His quaint little Sara had been a great companion to him, and he felt he should be a lonely fellow when, on his return to India, he went into his bungalow knowing he need not expect to see the small figure in its white frock come forward to meet him. So he held her very closely in his arm as the cab rolled into the big, dull square in which stood the house which was their destination.

It was a big, dull, brick house, exactly like all the others in its row, but that on the front door there shone a brass plate on which was engraved in black letters:

Miss Minchin,

Select Seminary for Young Ladies.

“Here we are, Sara,” said Captain Crewe, making his voice sound as cheerful as possible. Then he lifted her out of the cab and they mounted the steps and rang the bell. Sara often thought afterward that the house was somehow exactly like Miss Minchin. It was respectable and well furnished, but everything in it was ugly; and the very arm-chairs seemed to have hard bones in them. In the hall everything was hard and polished—even the red cheeks of the moon face on the tall clock in the corner had a severe varnished look. The drawing-room into which they were ushered was covered by a carpet with a square pattern upon it, the chairs were square, and a heavy marble timepiece stood upon the heavy marble mantel.

As she sat down in one of the stiff mahogany chairs, Sara cast one of her quick looks about her.

“I don’t like it, papa,” she said. “But then I dare say soldiers—even brave ones—don’t really like going into battle.”

Captain Crewe laughed outright at this. He was young and full of fun, and he never tired of hearing Sara’s queer speeches.

“Oh, little Sara,” he said. “What shall I do when I have no one to say solemn things to me? No one else is quite as solemn as you are.”

“But why do solemn things make you laugh so?” inquired Sara.

“Because you are such fun when you say them,” he answered, laughing still more. And then suddenly he swept her into his arms and kissed her very hard, stopping laughing all at once and looking almost as if tears had come into his eyes.

It was just then that Miss Minchin entered the room. She was very like her house, Sara felt: tall and dull, and respectable and ugly. She had large, cold, fishy eyes, and a large, cold, fishy smile. It spread itself into a very large smile when she saw Sara and Captain Crewe. She had heard a great many desirable things of the young soldier from the lady who had recommended her school to him. Among other things, she had heard that he was a rich father who was willing to spend a great deal of money on his little daughter.

“It will be a great privilege to have charge of such a beautiful and promising child, Captain Crewe,” she said, taking Sara’s hand and stroking it. “Lady Meredith has told me of her unusual cleverness. A clever child is a great treasure in an establishment like mine.”

Sara stood quietly, with her eyes fixed upon Miss Minchin’s face. She was thinking something odd, as usual.

“Why does she say I am a beautiful child,” she was thinking. “I am not beautiful at all. Colonel Grange’s little girl, Isobel, is beautiful. She has dimples and rose-colored cheeks, and long hair the color of gold. I have short black hair and green eyes; besides which, I am a thin child and not fair in the least. I am one of the ugliest children I ever saw. She is beginning by telling a story.”

She was mistaken, however, in thinking she was an ugly child. She was not in the least like Isobel Grange, who had been the beauty of the regiment, but she had an odd charm of her own. She was a slim, supple creature, rather tall for her age, and had an intense, attractive little face. Her hair was heavy and quite black and only curled at the tips; her eyes were greenish gray, it is true, but they were big, wonderful eyes with long, black lashes, and though she herself did not like the color of them, many other people did. Still she was very firm in her belief that she was an ugly little girl, and she was not at all elated by Miss Minchin’s flattery.

“I should be telling a story if I said she was beautiful,” she thought; “and I should know I was telling a story. I believe I am as ugly as she is—in my way. What did she say that for?”

After she had known Miss Minchin longer she learned why she had said it. She discovered that she said the same thing to each papa and mamma who brought a child to her school.

Sara stood near her father and listened while he and Miss Minchin talked. She had been brought to the seminary because Lady Meredith’s two little girls had been educated there, and Captain Crewe had a great respect for Lady Meredith’s experience. Sara was to be what was known as “a parlor-boarder,” and she was to enjoy even greater privileges than parlor-boarders usually did. She was to have a pretty bedroom and sitting-room of her own; she was to have a pony and a carriage, and a maid to take the place of the ayah who had been her nurse in India.

“I am not in the least anxious about her education,” Captain Crewe said, with his gay laugh, as he held Sara’s hand and patted it. “The difficulty will be to keep her from learning too fast and too much. She is always sitting with her little nose burrowing into books. She doesn’t read them, Miss Minchin; she gobbles them up as if she were a little wolf instead of a little girl. She is always starving for new books to gobble, and she wants grown-up books—great, big, fat ones—French and German as well as English—history and biography and poets, and all sorts of things. Drag her away from her books when she reads too much. Make her ride her pony in the Row or go out and buy a new doll. She ought to play more with dolls.”

“Papa,” said Sara. “You see, if I went out and bought a new doll every few days I should have more than I could be fond of. Dolls ought to be intimate friends. Emily is going to be my intimate friend.”

Captain Crewe looked at Miss Minchin and Miss Minchin looked at Captain Crewe.

“Who is Emily?” she inquired.

“Tell her, Sara,” Captain Crewe said, smiling.

Sara’s green-gray eyes looked very solemn and quite soft as she answered.

“She is a doll I haven’t got yet,” she said. “She is a doll papa is going to buy for me. We are going out together to find her. I have called her Emily. She is going to be my friend when papa is gone. I want her to talk to about him.”

Miss Minchin’s large, fishy smile became very flattering indeed.

“What an original child!” she said. “What a darling little creature!”

“Yes,” said Captain Crewe, drawing Sara close. “She is a darling little creature. Take great care of her for me, Miss Minchin.”

Sara stayed with her father at his hotel for several days; in fact, she remained with him until he sailed away again to India. They went out and visited many big shops together, and bought a great many things. They bought, indeed, a great many more things than Sara needed; but Captain Crewe was a rash, innocent young man and wanted his little girl to have everything she admired and everything he admired himself, so between them they collected a wardrobe much too grand for a child of seven. There were velvet dresses trimmed with costly furs, and lace dresses, and embroidered ones, and hats with great, soft ostrich feathers, and ermine coats and muffs, and boxes of tiny gloves and handkerchiefs and silk stockings in such abundant supplies that the polite young women behind the counters whispered to each other that the odd little girl with the big, solemn eyes must be at least some foreign princess—perhaps the little daughter of an Indian rajah.

And at last they found Emily, but they went to a number of toy-shops and looked at a great many dolls before they finally discovered her.

“I want her to look as if she wasn’t a doll really,” Sara said. “I want her to look as if she listens when I talk to her. The trouble with dolls, papa”—and she put her head on one side and reflected as she said it—“the trouble with dolls is that they never seem to hear.” So they looked at big ones and little ones—at dolls with black eyes and dolls with blue—at dolls with brown curls and dolls with golden braids, dolls dressed and dolls undressed.

“You see,” Sara said when they were examining one who had no clothes. “If, when I find her, she has no frocks, we can take her to a dressmaker and have her things made to fit. They will fit better if they are tried on.”

After a number of disappointments they decided to walk and look in at the shop windows and let the cab follow them. They had passed two or three places without even going in, when, as they were approaching a shop which was really not a very large one, Sara suddenly started and clutched her father’s arm.

“Oh, papa!” she cried. “There is Emily!”

A flush had risen to her face and there was an expression in her green-gray eyes as if she had just recognized some one she was intimate with and fond of.

“She is actually waiting for us!” she said. “Let us go in to her.”

“Dear me!” said Captain Crewe; “I feel as if we ought to have some one to introduce us.”

“You must introduce me and I will introduce you,” said Sara. “But I knew her the minute I saw her—so perhaps she knew me, too.”

Perhaps she had known her. She had certainly a very intelligent expression in her eyes when Sara took her in her arms. She was a large doll, but not too large to carry about easily; she had naturally curling golden-brown hair, which hung like a mantle about her, and her eyes were a deep, clear, gray blue, with soft, thick eyelashes which were real eyelashes and not mere painted lines.

“Of course,” said Sara, looking into her face as she held her on her knee—“of course, papa, this is Emily.”

So Emily was bought and actually taken to a children’s outfitter’s shop, and measured for a wardrobe as grand as Sara’s own. She had lace frocks, too, and velvet and muslin ones, and hats and coats and beautiful lace-trimmed underclothes, and gloves and handkerchiefs and furs.

“I should like her always to look as if she was a child with a good mother,” said Sara. “I’m her mother, though I am going to make a companion of her.”

Captain Crewe would really have enjoyed the shopping tremendously, but that a sad thought kept tugging at his heart. This all meant that he was going to be separated from his beloved, quaint little comrade.

He got out of his bed in the middle of that night and went and stood looking down at Sara, who lay asleep with Emily in her arms. Her black hair was spread out on the pillow and Emily’s golden-brown hair mingled with it, both of them had lace-ruffled night-gowns, and both had long eyelashes which lay and curled up on their cheeks. Emily looked so like a real child that Captain Crewe felt glad she was there. He drew a big sigh and pulled his mustache with a boyish expression.

“Heigh-ho, little Sara!” he said to himself. “I don’t believe you know how much your daddy will miss you.”

The next day he took her to Miss Minchin’s and left her there. He was to sail away the next morning. He explained to Miss Minchin that his solicitors, Messrs. Barrow & Skipworth, had charge of his affairs in England and would give her any advice she wanted, and that they would pay the bills she sent in for Sara’s expenses. He would write to Sara twice a week, and she was to be given every pleasure she asked for.

“She is a sensible little thing, and she never wants anything it isn’t safe to give her,” he said.

Then he went with Sara into her little sitting-room and they bade each other good-by. Sara sat on his knee and held the lapels of his coat in her small hands, and looked long and hard at his face.

“Are you learning me by heart, little Sara,” he said, stroking her hair.

“No,” she answered. “I know you by heart. You are inside my heart.” And they put their arms round each other and kissed as if they would never let each other go.

When the cab drove away from the door, Sara was sitting on the floor of her sitting-room, with her hands under her chin and her eyes following it until it had turned the corner of the square. Emily was sitting by her, and she looked after it, too. When Miss Minchin sent her sister, Miss Amelia, to see what the child was doing, she found she could not open the door.

“I have locked it,” said a queer, polite little voice from inside. “I want to be quite by myself, if you please.”

Miss Amelia was fat and dumpy, and stood very much in awe of her sister. She was really the better-natured person of the two, but she never disobeyed Miss Minchin. She went down-stairs again, looking almost alarmed.

“I never saw such a funny, old-fashioned child, sister,” she said. “She has locked herself in, and she is not making the least particle of noise.”

“It is much better than if she kicked and screamed, as some of them do,” Miss Minchin answered. “I expected that a child as much spoiled as she is would set the whole house in an uproar. If ever a child was given her own way in everything, she is.”

“I’ve been opening her trunks and putting her things away,” said Miss Amelia. “I never saw anything like them—sable and ermine on her coats, and real Valenciennes lace on her underclothing. You have seen some of her clothes. What do you think of them?”

“I think they are perfectly ridiculous,” replied Miss Minchin, sharply; “but they will look very well at the head of the line when we take the school-children to church on Sunday. She has been provided for as if she were a little princess.”

And up-stairs in the locked room Sara and Emily sat on the floor and stared at the corner round which the cab had disappeared, while Captain Crewe looked backward, waving and kissing his hand as if he could not bear to stop.

CHAPTER II

A FRENCH LESSON

When Sara entered the school-room the next morning everybody looked at her with wide, interested eyes. By that time every pupil—from Lavinia Herbert, who was nearly thirteen and felt quite grown up, to Lottie Legh, who was only just four and the baby of the school—had heard a great deal about her. They knew very certainly that she was Miss Minchin’s show pupil and was considered a credit to the establishment. One or two of them had even caught a glimpse of her French maid, Mariette, who had arrived the evening before. Lavinia had managed to pass Sara’s room when the door was open, and had seen Mariette opening a box which had arrived late from some shop.

“It was full of petticoats with lace frills on them—frills and frills,” she whispered to her friend Jessie as she bent over her geography. “I saw her shaking them out. I heard Miss Minchin say to Miss Amelia that her clothes were so grand that they were ridiculous for a child. My mamma says that children should be dressed simply. She has got one of those petticoats on now. I saw it when she sat down.”

“She has silk stockings on!” whispered Jessie, bending over her geography also. “And what little feet! I never saw such little feet.”

“Oh,” sniffed Lavinia, spitefully, “that is the way her slippers are made. My mamma says that even big feet can be made to look small if you have a clever shoemaker. I don’t think she is pretty at all. Her eyes are such a queer color.”

“She isn’t pretty as other pretty people are,” said Jessie, stealing a glance across the room; “but she makes you want to look at her again. She has tremendously long eyelashes, but her eyes are almost green.”

Sara was sitting quietly in her seat, waiting to be told what to do. She had been placed near Miss Minchin’s desk. She was not abashed at all by the many pairs of eyes watching her. She was interested and looked back quietly at the children who looked at her. She wondered what they were thinking of, and if they liked Miss Minchin, and if they cared for their lessons, and if any of them had a papa at all like her own. She had had a long talk with Emily about her papa that morning.

“He is on the sea now, Emily,” she had said. “We must be very great friends to each other and tell each other things. Emily, look at me. You have the nicest eyes I ever saw,—but I wish you could speak.”

She was a child full of imaginings and whimsical thoughts, and one of her fancies was that there would be a great deal of comfort in even pretending that Emily was alive and really heard and understood. After Mariette had dressed her in her dark-blue school-room frock and tied her hair with a dark-blue ribbon, she went to Emily, who sat in a chair of her own, and gave her a book.

“You can read that while I am down-stairs,” she said; and, seeing Mariette looking at her curiously, she spoke to her with a serious little face.

“What I believe about dolls,” she said, “is that they can do things they will not let us know about. Perhaps, really, Emily can read and talk and walk, but she will only do it when people are out of the room. That is her secret. You see, if people knew that dolls could do things, they would make them work. So, perhaps, they have promised each other to keep it a secret. If you stay in the room, Emily will just sit there and stare; but if you go out, she will begin to read, perhaps, or go and look out of the window. Then if she heard either of us coming, she would just run back and jump into her chair and pretend she had been there all the time.”

“Comme elle est drôle!” Mariette said to herself, and when she went down-stairs she told the head housemaid about it. But she had already begun to like this odd little girl who had such an intelligent small face and such perfect manners. She had taken care of children before who were not so polite. Sara was a very fine little person, and had a gentle, appreciative way of saying, “If you please, Mariette,” “Thank you, Mariette,” which was very charming. Mariette told the head housemaid that she thanked her as if she was thanking a lady.

“Elle a l’air d’une princesse, cette petite,” she said. Indeed, she was very much pleased with her new little mistress and liked her place greatly.

After Sara had sat in her seat in the school-room for a few minutes, being looked at by the pupils, Miss Minchin rapped in a dignified manner upon her desk.

“Young ladies,” she said, “I wish to introduce you to your new companion.” All the little girls rose in their places, and Sara rose also. “I shall expect you all to be very agreeable to Miss Crewe; she has just come to us from a great distance—in fact, from India. As soon as lessons are over you must make each other’s acquaintance.”

The pupils bowed ceremoniously, and Sara made a little courtesy, and then they sat down and looked at each other again.

“Sara,” said Miss Minchin in her school-room manner, “come here to me.”

She had taken a book from the desk and was turning over its leaves. Sara went to her politely.

“As your papa has engaged a French maid for you,” she began, “I conclude that he wishes you to make a special study of the French language.”

Sara felt a little awkward.

“I think he engaged her,” she said, “because he—he thought I would like her, Miss Minchin.”

“I am afraid,” said Miss Minchin, with a slightly sour smile, “that you have been a very spoiled little girl and always imagine that things are done because you like them. My impression is that your papa wished you to learn French.”

If Sara had been older or less punctilious about being quite polite to people, she could have explained herself in a very few words. But, as it was, she felt a flush rising on her cheeks. Miss Minchin was a very severe and imposing person, and she seemed so absolutely sure that Sara knew nothing whatever of French that she felt as if it would be almost rude to correct her. The truth was that Sara could not remember the time when she had not seemed to know French. Her father had often spoken it to her when she had been a baby. Her mother had been a Frenchwoman, and Captain Crewe had loved her language, so it happened that Sara had always heard and been familiar with it.

“I—I have never really learned French, but—but—” she began, trying shyly to make herself clear.

One of Miss Minchin’s chief secret annoyances was that she did not speak French herself, and was desirous of concealing the irritating fact. She, therefore, had no intention of discussing the matter and laying herself open to innocent questioning by a new little pupil.

“That is enough,” she said with polite tartness. “If you have not learned, you must begin at once. The French master, Monsieur Dufarge, will be here in a few minutes. Take this book and look at it until he arrives.”

Sara’s cheeks felt warm. She went back to her seat and opened the book. She looked at the first page with a grave face. She knew it would be rude to smile, and she was very determined not to be rude. But it was very odd to find herself expected to study a page which told her that “le père” meant “the father,” and “la mère” meant “the mother.”

Miss Minchin glanced toward her scrutinizingly.

“You look rather cross, Sara,” she said. “I am sorry you do not like the idea of learning French.”

“I am very fond of it,” answered Sara, thinking she would try again; “but—”

“You must not say ‘but’ when you are told to do things,” said Miss Minchin. “Look at your book again.”

And Sara did so, and did not smile, even when she found that “le fils” meant “the son,” and “le frère” meant “the brother.”

“When Monsieur Dufarge comes,” she thought, “I can make him understand.”

Monsieur Dufarge arrived very shortly afterward. He was a very nice, intelligent, middle-aged Frenchman, and he looked interested when his eyes fell upon Sara trying politely to seem absorbed in her little book of phrases.

“Is this a new pupil for me, madame?” he said to Miss Minchin. “I hope that is my good fortune.”

“Her papa—Captain Crewe—is very anxious that she should begin the language. But I am afraid she has a childish prejudice against it. She does not seem to wish to learn,” said Miss Minchin.

“I am sorry of that, mademoiselle,” he said kindly to Sara. “Perhaps, when we begin to study together, I may show you that it is a charming tongue.”

Little Sara rose in her seat. She was beginning to feel rather desperate, as if she were almost in disgrace. She looked up into Monsieur Dufarge’s face with her big, green-gray eyes, and they were quite innocently appealing. She knew that he would understand as soon as she spoke. She began to explain quite simply in pretty and fluent French. Madame had not understood. She had not learned French exactly,—not out of books,—but her papa and other people had always spoken it to her, and she had read it and written it as she had read and written English. Her papa loved it, and she loved it because he did. Her dear mamma, who had died when she was born, had been French. She would be glad to learn anything monsieur would teach her, but what she had tried to explain to madame was that she already knew the words in this book—and she held out the little book of phrases.

When she began to speak Miss Minchin started quite violently and sat staring at her over her eye-glasses, almost indignantly, until she had finished. Monsieur Dufarge began to smile, and his smile was one of great pleasure. To hear this pretty childish voice speaking his own language so simply and charmingly made him feel almost as if he were in his native land—which in dark, foggy days in London sometimes seemed worlds away. When she had finished, he took the phrase-book from her, with a look almost affectionate. But he spoke to Miss Minchin.

“Ah, madame,” he said, “there is not much I can teach her. She has not learned French; she is French. Her accent is exquisite.”

“You ought to have told me,” exclaimed Miss Minchin, much mortified, turning on Sara.

“I—I tried,” said Sara. “I—I suppose I did not begin right.”

Miss Minchin knew she had tried, and that it had not been her fault that she was not allowed to explain. And when she saw that the pupils had been listening and that Lavinia and Jessie were giggling behind their French grammars, she felt infuriated.

“Silence, young ladies!” she said severely, rapping upon the desk. “Silence at once!”

And she began from that minute to feel rather a grudge against her show pupil.

CHAPTER III

ERMENGARDE

On that first morning, when Sara sat at Miss Minchin’s side, aware that the whole school-room was devoting itself to observing her, she had noticed very soon one little girl, about her own age, who looked at her very hard with a pair of light, rather dull, blue eyes. She was a fat child who did not look as if she were in the least clever, but she had a good-naturedly pouting mouth. Her flaxen hair was braided in a tight pigtail, tied with a ribbon, and she had pulled this pigtail round her neck, and was biting the end of the ribbon, resting her elbows on the desk, as she stared wonderingly at the new pupil. When Monsieur Dufarge began to speak to Sara, she looked a little frightened; and when Sara stepped forward and, looking at him with the innocent, appealing eyes, answered him, without any warning, in French, the fat little girl gave a startled jump, and grew quite red in her awed amazement. Having wept hopeless tears for weeks in her efforts to remember that “la mère” meant “the mother,” and “le père,” “the father,”—when one spoke sensible English,—it was almost too much for her to suddenly find herself listening to a child her own age who seemed not only quite familiar with these words, but apparently knew any number of others, and could mix them up with verbs as if they were mere trifles.

She stared so hard and bit the ribbon on her pigtail so fast that she attracted the attention of Miss Minchin, who, feeling extremely cross at the moment, immediately pounced upon her.

“Miss St. John!” she exclaimed severely. “What do you mean by such conduct? Remove your elbows! Take your ribbon out of your mouth! Sit up at once!”

Upon which Miss St. John gave another jump, and when Lavinia and Jessie tittered she became redder than ever—so red, indeed, that she almost looked as if tears were coming into her poor, dull, childish eyes; and Sara saw her and was so sorry for her that she began to rather like her and want to be her friend. It was a way of hers always to want to spring into any fray in which some one was made uncomfortable or unhappy.

“If Sara had been a boy and lived a few centuries ago,” her father used to say, “she would have gone about the country with her sword drawn, rescuing and defending every one in distress. She always wants to fight when she sees people in trouble.”

So she took rather a fancy to fat, slow, little Miss St. John, and kept glancing toward her through the morning. She saw that lessons were no easy matter to her, and that there was no danger of her ever being spoiled by being treated as a show pupil. Her French lesson was a pathetic thing. Her pronunciation made even Monsieur Dufarge smile in spite of himself, and Lavinia and Jessie and the more fortunate girls either giggled or looked at her in wondering disdain. But Sara did not laugh. She tried to look as if she did not hear when Miss St. John called “le bon pain,” “lee bong pang.” She had a fine, hot little temper of her own, and it made her feel rather savage when she heard the titters and saw the poor, stupid, distressed child’s face.

“It isn’t funny, really,” she said between her teeth, as she bent over her book. “They ought not to laugh.”

When lessons were over and the pupils gathered together in groups to talk, Sara looked for Miss St. John, and finding her bundled rather disconsolately in a window-seat, she walked over to her and spoke. She only said the kind of thing little girls always say to each other by way of beginning an acquaintance, but there was something nice and friendly about Sara, and people always felt it.

“What is your name?” she said.

To explain Miss St. John’s amazement one must recall that a new pupil is, for a short time, a somewhat uncertain thing; and of this new pupil the entire school had talked the night before until it fell asleep quite exhausted by excitement and contradictory stories. A new pupil with a carriage and a pony and a maid, and a voyage from India to discuss, was not an ordinary acquaintance.

“My name’s Ermengarde St. John,” she answered.

“Mine is Sara Crewe,” said Sara. “Yours is very pretty. It sounds like a story-book.”

“Do you like it?” fluttered Ermengarde. “I—I like yours.”

Miss St. John’s chief trouble in life was that she had a clever father. Sometimes this seemed to her a dreadful calamity. If you have a father who knows everything, who speaks seven or eight languages, and has thousands of volumes which he has apparently learned by heart, he frequently expects you to be familiar with the contents of your lesson-books at least; and it is not improbable that he will feel you ought to be able to remember a few incidents of history and to write a French exercise. Ermengarde was a severe trial to Mr. St. John. He could not understand how a child of his could be a notably and unmistakably dull creature who never shone in anything.

“Good heavens!” he had said more than once, as he stared at her, “there are times when I think she is as stupid as her Aunt Eliza!”

If her Aunt Eliza had been slow to learn and quick to forget a thing entirely when she had learned it, Ermengarde was strikingly like her. She was the monumental dunce of the school, and it could not be denied.

“She must be made to learn,” her father said to Miss Minchin.

Consequently Ermengarde spent the greater part of her life in disgrace or in tears. She learned things and forgot them; or, if she remembered them, she did not understand them. So it was natural that, having made Sara’s acquaintance, she should sit and stare at her with profound admiration.

“You can speak French, can’t you?” she said respectfully.

Sara got on to the window-seat, which was a big, deep one, and, tucking up her feet, sat with her hands clasped round her knees.

“I can speak it because I have heard it all my life,” she answered. “You could speak it if you had always heard it.”

“Oh, no, I couldn’t,” said Ermengarde. “I never could speak it!”

“Why?” inquired Sara, curiously.

Ermengarde shook her head so that the pigtail wabbled.

“You heard me just now,” she said. “I’m always like that. I can’t say the words. They’re so queer.”

She paused a moment, and then added with a touch of awe in her voice:

“You are clever, aren’t you?”

Sara looked out of the window into the dingy square, where the sparrows were hopping and twittering on the wet, iron railings and the sooty branches of the trees. She reflected a few moments. She had heard it said very often that she was “clever,” and she wondered if she was,—and if she was, how it had happened.

“I don’t know,” she said. “I can’t tell.” Then, seeing a mournful look on the round, chubby face, she gave a little laugh and changed the subject.

“Would you like to see Emily?” she inquired.

“Who is Emily?” Ermengarde asked, just as Miss Minchin had done.

“Come up to my room and see,” said Sara, holding out her hand.

They jumped down from the window-seat together, and went up-stairs.

“Is it true,” Ermengarde whispered, as they went through the hall—“is it true that you have a play-room all to yourself?”

“Yes,” Sara answered. “Papa asked Miss Minchin to let me have one, because—well, it was because when I play I make up stories and tell them to myself, and I don’t like people to hear me. It spoils it if I think people listen.”

They had reached the passage leading to Sara’s room by this time, and Ermengarde stopped short, staring, and quite losing her breath.

“You make up stories!” she gasped. “Can you do that—as well as speak French? Can you?”

Sara looked at her in simple surprise.

“Why, any one can make up things,” she said. “Have you never tried?”

She put her hand warningly on Ermengarde’s.

“Let us go very quietly to the door,” she whispered, “and then I will open it quite suddenly; perhaps we may catch her.”

She was half laughing, but there was a touch of mysterious hope in her eyes which fascinated Ermengarde, though she had not the remotest idea what it meant, or whom it was she wanted to “catch,” or why she wanted to catch her. Whatsoever she meant, Ermengarde was sure it was something delightfully exciting. So, quite thrilled with expectation, she followed her on tiptoe along the passage. They made not the least noise until they reached the door. Then Sara suddenly turned the handle, and threw it wide open. Its opening revealed the room quite neat and quiet, a fire gently burning in the grate, and a wonderful doll sitting in a chair by it, apparently reading a book.

“Oh, she got back to her seat before we could see her!” Sara exclaimed. “Of course they always do. They are as quick as lightning.”

Ermengarde looked from her to the doll and back again.

“Can she—walk?” she asked breathlessly.

“Yes,” answered Sara. “At least I believe she can. At least I pretend I believe she can. And that makes it seem as if it were true. Have you never pretended things?”

“No,” said Ermengarde. “Never. I—tell me about it.”

She was so bewitched by this odd, new companion that she actually stared at Sara instead of at Emily—notwithstanding that Emily was the most attractive doll person she had ever seen.

“Let us sit down,” said Sara, “and I will tell you. It’s so easy that when you begin you can’t stop. You just go on and on doing it always. And it’s beautiful. Emily, you must listen. This is Ermengarde St. John, Emily. Ermengarde, this is Emily. Would you like to hold her?”

“Oh, may I?” said Ermengarde. “May I, really? She is beautiful!” And Emily was put into her arms.

Never in her dull, short life had Miss St. John dreamed of such an hour as the one she spent with the queer new pupil before they heard the lunch-bell ring and were obliged to go down-stairs.

Sara sat upon the hearth-rug and told her strange things. She sat rather huddled up, and her green eyes shone and her cheeks flushed. She told stories of the voyage, and stories of India; but what fascinated Ermengarde the most was her fancy about the dolls who walked and talked, and who could do anything they chose when the human beings were out of the room, but who must keep their powers a secret and so flew back to their places “like lightning” when people returned to the room.

“We couldn’t do it,” said Sara, seriously. “You see, it’s a kind of magic.”

Once, when she was relating the story of the search for Emily, Ermengarde saw her face suddenly change. A cloud seemed to pass over it and put out the light in her shining eyes. She drew her breath in so sharply that it made a funny, sad little sound, and then she shut her lips and held them tightly closed, as if she was determined either to do or not to do something. Ermengarde had an idea that if she had been like any other little girl, she might have suddenly burst out sobbing and crying. But she did not.

“Have you a—a pain?” Ermengarde ventured.

“Yes,” Sara answered, after a moment’s silence. “But it is not in my body.” Then she added something in a low voice which she tried to keep quite steady, and it was this: “Do you love your father more than anything else in all the whole world?”

Ermengarde’s mouth fell open a little. She knew that it would be far from behaving like a respectable child at a select seminary to say that it had never occurred to you that you could love your father, that you would do anything desperate to avoid being left alone in his society for ten minutes. She was, indeed, greatly embarrassed.

“I—I scarcely ever see him,” she stammered. “He is always in the library—reading things.”

“I love mine more than all the world ten times over,” Sara said. “That is what my pain is. He has gone away.”

She put her head quietly down on her little, huddled-up knees, and sat very still for a few minutes.

“She’s going to cry out loud,” thought Ermengarde, fearfully.

But she did not. Her short, black locks tumbled about her ears, and she sat still. Then she spoke without lifting her head.

“I promised him I would bear it,” she said. “And I will. You have to bear things. Think what soldiers bear! Papa is a soldier. If there was a war he would have to bear marching and thirstiness and, perhaps, deep wounds. And he would never say a word—not one word.”

Ermengarde could only gaze at her, but she felt that she was beginning to adore her. She was so wonderful and different from any one else.

Presently, she lifted her face and shook back her black locks, with a queer little smile.

“If I go on talking and talking,” she said, “and telling you things about pretending, I shall bear it better. You don’t forget, but you bear it better.”

Ermengarde did not know why a lump came into her throat and her eyes felt as if tears were in them.

“Lavinia and Jessie are ‘best friends,’” she said rather huskily. “I wish we could be ‘best friends.’ Would you have me for yours? You’re clever, and I’m the stupidest child in the school, but I—oh, I do so like you!”

“I’m glad of that,” said Sara. “It makes you thankful when you are liked. Yes. We will be friends. And I’ll tell you what”—a sudden gleam lighting her face—“I can help you with your French lessons.”

CHAPTER IV

LOTTIE

If Sara had been a different kind of child, the life she led at Miss Minchin’s Select Seminary for the next ten years would not have been at all good for her. She was treated more as if she were a distinguished guest at the establishment than as if she were a mere little girl. If she had been a self-opinionated, domineering child, she might have become disagreeable enough to be unbearable through being so much indulged and flattered. If she had been an indolent child, she would have learned nothing. Privately Miss Minchin disliked her, but she was far too worldly a woman to do or say anything which might make such a desirable pupil wish to leave her school. She knew quite well that if Sara wrote to her papa to tell him she was uncomfortable or unhappy, Captain Crewe would remove her at once. Miss Minchin’s opinion was that if a child were continually praised and never forbidden to do what she liked, she would be sure to be fond of the place where she was so treated. Accordingly, Sara was praised for her quickness at her lessons, for her good manners, for her amiability to her fellow-pupils, for her generosity if she gave sixpence to a beggar out of her full little purse; the simplest thing she did was treated as if it were a virtue, and if she had not had a disposition and a clever little brain, she might have been a very self-satisfied young person. But the clever little brain told her a great many sensible and true things about herself and her circumstances, and now and then she talked these things over to Ermengarde as time went on.

“Things happen to people by accident,” she used to say. “A lot of nice accidents have happened to me. It just happened that I always liked lessons and books, and could remember things when I learned them. It just happened that I was born with a father who was beautiful and nice and clever, and could give me everything I liked. Perhaps I have not really a good temper at all, but if you have everything you want and every one is kind to you, how can you help but be good-tempered? I don’t know”—looking quite serious—“how I shall ever find out whether I am really a nice child or a horrid one. Perhaps I’m a hideous child, and no one will ever know, just because I never have any trials.”

“Lavinia has no trials,” said Ermengarde, stolidly, “and she is horrid enough.”

Sara rubbed the end of her little nose reflectively, as she thought the matter over.

“Well,” she said at last, “perhaps—perhaps that is because Lavinia is growing.”

This was the result of a charitable recollection of having heard Miss Amelia say that Lavinia was growing so fast that she believed it affected her health and temper.

Lavinia, in fact, was spiteful. She was inordinately jealous of Sara. Until the new pupil’s arrival, she had felt herself the leader in the school. She had led because she was capable of making herself extremely disagreeable if the others did not follow her. She domineered over the little children, and assumed grand airs with those big enough to be her companions. She was rather pretty, and had been the best-dressed pupil in the procession when the Select Seminary walked out two by two, until Sara’s velvet coats and sable muffs appeared, combined with drooping ostrich feathers, and were led by Miss Minchin at the head of the line. This, at the beginning, had been bitter enough; but as time went on it became apparent that Sara was a leader, too, and not because she could make herself disagreeable, but because she never did.

“There’s one thing about Sara Crewe,” Jessie had enraged her “best friend” by saying honestly,—“she’s never ‘grand’ about herself the least bit, and you know she might be, Lavvie. I believe I couldn’t help being—just a little—if I had so many fine things and was made such a fuss over. It’s disgusting, the way Miss Minchin shows her off when parents come.”

“‘Dear Sara must come into the drawing-room and talk to Mrs. Musgrave about India,’” mimicked Lavinia, in her most highly flavored imitation of Miss Minchin. “‘Dear Sara must speak French to Lady Pitkin. Her accent is so perfect.’ She didn’t learn her French at the Seminary, at any rate. And there’s nothing so clever in her knowing it. She says herself she didn’t learn it at all. She just picked it up, because she always heard her papa speak it. And, as to her papa, there is nothing so grand in being an Indian officer.”

“Well,” said Jessie, slowly, “he’s killed tigers. He killed the one in the skin Sara has in her room. That’s why she likes it so. She lies on it and strokes its head, and talks to it as if it was a cat.”

“She’s always doing something silly,” snapped Lavinia. “My mamma says that way of hers of pretending things is silly. She says she will grow up eccentric.”

It was quite true that Sara was never “grand.” She was a friendly little soul, and shared her privileges and belongings with a free hand. The little ones, who were accustomed to being disdained and ordered out of the way by mature ladies aged ten and twelve, were never made to cry by this most envied of them all. She was a motherly young person, and when people fell down and scraped their knees, she ran and helped them up and patted them, or found in her pocket a bonbon or some other article of a soothing nature. She never pushed them out of her way or alluded to their years as a humiliation and a blot upon their small characters.

“If you are four you are four,” she said severely to Lavinia on an occasion of her having—it must be confessed—slapped Lottie and called her “a brat”; “but you will be five next year, and six the year after that. And,” opening large, convicting eyes, “it only takes sixteen years to make you twenty.”

“Dear me!” said Lavinia; “how we can calculate!” In fact, it was not to be denied that sixteen and four made twenty,—and twenty was an age the most daring were scarcely bold enough to dream of.

So the younger children adored Sara. More than once she had been known to have a tea-party, made up of these despised ones, in her own room. And Emily had been played with, and Emily’s own tea-service used—the one with cups which held quite a lot of much-sweetened weak tea and had blue flowers on them. No one had seen such a very real doll’s tea-set before. From that afternoon Sara was regarded as a goddess and a queen by the entire alphabet class.

Lottie Legh worshipped her to such an extent that if Sara had not been a motherly person, she would have found her tiresome. Lottie had been sent to school by a rather flighty young papa who could not imagine what else to do with her. Her young mother had died, and as the child had been treated like a favorite doll or a very spoiled pet monkey or lap-dog ever since the first hour of her life, she was a very appalling little creature. When she wanted anything or did not want anything she wept and howled; and, as she always wanted the things she could not have, and did not want the things that were best for her, her shrill little voice was usually to be heard uplifted in wails in one part of the house or another.

Her strongest weapon was that in some mysterious way she had found out that a very small girl who had lost her mother was a person who ought to be pitied and made much of. She had probably heard some grown-up people talking her over in the early days, after her mother’s death. So it became her habit to make great use of this knowledge.

The first time Sara took her in charge was one morning when, on passing a sitting-room, she heard both Miss Minchin and Miss Amelia trying to suppress the angry wails of some child who, evidently, refused to be silenced. She refused so strenuously indeed that Miss Minchin was obliged to almost shout—in a stately and severe manner—to make herself heard.

“What is she crying for?” she almost yelled.

“Oh—oh—oh!” Sara heard; “I haven’t got any mam—ma-a!”

“Oh, Lottie!” screamed Miss Amelia. “Do stop, darling! Don’t cry! Please don’t!”

“Oh! oh! oh!” Lottie howled tempestuously. “Haven’t—got—any—mam—ma-a!”

“She ought to be whipped,” Miss Minchin proclaimed. “You shall be whipped, you naughty child!”

Lottie wailed more loudly than ever. Miss Amelia began to cry. Miss Minchin’s voice rose until it almost thundered, then suddenly she sprang up from her chair in impotent indignation and flounced out of the room, leaving Miss Amelia to arrange the matter.

Sara had paused in the hall, wondering if she ought to go into the room, because she had recently begun a friendly acquaintance with Lottie and might be able to quiet her. When Miss Minchin came out and saw her, she looked rather annoyed. She realized that her voice, as heard from inside the room, could not have sounded either dignified or amiable.

“Oh, Sara!” she exclaimed, endeavoring to produce a suitable smile.

“I stopped,” explained Sara, “because I knew it was Lottie,—and I thought, perhaps—just perhaps, I could make her be quiet. May I try, Miss Minchin?”

“If you can. You are a clever child,” answered Miss Minchin, drawing in her mouth sharply. Then, seeing that Sara looked slightly chilled by her asperity, she changed her manner. “But you are clever in everything,” she said in her approving way. “I dare say you can manage her. Go in.” And she left her.

When Sara entered the room, Lottie was lying upon the floor, screaming and kicking her small fat legs violently, and Miss Amelia was bending over her in consternation and despair, looking quite red and damp with heat. Lottie had always found, when in her own nursery at home, that kicking and screaming would always be quieted by any means she insisted on. Poor plump Miss Amelia was trying first one method, and then another.

“Poor darling!” she said one moment; “I know you haven’t any mamma, poor—” Then in quite another tone: “If you don’t stop, Lottie, I will shake you. Poor little angel! There—there! You wicked, bad, detestable child, I will smack you! I will!”

Sara went to them quietly. She did not know at all what she was going to do, but she had a vague inward conviction that it would be better not to say such different kinds of things quite so helplessly and excitedly.

“Miss Amelia,” she said in a low voice, “Miss Minchin says I may try to make her stop—may I?”

Miss Amelia turned and looked at her hopelessly. “Oh, do you think you can?” she gasped.

“I don’t know whether I can,” answered Sara, still in her half-whisper; “but I will try.”

Miss Amelia stumbled up from her knees with a heavy sigh, and Lottie’s fat little legs kicked as hard as ever.

“If you will steal out of the room,” said Sara, “I will stay with her.”

“Oh, Sara!” almost whimpered Miss Amelia. “We never had such a dreadful child before. I don’t believe we can keep her.”

But she crept out of the room, and was very much relieved to find an excuse for doing it.

Sara stood by the howling, furious child for a few moments, and looked down at her without saying anything. Then she sat down flat on the floor beside her and waited. Except for Lottie’s angry screams, the room was quite quiet. This was a new state of affairs for little Miss Legh, who was accustomed, when she screamed, to hear other people protest and implore and command and coax by turns. To lie and kick and shriek, and find the only person near you not seeming to mind in the least, attracted her attention. She opened her tight-shut streaming eyes to see who this person was. And it was only another little girl. But it was the one who owned Emily and all the nice things. And she was looking at her steadily and as if she was merely thinking. Having paused for a few seconds to find this out, Lottie thought she must begin again, but the quiet of the room and of Sara’s odd, interested face made her first howl rather half-hearted.

“I—haven’t—any—ma—ma—ma-a!” she announced; but her voice was not so strong.

Sara looked at her still more steadily, but with a sort of understanding in her eyes.

“Neither have I,” she said.

This was so unexpected that it was astounding. Lottie actually dropped her legs, gave a wriggle, and lay and stared. A new idea will stop a crying child when nothing else will. Also it was true that while Lottie disliked Miss Minchin, who was cross, and Miss Amelia, who was foolishly indulgent, she rather liked Sara, little as she knew her. She did not want to give up her grievance, but her thoughts were distracted from it, so she wriggled again, and, after a sulky sob, said:

“Where is she?”

Sara paused a moment. Because she had been told that her mamma was in heaven, she had thought a great deal about the matter, and her thoughts had not been quite like those of other people.

“She went to heaven,” she said. “But I am sure she comes out sometimes to see me—though I don’t see her. So does yours. Perhaps they can both see us now. Perhaps they are both in this room.”

Lottie sat bolt upright, and looked about her. She was a pretty, little, curly-headed creature, and her round eyes were like wet forget-me-nots. If her mamma had seen her during the last half-hour, she might not have thought her the kind of child who ought to be related to an angel.

Sara went on talking. Perhaps some people might think that what she said was rather like a fairy story, but it was all so real to her own imagination that Lottie began to listen in spite of herself. She had been told that her mamma had wings and a crown, and she had been shown pictures of ladies in beautiful white night-gowns, who were said to be angels. But Sara seemed to be telling a real story about a lovely country where real people were.

“There are fields and fields of flowers,” she said, forgetting herself, as usual, when she began, and talking rather as if she were in a dream—“fields and fields of lilies—and when the soft wind blows over them it wafts the scent of them into the air—and everybody always breathes it, because the soft wind is always blowing. And little children run about in the lily-fields and gather armsful of them, and laugh and make little wreaths. And the streets are shining. And no one is ever tired, however far they walk. They can float anywhere they like. And there are walls made of pearl and gold all round the city, but they are low enough for the people to go and lean on them, and look down on to the earth and smile, and send beautiful messages.”

Whatsoever story she had begun to tell, Lottie would, no doubt, have stopped crying, and been fascinated into listening; but there was no denying that this story was prettier than most others. She dragged herself close to Sara, and drank in every word until the end came—far too soon. When it did come, she was so sorry that she put up her lip ominously.

“I want to go there,” she cried. “I—haven’t any mamma in this school.”

Sara saw the danger-signal, and came out of her dream. She took hold of the chubby hand and pulled her close to her side with a coaxing little laugh.

“I will be your mamma,” she said. “We will play that you are my little girl. And Emily shall be your sister.”

Lottie’s dimples all began to show themselves.

“Shall she?” she said.

“Yes,” answered Sara, jumping to her feet. “Let us go and tell her. And then I will wash your face and brush your hair.”

To which Lottie agreed quite cheerfully, and trotted out of the room and up-stairs with her, without seeming even to remember that the whole of the last hour’s tragedy had been caused by the fact that she had refused to be washed and brushed for lunch and Miss Minchin had been called in to use her majestic authority.

And from that time Sara was an adopted mother.

CHAPTER V

BECKY

Of course the greatest power Sara possessed and the one which gained her even more followers than her luxuries and the fact that she was “the show pupil,” the power that Lavinia and certain other girls were most envious of, and at the same time most fascinated by in spite of themselves, was her power of telling stories and of making everything she talked about seem like a story, whether it was one or not.

Any one who has been at school with a teller of stories knows what the wonder means—how he or she is followed about and besought in a whisper to relate romances; how groups gather round and hang on the outskirts of the favored party in the hope of being allowed to join it and listen. Sara not only could tell stories, but she adored telling them. When she sat or stood in the midst of a circle and began to invent wonderful things, her green eyes grew big and shining, her cheeks flushed, and, without knowing that she was doing it, she began to act and made what she told lovely or alarming by the raising or dropping of her voice, the bend and sway of her slim body, and the dramatic movement of her hands. She forgot that she was talking to listening children; she saw and lived with the fairy folk, or the kings and queens and beautiful ladies, whose adventures she was narrating. Sometimes when she had finished her story, she was quite out of breath with excitement, and would lay her hand on her thin, little, quick-rising chest, and half laugh as if at herself.

“When I am telling it,” she would say, “it doesn’t seem as if it was only made up. It seems more real than you are—more real than the school-room. I feel as if I were all the people in the story—one after the other. It is queer.”

She had been at Miss Minchin’s school about two years when, one foggy winter’s afternoon, as she was getting out of her carriage, comfortably wrapped up in her warmest velvets and furs and looking very much grander than she knew, she caught sight, as she crossed the pavement, of a dingy little figure standing on the area steps, and stretching its neck so that its wide-open eyes might peer at her through the railings. Something in the eagerness and timidity of the smudgy face made her look at it, and when she looked she smiled because it was her way to smile at people.

But the owner of the smudgy face and the wide-open eyes evidently was afraid that she ought not to have been caught looking at pupils of importance. She dodged out of sight like a Jack-in-the-box and scurried back into the kitchen, disappearing so suddenly that if she had not been such a poor, little forlorn thing, Sara would have laughed in spite of herself. That very evening, as Sara was sitting in the midst of a group of listeners in a corner of the school-room telling one of her stories, the very same figure timidly entered the room, carrying a coal-box much too heavy for her, and knelt down upon the hearth-rug to replenish the fire and sweep up the ashes.

She was cleaner than she had been when she peeped through the area railings, but she looked just as frightened. She was evidently afraid to look at the children or seem to be listening. She put on pieces of coal cautiously with her fingers so that she might make no disturbing noise, and she swept about the fire-irons very softly. But Sara saw in two minutes that she was deeply interested in what was going on, and that she was doing her work slowly in the hope of catching a word here and there. And realizing this, she raised her voice and spoke more clearly.

“The Mermaids swam softly about in the crystal-green water, and dragged after them a fishing-net woven of deep-sea pearls,” she said. “The Princess sat on the white rock and watched them.”

It was a wonderful story about a princess who was loved by a Prince Merman, and went to live with him in shining caves under the sea.

The small drudge before the grate swept the hearth once and then swept it again. Having done it twice, she did it three times; and, as she was doing it the third time, the sound of the story so lured her to listen that she fell under the spell and actually forgot that she had no right to listen at all, and also forgot everything else. She sat down upon her heels as she knelt on the hearth-rug, and the brush hung idly in her fingers. The voice of the story-teller went on and drew her with it into winding grottos under the sea, glowing with soft, clear blue light, and paved with pure golden sands. Strange sea flowers and grasses waved about her, and far away faint singing and music echoed.

The hearth-brush fell from the work-roughened hand, and Lavinia Herbert looked round.

“That girl has been listening,” she said.

The culprit snatched up her brush, and scrambled to her feet. She caught at the coal-box and simply scuttled out of the room like a frightened rabbit.

Sara felt rather hot-tempered.

“I knew she was listening,” she said. “Why shouldn’t she?”

Lavinia tossed her head with great elegance.

“Well,” she remarked, “I do not know whether your mamma would like you to tell stories to servant girls, but I know my mamma wouldn’t like me to do it.”

“My mamma!” said Sara, looking odd. “I don’t believe she would mind in the least. She knows that stories belong to everybody.”

“I thought,” retorted Lavinia, in severe recollection, “that your mamma was dead. How can she know things?”

“Do you think she doesn’t know things?” said Sara, in her stern little voice. Sometimes she had a rather stern little voice.

“Sara’s mamma knows everything,” piped in Lottie. “So does my mamma—’cept Sara is my mamma at Miss Minchin’s—my other one knows everything. The streets are shining, and there are fields and fields of lilies, and everybody gathers them. Sara tells me when she puts me to bed.”

“You wicked thing,” said Lavinia, turning on Sara; “making fairy stories about heaven.”

“There are much more splendid stories in Revelation,” returned Sara. “Just look and see! How do you know mine are fairy stories? But I can tell you”—with a fine bit of unheavenly temper—“you will never find out whether they are or not if you’re not kinder to people than you are now. Come along, Lottie.” And she marched out of the room, rather hoping that she might see the little servant again somewhere, but she found no trace of her when she got into the hall.

“Who is that little girl who makes the fires?” she asked Mariette that night.

Mariette broke forth into a flow of description.

Ah, indeed, Mademoiselle Sara might well ask. She was a forlorn little thing who had just taken the place of scullery-maid—though, as to being scullery-maid, she was everything else besides. She blacked boots and grates, and carried heavy coal-scuttles up and down stairs, and scrubbed floors and cleaned windows, and was ordered about by everybody. She was fourteen years old, but was so stunted in growth that she looked about twelve. In truth, Mariette was sorry for her. She was so timid that if one chanced to speak to her it appeared as if her poor, frightened eyes would jump out of her head.

“What is her name?” asked Sara, who had sat by the table, with her chin on her hands, as she listened absorbedly to the recital.

Her name was Becky. Mariette heard every one below-stairs calling, “Becky, do this,” and “Becky, do that,” every five minutes in the day.

Sara sat and looked into the fire, reflecting on Becky for some time after Mariette left her. She made up a story of which Becky was the ill-used heroine. She thought she looked as if she had never had quite enough to eat. Her very eyes were hungry. She hoped she should see her again, but though she caught sight of her carrying things up or down stairs on several occasions, she always seemed in such a hurry and so afraid of being seen that it was impossible to speak to her.

But a few weeks later, on another foggy afternoon, when she entered her sitting-room she found herself confronting a rather pathetic picture. In her own special and pet easy-chair before the bright fire, Becky—with a coal smudge on her nose and several on her apron, with her poor little cap hanging half off her head, and an empty coal-box on the floor near her—sat fast asleep, tired out beyond even the endurance of her hard-working young body. She had been sent up to put the bedrooms in order for the evening. There were a great many of them, and she had been running about all day. Sara’s rooms she had saved until the last. They were not like the other rooms, which were plain and bare. Ordinary pupils were expected to be satisfied with mere necessaries. Sara’s comfortable sitting-room seemed a bower of luxury to the scullery-maid, though it was, in fact, merely a nice, bright little room. But there were pictures and books in it, and curious things from India; there was a sofa and the low, soft chair; Emily sat in a chair of her own, with the air of a presiding goddess, and there was always a glowing fire and a polished grate. Becky saved it until the end of her afternoon’s work, because it rested her to go into it, and she always hoped to snatch a few minutes to sit down in the soft chair and look about her, and think about the wonderful good fortune of the child who owned such surroundings and who went out on the cold days in beautiful hats and coats one tried to catch a glimpse of through the area railing.

On this afternoon, when she had sat down, the sensation of relief to her short, aching legs had been so wonderful and delightful that it had seemed to soothe her whole body, and the glow of warmth and comfort from the fire had crept over her like a spell, until, as she looked at the red coals, a tired, slow smile stole over her smudged face, her head nodded forward without her being aware of it, her eyes drooped, and she fell fast asleep. She had really been only about ten minutes in the room when Sara entered, but she was in as deep a sleep as if she had been, like the Sleeping Beauty, slumbering for a hundred years. But she did not look—poor Becky!—like a Sleeping Beauty at all. She looked only like an ugly, stunted, worn-out little scullery drudge.

Sara seemed as much unlike her as if she were a creature from another world.

On this particular afternoon she had been taking her dancing-lesson, and the afternoon on which the dancing-master appeared was rather a grand occasion at the seminary, though it occurred every week. The pupils were attired in their prettiest frocks, and as Sara danced particularly well, she was very much brought forward, and Mariette was requested to make her as diaphanous and fine as possible.

Today a frock the color of a rose had been put on her, and Mariette had bought some real buds and made her a wreath to wear on her black locks. She had been learning a new, delightful dance in which she had been skimming and flying about the room, like a large rose-colored butterfly, and the enjoyment and exercise had brought a brilliant, happy glow into her face.

When she entered the room, she floated in with a few of the butterfly steps,—and there sat Becky, nodding her cap sideways off her head.

“Oh!” cried Sara, softly, when she saw her. “That poor thing!”

It did not occur to her to feel cross at finding her pet chair occupied by the small, dingy figure. To tell the truth, she was quite glad to find it there. When the ill-used heroine of her story wakened, she could talk to her. She crept toward her quietly, and stood looking at her. Becky gave a little snore.

“I wish she’d waken herself,” Sara said. “I don’t like to waken her. But Miss Minchin would be cross if she found out. I’ll just wait a few minutes.”

She took a seat on the edge of the table, and sat swinging her slim, rose-colored legs, and wondering what it would be best to do. Miss Amelia might come in at any moment, and if she did, Becky would be sure to be scolded.

“But she is so tired,” she thought. “She is so tired!”

A piece of flaming coal ended her perplexity for her that very moment. It broke off from a large lump and fell on to the fender. Becky started, and opened her eyes with a frightened gasp. She did not know she had fallen asleep. She had only sat down for one moment and felt the beautiful glow—and here she found herself staring in wild alarm at the wonderful pupil, who sat perched quite near her, like a rose-colored fairy, with interested eyes.

She sprang up and clutched at her cap. She felt it dangling over her ear, and tried wildly to put it straight. Oh, she had got herself into trouble now with a vengeance! To have impudently fallen asleep on such a young lady’s chair! She would be turned out of doors without wages.

She made a sound like a big breathless sob.

“Oh, miss! Oh, miss!” she stuttered. “I arst yer pardon, miss! Oh, I do, miss!”

Sara jumped down, and came quite close to her.

“Don’t be frightened,” she said, quite as if she had been speaking to a little girl like herself. “It doesn’t matter the least bit.”

“I didn’t go to do it, miss,” protested Becky. “It was the warm fire—an’ me bein’ so tired. It—it wasn’t imperence!”

Sara broke into a friendly little laugh, and put her hand on her shoulder.

“You were tired,” she said; “you could not help it. You are not really awake yet.”

How poor Becky stared at her! In fact, she had never heard such a nice, friendly sound in any one’s voice before. She was used to being ordered about and scolded, and having her ears boxed. And this one—in her rose-colored dancing afternoon splendor—was looking at her as if she were not a culprit at all—as if she had a right to be tired—even to fall asleep! The touch of the soft, slim little paw on her shoulder was the most amazing thing she had ever known.

“Ain’t—ain’t yer angry, miss?” she gasped. “Ain’t yer goin’ to tell the missus?”

“No,” cried out Sara. “Of course I’m not.”

The woful fright in the coal-smutted face made her suddenly so sorry that she could scarcely bear it. One of her queer thoughts rushed into her mind. She put her hand against Becky’s cheek.

“Why,” she said, “we are just the same—I am only a little girl like you. It’s just an accident that I am not you, and you are not me!”

Becky did not understand in the least. Her mind could not grasp such amazing thoughts, and “an accident” meant to her a calamity in which some one was run over or fell off a ladder and was carried to “the ’orspital.”

“A’ accident, miss,” she fluttered respectfully. “Is it?”

“Yes,” Sara answered, and she looked at her dreamily for a moment. But the next she spoke in a different tone. She realized that Becky did not know what she meant.

“Have you done your work?” she asked. “Dare you stay here a few minutes?”

Becky lost her breath again.

“Here, miss? Me?”

Sara ran to the door, opened it, and looked out and listened.

“No one is anywhere about,” she explained. “If your bedrooms are finished, perhaps you might stay a tiny while. I thought—perhaps—you might like a piece of cake.”

The next ten minutes seemed to Becky like a sort of delirium. Sara opened a cupboard, and gave her a thick slice of cake. She seemed to rejoice when it was devoured in hungry bites. She talked and asked questions, and laughed until Becky’s fears actually began to calm themselves, and she once or twice gathered boldness enough to ask a question or so herself, daring as she felt it to be.

“Is that—” she ventured, looking longingly at the rose-colored frock. And she asked it almost in a whisper. “Is that there your best?”

“It is one of my dancing-frocks,” answered Sara. “I like it, don’t you?”

For a few seconds Becky was almost speechless with admiration. Then she said in an awed voice:

“Onct I see a princess. I was standin’ in the street with the crowd outside Covin’ Garden, watchin’ the swells go inter the operer. An’ there was one every one stared at most. They ses to each other, ‘That’s the princess.’ She was a growed-up young lady, but she was pink all over—gownd an’ cloak, an’ flowers an’ all. I called her to mind the minnit I see you, sittin’ there on the table, miss. You looked like her.”

“I’ve often thought,” said Sara, in her reflecting voice, “that I should like to be a princess; I wonder what it feels like. I believe I will begin pretending I am one.”

Becky stared at her admiringly, and, as before, did not understand her in the least. She watched her with a sort of adoration. Very soon Sara left her reflections and turned to her with a new question.

“Becky,” she said, “weren’t you listening to that story?”

“Yes, miss,” confessed Becky, a little alarmed again. “I knowed I hadn’t orter, but it was that beautiful I—I couldn’t help it.”

“I liked you to listen to it,” said Sara. “If you tell stories, you like nothing so much as to tell them to people who want to listen. I don’t know why it is. Would you like to hear the rest?”

Becky lost her breath again.

“Me hear it?” she cried. “Like as if I was a pupil, miss! All about the Prince—and the little white Merbabies swimming about laughing—with stars in their hair?”

Sara nodded.

“You haven’t time to hear it now, I’m afraid,” she said; “but if you will tell me just what time you come to do my rooms, I will try to be here and tell you a bit of it every day until it is finished. It’s a lovely long one—and I’m always putting new bits to it.”

“Then,” breathed Becky, devoutly, “I wouldn’t mind how heavy the coal-boxes was—or what the cook done to me, if—if I might have that to think of.”

“You may,” said Sara. “I’ll tell it all to you.”

When Becky went down-stairs, she was not the same Becky who had staggered up, loaded down by the weight of the coal-scuttle. She had an extra piece of cake in her pocket, and she had been fed and warmed, but not only by cake and fire. Something else had warmed and fed her, and the something else was Sara.

When she was gone Sara sat on her favorite perch on the end of her table. Her feet were on a chair, her elbows on her knees, and her chin in her hands.

“If I was a princess—a real princess,” she murmured, “I could scatter largess to the populace. But even if I am only a pretend princess, I can invent little things to do for people. Things like this. She was just as happy as if it was largess. I’ll pretend that to do things people like is scattering largess. I’ve scattered largess.”

CHAPTER VI

THE DIAMOND-MINES

Not very long after this a very exciting thing happened. Not only Sara, but the entire school, found it exciting, and made it the chief subject of conversation for weeks after it occurred. In one of his letters Captain Crewe told a most interesting story. A friend who had been at school with him when he was a boy had unexpectedly come to see him in India. He was the owner of a large tract of land upon which diamonds had been found, and he was engaged in developing the mines. If all went as was confidently expected, he would become possessed of such wealth as it made one dizzy to think of; and because he was fond of the friend of his school-days, he had given him an opportunity to share in this enormous fortune by becoming a partner in his scheme. This, at least, was what Sara gathered from his letters. It is true that any other business scheme, however magnificent, would have had but small attraction for her or for the school-room; but “diamond-mines” sounded so like the “Arabian Nights” that no one could be indifferent. Sara thought them enchanting, and painted pictures, for Ermengarde and Lottie, of labyrinthine passages in the bowels of the earth, where sparkling stones studded the walls and roofs and ceilings, and strange, dark men dug them out with heavy picks. Ermengarde delighted in the story, and Lottie insisted on its being retold to her every evening. Lavinia was very spiteful about it, and told Jessie that she didn’t believe such things as diamond-mines existed.

“My mamma has a diamond ring which cost forty pounds,” she said. “And it is not a big one, either. If there were mines full of diamonds, people would be so rich it would be ridiculous.”

“Perhaps Sara will be so rich that she will be ridiculous,” giggled Jessie.

“She’s ridiculous without being rich,” Lavinia sniffed.

“I believe you hate her,” said Jessie.

“No, I don’t,” snapped Lavinia. “But I don’t believe in mines full of diamonds.”

“Well, people have to get them from somewhere,” said Jessie. “Lavinia,”—with a new giggle,—“what do you think Gertrude says?”

“I don’t know, I’m sure; and I don’t care if it’s something more about that everlasting Sara.”

“Well, it is. One of her ‘pretends’ is that she is a princess. She plays it all the time—even in school. She says it makes her learn her lessons better. She wants Ermengarde to be one, too, but Ermengarde says she is too fat.”

“She is too fat,” said Lavinia. “And Sara is too thin.”

Naturally, Jessie giggled again.

“She says it has nothing to do with what you look like, or what you have. It has only to do with what you think of, and what you do.”

“I suppose she thinks she could be a princess if she was a beggar,” said Lavinia. “Let us begin to call her Your Royal Highness.”

Lessons for the day were over, and they were sitting before the school-room fire, enjoying the time they liked best. It was the time when Miss Minchin and Miss Amelia were taking their tea in the sitting-room sacred to themselves. At this hour a great deal of talking was done, and a great many secrets changed hands, particularly if the younger pupils behaved themselves well, and did not squabble or run about noisily, which it must be confessed they usually did. When they made an uproar the older girls usually interfered with scoldings and shakes. They were expected to keep order, and there was danger that if they did not, Miss Minchin or Miss Amelia would appear and put an end to festivities. Even as Lavinia spoke the door opened and Sara entered with Lottie, whose habit was to trot everywhere after her like a little dog.

“There she is, with that horrid child!” exclaimed Lavinia, in a whisper. “If she’s so fond of her, why doesn’t she keep her in her own room? She will begin howling about something in five minutes.”

It happened that Lottie had been seized with a sudden desire to play in the school-room, and had begged her adopted parent to come with her. She joined a group of little ones who were playing in a corner. Sara curled herself up in the window-seat, opened a book, and began to read. It was a book about the French Revolution, and she was soon lost in a harrowing picture of the prisoners in the Bastille—men who had spent so many years in dungeons that when they were dragged out by those who rescued them, their long, gray hair and beards almost hid their faces, and they had forgotten that an outside world existed at all, and were like beings in a dream.

She was so far away from the school-room that it was not agreeable to be dragged back suddenly by a howl from Lottie. Never did she find anything so difficult as to keep herself from losing her temper when she was suddenly disturbed while absorbed in a book. People who are fond of books know the feeling of irritation which sweeps over them at such a moment. The temptation to be unreasonable and snappish is one not easy to manage.

“It makes me feel as if some one had hit me,” Sara had told Ermengarde once in confidence. “And as if I want to hit back. I have to remember things quickly to keep from saying something ill-tempered.”

She had to remember things quickly when she laid her book on the window-seat and jumped down from her comfortable corner.

Lottie had been sliding across the school-room floor, and, having first irritated Lavinia and Jessie by making a noise, had ended by falling down and hurting her fat knee. She was screaming and dancing up and down in the midst of a group of friends and enemies, who were alternately coaxing and scolding her.

“Stop this minute, you cry-baby! Stop this minute!” Lavinia commanded.

“I’m not a cry-baby—I’m not!” wailed Lottie. “Sara, Sa—ra!”

“If she doesn’t stop, Miss Minchin will hear her,” cried Jessie. “Lottie darling, I’ll give you a penny!”

“I don’t want your penny,” sobbed Lottie; and she looked down at the fat knee, and, seeing a drop of blood on it, burst forth again.

Sara flew across the room and, kneeling down, put her arms round her.

“Now, Lottie,” she said. “Now, Lottie, you promised Sara.”

“She said I was a cry-baby,” wept Lottie.

Sara patted her, but spoke in the steady voice Lottie knew.

“But if you cry, you will be one, Lottie pet. You promised.”

Lottie remembered that she had promised, but she preferred to lift up her voice.

“I haven’t any mamma,” she proclaimed. “I haven’t—a bit—of mamma.”

“Yes, you have,” said Sara, cheerfully. “Have you forgotten? Don’t you know that Sara is your mamma? Don’t you want Sara for your mamma?”

Lottie cuddled up to her with a consoled sniff.

“Come and sit in the window-seat with me,” Sara went on, “and I’ll whisper a story to you.”

“Will you?” whimpered Lottie. “Will you—tell me—about the diamond-mines?”

“The diamond-mines?” broke out Lavinia. “Nasty, little spoiled thing, I should like to slap her!”

Sara got up quickly on her feet. It must be remembered that she had been very deeply absorbed in the book about the Bastille, and she had had to recall several things rapidly when she realized that she must go and take care of her adopted child. She was not an angel, and she was not fond of Lavinia.

“Well,” she said, with some fire, “I should like to slap you,—but I don’t want to slap you!” restraining herself. “At least I both want to slap you—and I should like to slap you,—but I won’t slap you. We are not little gutter children. We are both old enough to know better.”

Here was Lavinia’s opportunity.

“Ah, yes, your royal highness,” she said. “We are princesses, I believe. At least one of us is. The school ought to be very fashionable now Miss Minchin has a princess for a pupil.”

Sara started toward her. She looked as if she were going to box her ears. Perhaps she was. Her trick of pretending things was the joy of her life. She never spoke of it to girls she was not fond of. Her new “pretend” about being a princess was very near to her heart, and she was shy and sensitive about it. She had meant it to be rather a secret, and here was Lavinia deriding it before nearly all the school. She felt the blood rush up into her face and tingle in her ears. She only just saved herself. If you were a princess, you did not fly into rages. Her hand dropped, and she stood quite still a moment. When she spoke it was in a quiet, steady voice; she held her head up, and everybody listened to her.

“It’s true,” she said. “Sometimes I do pretend I am a princess. I pretend I am a princess, so that I can try and behave like one.”

Lavinia could not think of exactly the right thing to say. Several times she had found that she could not think of a satisfactory reply when she was dealing with Sara. The reason of this was that, somehow, the rest always seemed to be vaguely in sympathy with her opponent. She saw now that they were pricking up their ears interestedly. The truth was, they liked princesses, and they all hoped they might hear something more definite about this one, and drew nearer Sara accordingly.

Lavinia could only invent one remark, and it fell rather flat.

“Dear me!” she said; “I hope, when you ascend the throne, you won’t forget us.”

“I won’t,” said Sara, and she did not utter another word, but stood quite still, and stared at her steadily as she saw her take Jessie’s arm and turn away.

After this, the girls who were jealous of her used to speak of her as “Princess Sara” whenever they wished to be particularly disdainful, and those who were fond of her gave her the name among themselves as a term of affection. No one called her “princess” instead of “Sara,” but her adorers were much pleased with the picturesqueness and grandeur of the title, and Miss Minchin, hearing of it, mentioned it more than once to visiting parents, feeling that it rather suggested a sort of royal boarding-school.

To Becky it seemed the most appropriate thing in the world. The acquaintance begun on the foggy afternoon when she had jumped up terrified from her sleep in the comfortable chair, had ripened and grown, though it must be confessed that Miss Minchin and Miss Amelia knew very little about it. They were aware that Sara was “kind” to the scullery-maid, but they knew nothing of certain delightful moments snatched perilously when, the up-stairs rooms being set in order with lightning rapidity, Sara’s sitting-room was reached, and the heavy coal-box set down with a sigh of joy. At such times stories were told by instalments, things of a satisfying nature were either produced and eaten or hastily tucked into pockets to be disposed of at night, when Becky went up-stairs to her attic to bed.

“But I has to eat ’em careful, miss,” she said once; “’cos if I leaves crumbs the rats come out to get ’em.”

“Rats!” exclaimed Sara, in horror. “Are there rats there?”

“Lots of ’em, miss,” Becky answered in quite a matter-of-fact manner. “There mostly is rats an’ mice in attics. You gets used to the noise they makes scuttling about. I’ve got so I don’t mind ’em s’ long as they don’t run over my piller.”

“Ugh!” said Sara.

“You gets used to anythin’ after a bit,” said Becky. “You have to, miss, if you’re born a scullery-maid. I’d rather have rats than cockroaches.”

“So would I,” said Sara; “I suppose you might make friends with a rat in time, but I don’t believe I should like to make friends with a cockroach.”

Sometimes Becky did not dare to spend more than a few minutes in the bright, warm room, and when this was the case perhaps only a few words could be exchanged, and a small purchase slipped into the old-fashioned pocket Becky carried under her dress skirt, tied round her waist with a band of tape. The search for and discovery of satisfying things to eat which could be packed into small compass, added a new interest to Sara’s existence. When she drove or walked out, she used to look into shop windows eagerly. The first time it occurred to her to bring home two or three little meat-pies, she felt that she had hit upon a discovery. When she exhibited them, Becky’s eyes quite sparkled.

“Oh, miss!” she murmured. “Them will be nice an’ fillin’. It’s fillin’ness that’s best. Sponge-cake’s a ’evingly thing, but it melts away like—if you understand, miss. These’ll just stay in yer stummick.”

“Well,” hesitated Sara, “I don’t think it would be good if they stayed always, but I do believe they will be satisfying.”

They were satisfying,—and so were beef sandwiches, bought at a cook-shop,—and so were rolls and Bologna sausage. In time, Becky began to lose her hungry, tired feeling, and the coal-box did not seem so unbearably heavy.

However heavy it was, and whatsoever the temper of the cook, and the hardness of the work heaped upon her shoulders, she had always the chance of the afternoon to look forward to—the chance that Miss Sara would be able to be in her sitting-room. In fact, the mere seeing of Miss Sara would have been enough without meat-pies. If there was time only for a few words, they were always friendly, merry words that put heart into one; and if there was time for more, then there was an instalment of a story to be told, or some other thing one remembered afterward and sometimes lay awake in one’s bed in the attic to think over. Sara—who was only doing what she unconsciously liked better than anything else, Nature having made her for a giver—had not the least idea what she meant to poor Becky, and how wonderful a benefactor she seemed. If Nature has made you for a giver, your hands are born open, and so is your heart; and though there may be times when your hands are empty, your heart is always full, and you can give things out of that—warm things, kind things, sweet things,—help and comfort and laughter,—and sometimes gay, kind laughter is the best help of all.

Becky had scarcely known what laughter was through all her poor, little hard-driven life. Sara made her laugh, and laughed with her; and, though neither of them quite knew it, the laughter was as “fillin’” as the meat-pies.

A few weeks before Sara’s eleventh birthday a letter came to her from her father, which did not seem to be written in such boyish high spirits as usual. He was not very well, and was evidently overweighted by the business connected with the diamond-mines.

“You see, little Sara,” he wrote, “your daddy is not a business man at all, and figures and documents bother him. He does not really understand them, and all this seems so enormous. Perhaps, if I was not feverish I should not be awake, tossing about, one half of the night and spend the other half in troublesome dreams. If my little missus were here, I dare say she would give me some solemn, good advice. You would, wouldn’t you, little missus?”

One of his many jokes had been to call her his “little missus” because she had such an old-fashioned air.

He had made wonderful preparations for her birthday. Among other things, a new doll had been ordered in Paris, and her wardrobe was to be, indeed, a marvel of splendid perfection. When she had replied to the letter asking her if the doll would be an acceptable present, Sara had been very quaint.

“I am getting very old,” she wrote; “you see, I shall never live to have another doll given me. This will be my last doll. There is something solemn about it. If I could write poetry, I am sure a poem about ‘A Last Doll’ would be very nice. But I cannot write poetry. I have tried, and it made me laugh. It did not sound like Watts or Coleridge or Shakespeare at all. No one could ever take Emily’s place, but I should respect the Last Doll very much; and I am sure the school would love it. They all like dolls, though some of the big ones—the almost fifteen ones—pretend they are too grown up.”

Captain Crewe had a splitting headache when he read this letter in his bungalow in India. The table before him was heaped with papers and letters which were alarming him and filling him with anxious dread, but he laughed as he had not laughed for weeks.

“Oh,” he said, “she’s better fun every year she lives. God grant this business may right itself and leave me free to run home and see her. What wouldn’t I give to have her little arms round my neck this minute! What wouldn’t I give!”

The birthday was to be celebrated by great festivities. The school-room was to be decorated, and there was to be a party. The boxes containing the presents were to be opened with great ceremony, and there was to be a glittering feast spread in Miss Minchin’s sacred room. When the day arrived the whole house was in a whirl of excitement. How the morning passed nobody quite knew, because there seemed such preparations to be made. The school-room was being decked with garlands of holly; the desks had been moved away, and red covers had been put on the forms which were arrayed round the room against the wall.

When Sara went into her sitting-room in the morning, she found on the table a small, dumpy package, tied up in a piece of brown paper. She knew it was a present, and she thought she could guess whom it came from. She opened it quite tenderly. It was a square pincushion, made of not quite clean red flannel, and black pins had been stuck carefully into it to form the words, “Menny hapy returns.”

“Oh!” cried Sara, with a warm feeling in her heart. “What pains she has taken! I like it so, it—it makes me feel sorrowful.”

But the next moment she was mystified. On the under side of the pincushion was secured a card, bearing in neat letters the name “Miss Amelia Minchin.”

Sara turned it over and over.

“Miss Amelia!” she said to herself. “How can it be!”

And just at that very moment she heard the door being cautiously pushed open and saw Becky peeping round it.

There was an affectionate, happy grin on her face, and she shuffled forward and stood nervously pulling at her fingers.

“Do yer like it, Miss Sara?” she said. “Do yer?”

“Like it?” cried Sara. “You darling Becky, you made it all yourself.”

Becky gave a hysteric but joyful sniff, and her eyes looked quite moist with delight.

“It ain’t nothin’ but flannin, an’ the flannin ain’t new; but I wanted to give yer somethin’ an’ I made it of nights. I knew yer could pretend it was satin with diamond pins in. I tried to when I was makin’ it. The card, miss,” rather doubtfully; “’t warn’t wrong of me to pick it up out o’ the dust-bin, was it? Miss ’Meliar had throwed it away. I hadn’t no card o’ my own, an’ I knowed it wouldn’t be a proper presink if I didn’t pin a card on—so I pinned Miss ’Meliar’s.”

Sara flew at her and hugged her. She could not have told herself or any one else why there was a lump in her throat.

“Oh, Becky!” she cried out, with a queer little laugh. “I love you, Becky,—I do, I do!”

“Oh, miss!” breathed Becky. “Thank yer, miss, kindly; It ain’t good enough for that. The—the flannin wasn’t new.”

CHAPTER VII

THE DIAMOND-MINES AGAIN

When Sara entered the holly-hung school-room in the afternoon, she did so as the head of a sort of procession. Miss Minchin, in her grandest silk dress, led her by the hand. A man-servant followed, carrying the box containing the Last Doll, a housemaid carried a second box, and Becky brought up the rear, carrying a third and wearing a clean apron and a new cap. Sara would have much preferred to enter in the usual way, but Miss Minchin had sent for her, and, after an interview in her private sitting-room, had expressed her wishes.

“This is not an ordinary occasion,” she said. “I do not desire that it should be treated as one.”

So Sara was led grandly in and felt shy when, on her entry, the big girls stared at her and touched each other’s elbows, and the little ones began to squirm joyously in their seats.

“Silence, young ladies!” said Miss Minchin, at the murmur which arose. “James, place the box on the table and remove the lid. Emma, put yours upon a chair. Becky!” suddenly and severely.

Becky had quite forgotten herself in her excitement, and was grinning at Lottie, who was wriggling with rapturous expectation. She almost dropped her box, the disapproving voice so startled her, and her frightened, bobbing courtesy of apology was so funny that Lavinia and Jessie tittered.

“It is not your place to look at the young ladies,” said Miss Minchin. “You forget yourself. Put your box down.”

Becky obeyed with alarmed haste and hastily backed toward the door.

“You may leave us,” Miss Minchin announced to the servants with a wave of her hand.

Becky stepped aside respectfully to allow the superior servants to pass out first. She could not help casting a longing glance at the box on the table. Something made of blue satin was peeping from between the folds of tissue-paper.

“If you please, Miss Minchin,” said Sara, suddenly, “mayn’t Becky stay?”

It was a bold thing to do. Miss Minchin was betrayed into something like a slight jump. Then she put her eye-glass up, and gazed at her show pupil disturbedly.

“Becky!” she exclaimed. “My dearest Sara!”

Sara advanced a step toward her.

“I want her because I know she will like to see the presents,” she explained. “She is a little girl, too, you know.”

Miss Minchin was scandalized. She glanced from one figure to the other.

“My dear Sara,” she said, “Becky is the scullery-maid. Scullery-maids—er—are not little girls.”

It really had not occurred to her to think of them in that light. Scullery-maids were machines who carried coal-scuttles and made fires.

“But Becky is,” said Sara. “And I know she would enjoy herself. Please let her stay—because it is my birthday.”

Miss Minchin replied with much dignity:

“As you ask it as a birthday favor—she may stay. Rebecca, thank Miss Sara for her great kindness.”

Becky had been backing into the corner, twisting the hem of her apron in delighted suspense. She came forward, bobbing courtesies, but between Sara’s eyes and her own there passed a gleam of friendly understanding, while her words tumbled over each other.

“Oh, if you please, miss! I’m that grateful, miss! I did want to see the doll, miss, that I did. Thank you, miss. And thank you, ma’am,”—turning and making an alarmed bob to Miss Minchin,—“for letting me take the liberty.”

Miss Minchin waved her hand again—this time it was in the direction of the corner near the door.

“Go and stand there,” she commanded. “Not too near the young ladies.”

Becky went to her place, grinning. She did not care where she was sent, so that she might have the luck of being inside the room, instead of being down-stairs in the scullery, while these delights were going on. She did not even mind when Miss Minchin cleared her throat ominously and spoke again.

“Now, young ladies, I have a few words to say to you,” she announced.

“She’s going to make a speech,” whispered one of the girls. “I wish it was over.”

Sara felt rather uncomfortable. As this was her party, it was probable that the speech was about her. It is not agreeable to stand in a school-room and have a speech made about you.

“You are aware, young ladies,” the speech began,—for it was a speech,—“that dear Sara is eleven years old today.”

“Dear Sara!” murmured Lavinia.

“Several of you here have also been eleven years old, but Sara’s birthdays are rather different from other little girls’ birthdays. When she is older she will be heiress to a large fortune, which it will be her duty to spend in a meritorious manner.”

“The diamond-mines,” giggled Jessie, in a whisper.

Sara did not hear her; but as she stood with her green-gray eyes fixed steadily on Miss Minchin, she felt herself growing rather hot. When Miss Minchin talked about money, she felt somehow that she always hated her—and, of course, it was disrespectful to hate grown-up people.

“When her dear papa, Captain Crewe, brought her from India and gave her into my care,” the speech proceeded, “he said to me, in a jesting way, ‘I am afraid she will be very rich, Miss Minchin.’ My reply was, ‘Her education at my seminary, Captain Crewe, shall be such as will adorn the largest fortune.’ Sara has become my most accomplished pupil. Her French and her dancing are a credit to the seminary. Her manners—which have caused you to call her Princess Sara—are perfect. Her amiability she exhibits by giving you this afternoon’s party. I hope you appreciate her generosity. I wish you to express your appreciation of it by saying aloud all together, ‘Thank you, Sara!’”

The entire school-room rose to its feet as it had done the morning Sara remembered so well.

“Thank you, Sara!” it said, and it must be confessed that Lottie jumped up and down. Sara looked rather shy for a moment. She made a courtesy—and it was a very nice one.

“Thank you,” she said, “for coming to my party.”

“Very pretty, indeed, Sara,” approved Miss Minchin. “That is what a real princess does when the populace applauds her. Lavinia,”—scathingly,—“the sound you just made was extremely like a snort. If you are jealous of your fellow-pupil, I beg you will express your feelings in some more ladylike manner. Now I will leave you to enjoy yourselves.”

The instant she had swept out of the room the spell her presence always had upon them was broken. The door had scarcely closed before every seat was empty. The little girls jumped or tumbled out of theirs; the older ones wasted no time in deserting theirs. There was a rush toward the boxes. Sara had bent over one of them with a delighted face.

“These are books, I know,” she said.

The little children broke into a rueful murmur, and Ermengarde looked aghast.

“Does your papa send you books for a birthday present?” she exclaimed. “Why, he’s as bad as mine. Don’t open them, Sara.”

“I like them,” Sara laughed, but she turned to the biggest box. When she took out the Last Doll it was so magnificent that the children uttered delighted groans of joy, and actually drew back to gaze at it in breathless rapture.

“She is almost as big as Lottie,” some one gasped.

Lottie clapped her hands and danced about, giggling.

“She’s dressed for the theatre,” said Lavinia. “Her cloak is lined with ermine.”

“Oh!” cried Ermengarde, darting forward, “she has an opera-glass in her hand—a blue-and-gold one.”

“Here is her trunk,” said Sara. “Let us open it and look at her things.”

She sat down upon the floor and turned the key. The children crowded clamoring around her, as she lifted tray after tray and revealed their contents. Never had the school-room been in such an uproar. There were lace collars and silk stockings and handkerchiefs; there was a jewel-case containing a necklace and a tiara which looked quite as if they were made of real diamonds; there was a long sealskin and muff; there were ball dresses and walking dresses and visiting dresses; there were hats and tea-gowns and fans. Even Lavinia and Jessie forgot that they were too elderly to care for dolls, and uttered exclamations of delight and caught up things to look at them.

“Suppose,” Sara said, as she stood by the table, putting a large, black-velvet hat on the impassively smiling owner of all these splendors—“suppose she understands human talk and feels proud of being admired.”

“You are always supposing things,” said Lavinia, and her air was very superior.

“I know I am,” answered Sara, undisturbedly. “I like it. There is nothing so nice as supposing. It’s almost like being a fairy. If you suppose anything hard enough it seems as if it were real.”

“It’s all very well to suppose things if you have everything,” said Lavinia. “Could you suppose and pretend if you were a beggar and lived in a garret?”

Sara stopped arranging the Last Doll’s ostrich plumes, and looked thoughtful.

“I believe I could,” she said. “If one was a beggar, one would have to suppose and pretend all the time. But it mightn’t be easy.”

She often thought afterward how strange it was that just as she had finished saying this—just at that very moment—Miss Amelia came into the room.

“Sara,” she said, “your papa’s solicitor, Mr. Barrow, has called to see Miss Minchin, and, as she must talk to him alone and the refreshments are laid in her parlor, you had all better come and have your feast now, so that my sister can have her interview here in the school-room.”

Refreshments were not likely to be disdained at any hour, and many pairs of eyes gleamed. Miss Amelia arranged the procession into decorum, and then, with Sara at her side heading it, she led it away, leaving the Last Doll sitting upon a chair with the glories of her wardrobe scattered about her; dresses and coats hung upon chair backs, piles of lace-frilled petticoats lying upon their seats.

Becky, who was not expected to partake of refreshments, had the indiscretion to linger a moment to look at these beauties—it really was an indiscretion.

“Go back to your work, Becky,” Miss Amelia had said; but she had stopped to reverently pick up first a muff and then a coat, and while she stood looking at them adoringly, she heard Miss Minchin upon the threshold, and, being smitten with terror at the thought of being accused of taking liberties, she rashly darted under the table, which hid her by its table-cloth.

Miss Minchin came into the room, accompanied by a sharp-featured, dry little gentleman, who looked rather disturbed. Miss Minchin herself also looked rather disturbed, it must be admitted, and she gazed at the dry little gentleman with an irritated and puzzled expression.

She sat down with stiff dignity, and waved him to a chair.

“Pray, be seated, Mr. Barrow,” she said.

Mr. Barrow did not sit down at once. His attention seemed attracted by the Last Doll and the things which surrounded her. He settled his eye-glasses and looked at them in nervous disapproval. The Last Doll herself did not seem to mind this in the least. She merely sat upright and returned his gaze indifferently.

“A hundred pounds,” Mr. Barrow remarked succinctly. “All expensive material, and made at a Parisian modiste’s. He spent money lavishly enough, that young man.”

Miss Minchin felt offended. This seemed to be a disparagement of her best patron and was a liberty.

Even solicitors had no right to take liberties.

“I beg your pardon, Mr. Barrow,” she said stiffly. “I do not understand.”

“Birthday presents,” said Mr. Barrow in the same critical manner, “to a child eleven years old! Mad extravagance, I call it.”

Miss Minchin drew herself up still more rigidly.

“Captain Crewe is a man of fortune,” she said. “The diamond-mines alone—”

Mr. Barrow wheeled round upon her.

“Diamond-mines!” he broke out. “There are none! Never were!”

Miss Minchin actually got up from her chair.

“What!” she cried. “What do you mean?”

“At any rate,” answered Mr. Barrow, quite snappishly, “it would have been much better if there never had been any.”

“Any diamond-mines?” ejaculated Miss Minchin, catching at the back of a chair and feeling as if a splendid dream was fading away from her.

“Diamond-mines spell ruin oftener than they spell wealth,” said Mr. Barrow. “When a man is in the hands of a very dear friend and is not a business man himself, he had better steer clear of the dear friend’s diamond-mines, or gold-mines, or any other kind of mines dear friends want his money to put into. The late Captain Crewe—”

Here Miss Minchin stopped him with a gasp.

“The late Captain Crewe!” she cried out; “the late! You don’t come to tell me that Captain Crewe is—”

“He’s dead, ma’am,” Mr. Barrow answered with jerky brusqueness. “Died of jungle fever and business troubles combined. The jungle fever might not have killed him if he had not been driven mad by the business troubles, and the business troubles might not have put an end to him if the jungle fever had not assisted. Captain Crewe is dead!”

Miss Minchin dropped into her chair again. The words he had spoken filled her with alarm.

“What were his business troubles?” she said. “What were they?”

“Diamond-mines,” answered Mr. Barrow, “and dear friends—and ruin.”

Miss Minchin lost her breath.

“Ruin!” she gasped out.

“Lost every penny. That young man had too much money. The dear friend was mad on the subject of the diamond-mine. He put all his own money into it, and all Captain Crewe’s. Then the dear friend ran away—Captain Crewe was already stricken with fever when the news came. The shock was too much for him. He died delirious, raving about his little girl—and didn’t leave a penny.”

Now Miss Minchin understood, and never had she received such a blow in her life. Her show pupil, her show patron, swept away from the Select Seminary at one blow. She felt as if she had been outraged and robbed, and that Captain Crewe and Sara and Mr. Barrow were equally to blame.

“Do you mean to tell me,” she cried out, “that he left nothing! That Sara will have no fortune! That the child is a beggar! That she is left on my hands a little pauper instead of an heiress?”

Mr. Barrow was a shrewd business man, and felt it as well to make his own freedom from responsibility quite clear without any delay.

“She is certainly left a beggar,” he replied. “And she is certainly left on your hands, ma’am,—as she hasn’t a relation in the world that we know of.”

Miss Minchin started forward. She looked as if she was going to open the door and rush out of the room to stop the festivities going on joyfully and rather noisily that moment over the refreshments.

“It is monstrous!” she said. “She’s in my sitting-room at this moment, dressed in silk gauze and lace petticoats, giving a party at my expense.”

“She’s giving it at your expense, madam, if she’s giving it,” said Mr. Barrow, calmly. “Barrow & Skipworth are not responsible for anything. There never was a cleaner sweep made of a man’s fortune. Captain Crewe died without paying our last bill—and it was a big one.”

Miss Minchin turned back from the door in increased indignation. This was worse than any one could have dreamed of its being.

“That is what has happened to me!” she cried. “I was always so sure of his payments that I went to all sorts of ridiculous expenses for the child. I paid the bills for that ridiculous doll and her ridiculous fantastic wardrobe. The child was to have anything she wanted. She has a carriage and a pony and a maid, and I’ve paid for all of them since the last cheque came.”

Mr. Barrow evidently did not intend to remain to listen to the story of Miss Minchin’s grievances after he had made the position of his firm clear and related the mere dry facts. He did not feel any particular sympathy for irate keepers of boarding-schools.

“You had better not pay for anything more, ma’am,” he remarked, “unless you want to make presents to the young lady. No one will remember you. She hasn’t a brass farthing to call her own.”

“But what am I to do?” demanded Miss Minchin, as if she felt it entirely his duty to make the matter right. “What am I to do?”

“There isn’t anything to do,” said Mr. Barrow, folding up his eye-glasses and slipping them into his pocket. “Captain Crewe is dead. The child is left a pauper. Nobody is responsible for her but you.”

“I am not responsible for her, and I refuse to be made responsible!”

Miss Minchin became quite white with rage.

Mr. Barrow turned to go.

“I have nothing to do with that, madam,” he said uninterestedly. “Barrow & Skipworth are not responsible. Very sorry the thing has happened, of course.”

“If you think she is to be foisted off on me, you are greatly mistaken,” Miss Minchin gasped. “I have been robbed and cheated; I will turn her into the street!”

If she had not been so furious, she would have been too discreet to say quite so much. She saw herself burdened with an extravagantly brought-up child whom she had always resented, and she lost all self-control.

Mr. Barrow undisturbedly moved toward the door.

“I wouldn’t do that, madam,” he commented; “it wouldn’t look well. Unpleasant story to get about in connection with the establishment. Pupil bundled out penniless and without friends.”

He was a clever business man, and he knew what he was saying. He also knew that Miss Minchin was a business woman, and would be shrewd enough to see the truth. She could not afford to do a thing which would make people speak of her as cruel and hard-hearted.

“Better keep her and make use of her,” he added. “She’s a clever child, I believe. You can get a good deal out of her as she grows older.”

“I will get a good deal out of her before she grows older!” exclaimed Miss Minchin.

“I am sure you will, ma’am,” said Mr. Barrow, with a little sinister smile. “I am sure you will. Good morning!”

He bowed himself out and closed the door, and it must be confessed that Miss Minchin stood for a few moments and glared at it. What he had said was quite true. She knew it. She had absolutely no redress. Her show pupil had melted into nothingness, leaving only a friendless, beggared little girl. Such money as she herself had advanced was lost and could not be regained.

And as she stood there breathless under her sense of injury, there fell upon her ears a burst of gay voices from her own sacred room, which had actually been given up to the feast. She could at least stop this.

But as she started toward the door it was opened by Miss Amelia, who, when she caught sight of the changed, angry face, fell back a step in alarm.

“What is the matter, sister?” she ejaculated.

Miss Minchin’s voice was almost fierce when she answered:

“Where is Sara Crewe?”

Miss Amelia was bewildered.

“Sara!” she stammered. “Why, she’s with the children in your room, of course.”

“Has she a black frock in her sumptuous wardrobe?”—in bitter irony.

“A black frock?” Miss Amelia stammered again. “A black one?”

“She has frocks of every other color. Has she a black one?”

Miss Amelia began to turn pale.

“No—ye-es!” she said. “But it is too short for her. She has only the old black velvet, and she has outgrown it.”

“Go and tell her to take off that preposterous pink silk gauze, and put the black one on, whether it is too short or not. She has done with finery!”

Then Miss Amelia began to wring her fat hands and cry.

“Oh, sister!” she sniffed. “Oh, sister! What can have happened?”

Miss Minchin wasted no words.

“Captain Crewe is dead,” she said. “He has died without a penny. That spoiled, pampered, fanciful child is left a pauper on my hands.”

Miss Amelia sat down quite heavily in the nearest chair.

“Hundreds of pounds have I spent on nonsense for her. And I shall never see a penny of it. Put a stop to this ridiculous party of hers. Go and make her change her frock at once.”

“I?” panted Miss Amelia. “M-must I go and tell her now?”

“This moment!” was the fierce answer. “Don’t sit staring like a goose. Go!”

Poor Miss Amelia was accustomed to being called a goose. She knew, in fact, that she was rather a goose, and that it was left to geese to do a great many disagreeable things. It was a somewhat embarrassing thing to go into the midst of a room full of delighted children, and tell the giver of the feast that she had suddenly been transformed into a little beggar, and must go up-stairs and put on an old black frock which was too small for her. But the thing must be done. This was evidently not the time when questions might be asked.

She rubbed her eyes with her handkerchief until they looked quite red. After which she got up and went out of the room, without venturing to say another word. When her older sister looked and spoke as she had done just now, the wisest course to pursue was to obey orders without any comment. Miss Minchin walked across the room. She spoke to herself aloud without knowing that she was doing it. During the last year the story of the diamond-mines had suggested all sorts of possibilities to her. Even proprietors of seminaries might make fortunes in stocks, with the aid of owners of mines. And now, instead of looking forward to gains, she was left to look back upon losses.

“The Princess Sara, indeed!” she said. “The child has been pampered as if she were a queen.”

She was sweeping angrily past the corner table as she said it, and the next moment she started at the sound of a loud, sobbing sniff which issued from under the cover.

“What is that!” she exclaimed angrily. The loud, sobbing sniff was heard again, and she stooped and raised the hanging folds of the table-cover.

“How dare you!” she cried out. “How dare you! Come out immediately!”

It was poor Becky who crawled out, and her cap was knocked on one side, and her face was red with repressed crying.

“If you please, ’m—it’s me, mum,” she explained. “I know I hadn’t ought to. But I was lookin’ at the doll, mum—an’ I was frightened when you come in—an’ slipped under the table.”

“You have been there all the time, listening,” said Miss Minchin.

“No, mum,” Becky protested, bobbing courtesies. “Not listenin’—I thought I could slip out without your noticin’, but I couldn’t an’ I had to stay. But I didn’t listen, mum—I wouldn’t for nothin’. But I couldn’t help hearin’.”

Suddenly it seemed almost as if she lost all fear of the awful lady before her. She burst into fresh tears.

“Oh, please, ’m,” she said; “I dare say you’ll give me warnin’, mum,—but I’m so sorry for poor Miss Sara—I’m so sorry!”

“Leave the room!” ordered Miss Minchin.

Becky courtesied again, the tears openly streaming down her cheeks.

“Yes, ’m; I will, ’m,” she said, trembling; “but oh, I just wanted to arst you: Miss Sara—she’s been such a rich young lady, an’ she’s been waited on, ’and and foot; an’ what will she do now, mum, without no maid? If—if, oh please, would you let me wait on her after I’ve done my pots an’ kettles? I’d do ’em that quick—if you’d let me wait on her now she’s poor. Oh,”—breaking out afresh,—“poor little Miss Sara, mum—that was called a princess.”

Somehow, she made Miss Minchin feel more angry than ever. That the very scullery-maid should range herself on the side of this child—whom she realized more fully than ever that she had never liked—was too much. She actually stamped her foot.

“No—certainly not,” she said. “She will wait on herself, and on other people, too. Leave the room this instant, or you’ll leave your place.”

Becky threw her apron over her head and fled. She ran out of the room and down the steps into the scullery, and there she sat down among her pots and kettles, and wept as if her heart would break.

“It’s exactly like the ones in the stories,” she wailed. “Them pore princess ones that was drove into the world.”

Miss Minchin had never looked quite so still and hard as she did when Sara came to her, a few hours later, in response to a message she had sent her.

* * * *

Even by that time it seemed to Sara as if the birthday party had either been a dream or a thing which had happened years ago, and had happened in the life of quite another little girl.

Every sign of the festivities had been swept away; the holly had been removed from the school-room walls, and the forms and desks put back into their places. Miss Minchin’s sitting-room looked as it always did—all traces of the feast were gone, and Miss Minchin had resumed her usual dress. The pupils had been ordered to lay aside their party frocks; and this having been done, they had returned to the school-room and huddled together in groups, whispering and talking excitedly.

“Tell Sara to come to my room,” Miss Minchin had said to her sister. “And explain to her clearly that I will have no crying or unpleasant scenes.”

“Sister,” replied Miss Amelia, “she is the strangest child I ever saw. She has actually made no fuss at all. You remember she made none when Captain Crewe went back to India. When I told her what had happened, she just stood quite still and looked at me without making a sound. Her eyes seemed to get bigger and bigger, and she went quite pale. When I had finished, she still stood staring for a few seconds, and then her chin began to shake, and she turned round and ran out of the room and up-stairs. Several of the other children began to cry, but she did not seem to hear them or to be alive to anything but just what I was saying. It made me feel quite queer not to be answered; and when you tell anything sudden and strange, you expect people will say something—whatever it is.”

Nobody but Sara herself ever knew what had happened in her room after she had run up-stairs and locked her door. In fact, she herself scarcely remembered anything but that she walked up and down, saying over and over again to herself in a voice which did not seem her own:

“My papa is dead! My papa is dead!”

Once she stopped before Emily, who sat watching her from her chair, and cried out wildly:

“Emily! Do you hear? Do you hear—papa is dead? He is dead in India—thousands of miles away.”

When she came into Miss Minchin’s sitting-room in answer to her summons, her face was white and her eyes had dark rings around them. Her mouth was set as if she did not wish it to reveal what she had suffered and was suffering. She did not look in the least like the rose-colored butterfly child who had flown about from one of her treasures to the other in the decorated school-room. She looked instead a strange, desolate, almost grotesque little figure.

She had put on, without Mariette’s help, the cast-aside black-velvet frock. It was too short and tight, and her slender legs looked long and thin, showing themselves from beneath the brief skirt. As she had not found a piece of black ribbon, her short, thick, black hair tumbled loosely about her face and contrasted strongly with its pallor. She held Emily tightly in one arm, and Emily was swathed in a piece of black material.

“Put down your doll,” said Miss Minchin. “What do you mean by bringing her here?”

“No,” Sara answered. “I will not put her down. She is all I have. My papa gave her to me.”

She had always made Miss Minchin feel secretly uncomfortable, and she did so now. She did not speak with rudeness so much as with a cold steadiness with which Miss Minchin felt it difficult to cope—perhaps because she knew she was doing a heartless and inhuman thing.

“You will have no time for dolls in future,” she said. “You will have to work and improve yourself and make yourself useful.”

Sara kept her big, strange eyes fixed on her, and said not a word.

“Everything will be very different now,” Miss Minchin went on. “I suppose Miss Amelia has explained matters to you.”

“Yes,” answered Sara. “My papa is dead. He left me no money. I am quite poor.”

“You are a beggar,” said Miss Minchin, her temper rising at the recollection of what all this meant. “It appears that you have no relations and no home, and no one to take care of you.”

For a moment the thin, pale little face twitched, but Sara again said nothing.

“What are you staring at?” demanded Miss Minchin, sharply. “Are you so stupid that you cannot understand? I tell you that you are quite alone in the world, and have no one to do anything for you, unless I choose to keep you here out of charity.”

“I understand,” answered Sara, in a low tone; and there was a sound as if she had gulped down something which rose in her throat. “I understand.”

“That doll,” cried Miss Minchin, pointing to the splendid birthday gift seated near—“that ridiculous doll, with all her nonsensical, extravagant things—I actually paid the bill for her!”

Sara turned her head toward the chair.

“The Last Doll,” she said. “The Last Doll.” And her little mournful voice had an odd sound.

“The Last Doll, indeed!” said Miss Minchin. “And she is mine, not yours. Everything you own is mine.”

“Please take it away from me, then,” said Sara. “I do not want it.”

If she had cried and sobbed and seemed frightened, Miss Minchin might almost have had more patience with her. She was a woman who liked to domineer and feel her power, and as she looked at Sara’s pale little steadfast face and heard her proud little voice, she quite felt as if her might was being set at naught.

“Don’t put on grand airs,” she said. “The time for that sort of thing is past. You are not a princess any longer. Your carriage and your pony will be sent away—your maid will be dismissed. You will wear your oldest and plainest clothes—your extravagant ones are no longer suited to your station. You are like Becky—you must work for your living.”

To her surprise, a faint gleam of light came into the child’s eyes—a shade of relief.

“Can I work?” she said. “If I can work it will not matter so much. What can I do?”

“You can do anything you are told,” was the answer. “You are a sharp child, and pick up things readily. If you make yourself useful I may let you stay here. You speak French well, and you can help with the younger children.”

“May I?” exclaimed Sara. “Oh, please let me! I know I can teach them. I like them, and they like me.”

“Don’t talk nonsense about people liking you,” said Miss Minchin. “You will have to do more than teach the little ones. You will run errands and help in the kitchen as well as in the school-room. If you don’t please me, you will be sent away. Remember that. Now go.”

Sara stood still just a moment, looking at her. In her young soul, she was thinking deep and strange things. Then she turned to leave the room.

“Stop!” said Miss Minchin. “Don’t you intend to thank me?”

Sara paused, and all the deep, strange thoughts surged up in her breast.

“What for?” she said.

“For my kindness to you,” replied Miss Minchin. “For my kindness in giving you a home.”

Sara made two or three steps toward her. Her thin little chest heaved up and down, and she spoke in a strange, unchildishly fierce way.

“You are not kind,” she said. “You are not kind, and it is not a home.” And she had turned and run out of the room before Miss Minchin could stop her or do anything but stare after her with stony anger.

She went up the stairs slowly, but panting for breath, and she held Emily tightly against her side.

“I wish she could talk,” she said to herself. “If she could speak—if she could speak!”

She meant to go to her room and lie down on the tiger-skin, with her cheek upon the great cat’s head, and look into the fire and think and think and think. But just before she reached the landing Miss Amelia came out of the door and closed it behind her, and stood before it, looking nervous and awkward. The truth was that she felt secretly ashamed of the thing she had been ordered to do.

“You—you are not to go in there,” she said.

“Not go in?” exclaimed Sara, and she fell back a pace.

“That is not your room now,” Miss Amelia answered, reddening a little.

Somehow, all at once, Sara understood. She realized that this was the beginning of the change Miss Minchin had spoken of.

“Where is my room?” she asked, hoping very much that her voice did not shake.

“You are to sleep in the attic next to Becky.”

Sara knew where it was. Becky had told her about it. She turned, and mounted up two flights of stairs. The last one was narrow, and covered with shabby strips of old carpet. She felt as if she were walking away and leaving far behind her the world in which that other child, who no longer seemed herself, had lived. This child, in her short, tight old frock, climbing the stairs to the attic, was quite a different creature.

When she reached the attic door and opened it, her heart gave a dreary little thump. Then she shut the door and stood against it and looked about her.

Yes, this was another world. The room had a slanting roof and was whitewashed. The whitewash was dingy and had fallen off in places. There was a rusty grate, an old iron bedstead, and a hard bed covered with a faded coverlet. Some pieces of furniture too much worn to be used down-stairs had been sent up. Under the skylight in the roof, which showed nothing but an oblong piece of dull gray sky, there stood an old battered red footstool. Sara went to it and sat down. She seldom cried. She did not cry now. She laid Emily across her knees and put her face down upon her and her arms around her, and sat there, her little black head resting on the black draperies, not saying one word, not making one sound.

And as she sat in this silence there came a low tap at the door—such a low, humble one that she did not at first hear it, and, indeed, was not roused until the door was timidly pushed open and a poor tear-smeared face appeared peeping round it. It was Becky’s face, and Becky had been crying furtively for hours and rubbing her eyes with her kitchen apron until she looked strange indeed.

“Oh, miss,” she said under her breath. “Might I—would you allow me—jest to come in?”

Sara lifted her head and looked at her. She tried to begin a smile, and somehow she could not. Suddenly—and it was all through the loving mournfulness of Becky’s streaming eyes—her face looked more like a child’s not so much too old for her years. She held out her hand and gave a little sob.

“Oh, Becky,” she said. “I told you we were just the same—only two little girls—just two little girls. You see how true it is. There’s no difference now. I’m not a princess any more.”

Becky ran to her and caught her hand, and hugged it to her breast, kneeling beside her and sobbing with love and pain.

“Yes, miss, you are,” she cried, and her words were all broken. “Whats’ever ’appens to you—whats’ever—you’d be a princess all the same—an’ nothin’ couldn’t make you nothin’ different.”

CHAPTER VIII

IN THE ATTIC

The first night she spent in her attic was a thing Sara never forgot. During its passing, she lived through a wild, unchildlike woe of which she never spoke to any one about her. There was no one who would have understood. It was, indeed, well for her that as she lay awake in the darkness her mind was forcibly distracted, now and then, by the strangeness of her surroundings. It was, perhaps, well for her that she was reminded by her small body of material things. If this had not been so, the anguish of her young mind might have been too great for a child to bear. But, really, while the night was passing she scarcely knew that she had a body at all or remembered any other thing than one.

“My papa is dead!” she kept whispering to herself. “My papa is dead!”

It was not until long afterward that she realized that her bed had been so hard that she turned over and over in it to find a place to rest, that the darkness seemed more intense than any she had ever known, and that the wind howled over the roof among the chimneys like something which wailed aloud. Then there was something worse. This was certain scufflings and scratchings and squeakings in the walls and behind the skirting boards. She knew what they meant, because Becky had described them. They meant rats and mice who were either fighting with each other or playing together. Once or twice she even heard sharp-toed feet scurrying across the floor, and she remembered in those after days, when she recalled things, that when first she heard them she started up in bed and sat trembling, and when she lay down again covered her head with the bedclothes.

The change in her life did not come about gradually, but was made all at once.

“She must begin as she is to go on,” Miss Minchin said to Miss Amelia. “She must be taught at once what she is to expect.”

Mariette had left the house the next morning. The glimpse Sara caught of her sitting-room, as she passed its open door, showed her that everything had been changed. Her ornaments and luxuries had been removed, and a bed had been placed in a corner to transform it into a new pupil’s bedroom.

When she went down to breakfast she saw that her seat at Miss Minchin’s side was occupied by Lavinia, and Miss Minchin spoke to her coldly.

“You will begin your new duties, Sara,” she said, “by taking your seat with the younger children at a smaller table. You must keep them quiet, and see that they behave well and do not waste their food. You ought to have been down earlier. Lottie has already upset her tea.”

That was the beginning, and from day to day the duties given to her were added to. She taught the younger children French and heard their other lessons, and these were the least of her labors. It was found that she could be made use of in numberless directions. She could be sent on errands at any time and in all weathers. She could be told to do things other people neglected. The cook and the housemaids took their tone from Miss Minchin, and rather enjoyed ordering about the “young one” who had been made so much fuss over for so long. They were not servants of the best class, and had neither good manners nor good tempers, and it was frequently convenient to have at hand some one on whom blame could be laid.

During the first month or two, Sara thought that her willingness to do things as well as she could, and her silence under reproof, might soften those who drove her so hard. In her proud little heart she wanted them to see that she was trying to earn her living and not accepting charity. But the time came when she saw that no one was softened at all; and the more willing she was to do as she was told, the more domineering and exacting careless housemaids became, and the more ready a scolding cook was to blame her.

If she had been older, Miss Minchin would have given her the bigger girls to teach and saved money by dismissing an instructress; but while she remained and looked like a child, she could be made more useful as a sort of little superior errand girl and maid of all work. An ordinary errand boy would not have been so clever and reliable. Sara could be trusted with difficult commissions and complicated messages. She could even go and pay bills, and she combined with this the ability to dust a room well and to set things in order.

Her own lessons became things of the past. She was taught nothing, and only after long and busy days spent in running here and there at everybody’s orders was she grudgingly allowed to go into the deserted school-room, with a pile of old books, and study alone at night.

“If I do not remind myself of the things I have learned, perhaps I may forget them,” she said to herself. “I am almost a scullery-maid, and if I am a scullery-maid who knows nothing, I shall be like poor Becky. I wonder if I could quite forget and begin to drop my h’s and not remember that Henry the Eighth had six wives.”

One of the most curious things in her new existence was her changed position among the pupils. Instead of being a sort of small royal personage among them, she no longer seemed to be one of their number at all. She was kept so constantly at work that she scarcely ever had an opportunity of speaking to any of them, and she could not avoid seeing that Miss Minchin preferred that she should live a life apart from that of the occupants of the school-room.

“I will not have her forming intimacies and talking to the other children,” that lady said. “Girls like a grievance, and if she begins to tell romantic stories about herself, she will become an ill-used heroine, and parents will be given a wrong impression. It is better that she should live a separate life—one suited to her circumstances. I am giving her a home, and that is more than she has any right to expect from me.”

Sara did not expect much, and was far too proud to try to continue to be intimate with girls who evidently felt rather awkward and uncertain about her. The fact was that Miss Minchin’s pupils were a set of dull, matter-of-fact young people. They were accustomed to being rich and comfortable, and as Sara’s frocks grew shorter and shabbier and queerer-looking, and it became an established fact that she wore shoes with holes in them and was sent out to buy groceries and carry them through the streets in a basket on her arm when the cook wanted them in a hurry, they felt rather as if, when they spoke to her, they were addressing an under servant.

“To think that she was the girl with the diamond-mines,” Lavinia commented. “She does look like an object. And she’s queerer than ever. I never liked her much, but I can’t bear that way she has now of looking at people without speaking—just as if she was finding them out.”

“I am,” said Sara, promptly, when she heard of this. “That’s what I look at some people for. I like to know about them. I think about them over afterward.”

The truth was that she had saved herself annoyance several times by keeping her eye on Lavinia, who was quite ready to make mischief, and would have been rather pleased to have made it for the ex-show pupil.

Sara never made any mischief herself, or interfered with any one. She worked like a drudge; she tramped through the wet streets, carrying parcels and baskets; she labored with the childish inattention of the little ones’ French lessons; as she became shabbier and more forlorn-looking, she was told that she had better take her meals down-stairs; she was treated as if she was nobody’s concern, and her heart grew proud and sore, but she never told any one what she felt.

“Soldiers don’t complain,” she would say between her small, shut teeth. “I am not going to do it; I will pretend this is part of a war.”

But there were hours when her child heart might almost have broken with loneliness but for three people.

The first, it must be owned, was Becky—just Becky. Throughout all that first night spent in the garret, she had felt a vague comfort in knowing that on the other side of the wall in which the rats scuffled and squeaked there was another young human creature. And during the nights that followed the sense of comfort grew. They had little chance to speak to each other during the day. Each had her own tasks to perform, and any attempt at conversation would have been regarded as a tendency to loiter and lose time.

“Don’t mind me, miss,” Becky whispered during the first morning, “if I don’t say nothin’ polite. Some un ’d be down on us if I did. I means ‘please’ an’ ‘thank you’ an’ ‘beg pardon,’ but I dassn’t to take time to say it.”

But before daybreak she used to slip into Sara’s attic and button her dress and give her such help as she required before she went down-stairs to light the kitchen fire. And when night came Sara always heard the humble knock at her door which meant that her handmaid was ready to help her again if she was needed. During the first weeks of her grief Sara felt as if she were too stupefied to talk, so it happened that some time passed before they saw each other much or exchanged visits. Becky’s heart told her that it was best that people in trouble should be left alone.

The second of the trio of comforters was Ermengarde, but odd things happened before Ermengarde found her place.

When Sara’s mind seemed to awaken again to the life about her, she realized that she had forgotten that an Ermengarde lived in the world. The two had always been friends, but Sara had felt as if she were years the older. It could not be contested that Ermengarde was as dull as she was affectionate. She clung to Sara in a simple, helpless way; she brought her lessons to her that she might be helped; she listened to her every word and besieged her with requests for stories. But she had nothing interesting to say herself, and she loathed books of every description. She was, in fact, not a person one would remember when one was caught in the storm of a great trouble, and Sara forgot her.

It had been all the easier to forget her because she had been suddenly called home for a few weeks. When she came back she did not see Sara for a day or two, and when she met her for the first time she encountered her coming down a corridor with her arms full of garments which were to be taken down-stairs to be mended. Sara herself had already been taught to mend them. She looked pale and unlike herself, and she was attired in the queer, outgrown frock whose shortness showed so much thin black leg.

Ermengarde was too slow a girl to be equal to such a situation. She could not think of anything to say. She knew what had happened, but, somehow, she had never imagined Sara could look like this—so odd and poor and almost like a servant. It made her quite miserable, and she could do nothing but break into a short hysterical laugh and exclaim—aimlessly and as if without any meaning:

“Oh, Sara! is that you?”

“Yes,” answered Sara, and suddenly a strange thought passed through her mind and made her face flush.

She held the pile of garments in her arms, and her chin rested upon the top of it to keep it steady. Something in the look of her straight-gazing eyes made Ermengarde lose her wits still more. She felt as if Sara had changed into a new kind of girl, and she had never known her before. Perhaps it was because she had suddenly grown poor and had to mend things and work like Becky.

“Oh,” she stammered. “How—how are you?”

“I don’t know,” Sara replied. “How are you?”

“I’m—I’m quite well,” said Ermengarde, overwhelmed with shyness. Then spasmodically she thought of something to say which seemed more intimate. “Are you—are you very unhappy?” she said in a rush.

Then Sara was guilty of an injustice. Just at that moment her torn heart swelled within her, and she felt that if any one was as stupid as that, one had better get away from her.

“What do you think?” she said. “Do you think I am very happy?” and she marched past her without another word.

In course of time she realized that if her wretchedness had not made her forget things, she would have known that poor, dull Ermengarde was not to be blamed for her unready, awkward ways. She was always awkward, and the more she felt, the more stupid she was given to being.

But the sudden thought which had flashed upon her had made her over-sensitive.

“She is like the others,” she had thought. “She does not really want to talk to me. She knows no one does.”

So for several weeks a barrier stood between them. When they met by chance Sara looked the other way, and Ermengarde felt too stiff and embarrassed to speak. Sometimes they nodded to each other in passing, but there were times when they did not even exchange a greeting.

“If she would rather not talk to me,” Sara thought, “I will keep out of her way. Miss Minchin makes that easy enough.”

Miss Minchin made it so easy that at last they scarcely saw each other at all. At that time it was noticed that Ermengarde was more stupid than ever, and that she looked listless and unhappy. She used to sit in the window-seat, huddled in a heap, and stare out of the window without speaking. Once Jessie, who was passing, stopped to look at her curiously.

“What are you crying for, Ermengarde?” she asked.

“I’m not crying,” answered Ermengarde, in a muffled, unsteady voice.

“You are,” said Jessie. “A great big tear just rolled down the bridge of your nose and dropped off at the end of it. And there goes another.”

“Well,” said Ermengarde, “I’m miserable—and no one need interfere.” And she turned her plump back and took out her handkerchief and boldly hid her face in it.

That night, when Sara went to her attic, she was later than usual. She had been kept at work until after the hour at which the pupils went to bed, and after that she had gone to her lessons in the lonely school-room. When she reached the top of the stairs, she was surprised to see a glimmer of light coming from under the attic door.

“Nobody goes there but myself,” she thought quickly; “but some one has lighted a candle.”

Some one had, indeed, lighted a candle, and it was not burning in the kitchen candlestick she was expected to use, but in one of those belonging to the pupils’ bedrooms. The some one was sitting upon the battered footstool, and was dressed in her night-gown and wrapped up in a red shawl. It was Ermengarde.

“Ermengarde!” cried Sara. She was so startled that she was almost frightened. “You will get into trouble.”

Ermengarde stumbled up from her footstool. She shuffled across the attic in her bedroom slippers, which were too large for her. Her eyes and nose were pink with crying.

“I know I shall—if I’m found out,” she said. “But I don’t care—I don’t care a bit. Oh, Sara, please tell me. What is the matter? Why don’t you like me any more?”

Something in her voice made the familiar lump rise in Sara’s throat. It was so affectionate and simple—so like the old Ermengarde who had asked her to be “best friends.” It sounded as if she had not meant what she had seemed to mean during these past weeks.

“I do like you,” Sara answered. “I thought—you see, everything is different now. I thought you—were different.”

Ermengarde opened her wet eyes wide.

“Why, it was you who were different!” she cried. “You didn’t want to talk to me. I didn’t know what to do. It was you who were different after I came back.”

Sara thought a moment. She saw she had made a mistake.

“I am different,” she explained, “though not in the way you think. Miss Minchin does not want me to talk to the girls. Most of them don’t want to talk to me. I thought—perhaps—you didn’t. So I tried to keep out of your way.”

“Oh, Sara,” Ermengarde almost wailed in her reproachful dismay. And then after one more look they rushed into each other’s arms. It must be confessed that Sara’s small black head lay for some minutes on the shoulder covered by the red shawl. When Ermengarde had seemed to desert her, she had felt horribly lonely.

Afterward they sat down upon the floor together, Sara clasping her knees with her arms, and Ermengarde rolled up in her shawl. Ermengarde looked at the odd, big-eyed little face adoringly.

“I couldn’t bear it any more,” she said. “I dare say you could live without me, Sara; but I couldn’t live without you. I was nearly dead. So tonight, when I was crying under the bedclothes, I thought all at once of creeping up here and just begging you to let us be friends again.”

“You are nicer than I am,” said Sara. “I was too proud to try and make friends. You see, now that trials have come, they have shown that I am not a nice child. I was afraid they would. Perhaps”—wrinkling her forehead wisely—“that is what they were sent for.”

“I don’t see any good in them,” said Ermengarde, stoutly.

“Neither do I—to speak the truth,” admitted Sara, frankly. “But I suppose there might be good in things, even if we don’t see it. There might”—doubtfully—“be good in Miss Minchin.”

Ermengarde looked round the attic with a rather fearsome curiosity.

“Sara,” she said, “do you think you can bear living here?”

Sara looked round also.

“If I pretend it’s quite different, I can,” she answered; “or if I pretend it is a place in a story.”

She spoke slowly. Her imagination was beginning to work for her. It had not worked for her at all since her troubles had come upon her. She had felt as if it had been stunned.

“Other people have lived in worse places. Think of the Count of Monte Cristo in the dungeons of the Château d’If. And think of the people in the Bastille!”

“The Bastille,” half whispered Ermengarde, watching her and beginning to be fascinated. She remembered stories of the French Revolution which Sara had been able to fix in her mind by her dramatic relation of them. No one but Sara could have done it.

A well-known glow came into Sara’s eyes.

“Yes,” she said, hugging her knees. “That will be a good place to pretend about. I am a prisoner in the Bastille. I have been here for years and years—and years; and everybody has forgotten about me. Miss Minchin is the jailer—and Becky”—a sudden light adding itself to the glow in her eyes—“Becky is the prisoner in the next cell.”

She turned to Ermengarde, looking quite like the old Sara.

“I shall pretend that,” she said; “and it will be a great comfort.”

Ermengarde was at once enraptured and awed.

“And will you tell me all about it?” she said. “May I creep up here at night, whenever it is safe, and hear the things you have made up in the day? It will seem as if we were more ‘best friends’ than ever.”

“Yes,” answered Sara, nodding. “Adversity tries people, and mine has tried you and proved how nice you are.”

CHAPTER IX

MELCHISEDEC

The third person in the trio was Lottie. She was a small thing and did not know what adversity meant, and was much bewildered by the alteration she saw in her young adopted mother. She had heard it rumored that strange things had happened to Sara, but she could not understand why she looked different—why she wore an old black frock and came into the school-room only to teach instead of to sit in her place of honor and learn lessons herself. There had been much whispering among the little ones when it had been discovered that Sara no longer lived in the rooms in which Emily had so long sat in state. Lottie’s chief difficulty was that Sara said so little when one asked her questions. At seven mysteries must be made very clear if one is to understand them.

“Are you very poor now, Sara?” she had asked confidentially the first morning her friend took charge of the small French class. “Are you as poor as a beggar?” She thrust a fat hand into the slim one and opened round, tearful eyes. “I don’t want you to be as poor as a beggar.”

She looked as if she was going to cry, and Sara hurriedly consoled her.

“Beggars have nowhere to live,” she said courageously. “I have a place to live in.”

“Where do you live?” persisted Lottie. “The new girl sleeps in your room, and it isn’t pretty any more.”

“I live in another room,” said Sara.

“Is it a nice one?” inquired Lottie. “I want to go and see it.”

“You must not talk,” said Sara. “Miss Minchin is looking at us. She will be angry with me for letting you whisper.”

She had found out already that she was to be held accountable for everything which was objected to. If the children were not attentive, if they talked, if they were restless, it was she who would be reproved.

But Lottie was a determined little person. If Sara would not tell her where she lived, she would find out in some other way. She talked to her small companions and hung about the elder girls and listened when they were gossiping; and acting upon certain information they had unconsciously let drop, she started late one afternoon on a voyage of discovery, climbing stairs she had never known the existence of, until she reached the attic floor. There she found two doors near each other, and opening one, she saw her beloved Sara standing upon an old table and looking out of a window.

“Sara!” she cried, aghast. “Mamma Sara!” She was aghast because the attic was so bare and ugly and seemed so far away from all the world. Her short legs had seemed to have been mounting hundreds of stairs.

Sara turned round at the sound of her voice. It was her turn to be aghast. What would happen now? If Lottie began to cry and any one chanced to hear, they were both lost. She jumped down from her table and ran to the child.

“Don’t cry and make a noise,” she implored. “I shall be scolded if you do, and I have been scolded all day. It’s—it’s not such a bad room, Lottie.”

“Isn’t it?” gasped Lottie, and as she looked round it she bit her lip. She was a spoiled child yet, but she was fond enough of her adopted parent to make an effort to control herself for her sake. Then, somehow, it was quite possible that any place in which Sara lived might turn out to be nice. “Why isn’t it, Sara?” she almost whispered.

Sara hugged her close and tried to laugh. There was a sort of comfort in the warmth of the plump, childish body. She had had a hard day and had been staring out of the windows with hot eyes.

“You can see all sorts of things you can’t see down-stairs,” she said.

“What sort of things?” demanded Lottie, with that curiosity Sara could always awaken even in bigger girls.

“Chimneys—quite close to us—with smoke curling up in wreaths and clouds and going up into the sky,—and sparrows hopping about and talking to each other just as if they were people,—and other attic windows where heads may pop out any minute and you can wonder who they belong to. And it all feels as high up—as if it was another world.”

“Oh, let me see it!” cried Lottie. “Lift me up!”

Sara lifted her up, and they stood on the old table together and leaned on the edge of the flat window in the roof, and looked out.

Any one who has not done this does not know what a different world they saw. The slates spread out on either side of them and slanted down into the rain gutter-pipes. The sparrows, being at home there, twittered and hopped about quite without fear. Two of them perched on the chimney-top nearest and quarrelled with each other fiercely until one pecked the other and drove him away. The garret window next to theirs was shut because the house next door was empty.

“I wish some one lived there,” Sara said. “It is so close that if there was a little girl in the attic, we could talk to each other through the windows and climb over to see each other, if we were not afraid of falling.”

The sky seemed so much nearer than when one saw it from the street, that Lottie was enchanted. From the attic window, among the chimney-pots, the things which were happening in the world below seemed almost unreal. One scarcely believed in the existence of Miss Minchin and Miss Amelia and the school-room, and the roll of wheels in the square seemed a sound belonging to another existence.

“Oh, Sara!” cried Lottie, cuddling in her guarding arm. “I like this attic—I like it! It is nicer than down-stairs!”

“Look at that sparrow,” whispered Sara. “I wish I had some crumbs to throw to him.”

“I have some!” came in a little shriek from Lottie. “I have part of a bun in my pocket; I bought it with my penny yesterday, and I saved a bit.”

When they threw out a few crumbs the sparrow jumped and flew away to an adjacent chimney-top. He was evidently not accustomed to intimates in attics, and unexpected crumbs startled him. But when Lottie remained quite still and Sara chirped very softly—almost as if she were a sparrow herself—he saw that the thing which had alarmed him represented hospitality, after all. He put his head on one side, and from his perch on the chimney looked down at the crumbs with twinkling eyes. Lottie could scarcely keep still.

“Will he come? Will he come?” she whispered.

“His eyes look as if he would,” Sara whispered back. “He is thinking and thinking whether he dare. Yes, he will! Yes, he is coming!”

He flew down and hopped toward the crumbs, but stopped a few inches away from them, putting his head on one side again, as if reflecting on the chances that Sara and Lottie might turn out to be big cats and jump on him. At last his heart told him they were really nicer than they looked, and he hopped nearer and nearer, darted at the biggest crumb with a lightning peck, seized it, and carried it away to the other side of his chimney.

“Now he knows,” said Sara. “And he will come back for the others.”

He did come back, and even brought a friend, and the friend went away and brought a relative, and among them they made a hearty meal over which they twittered and chattered and exclaimed, stopping every now and then to put their heads on one side and examine Lottie and Sara. Lottie was so delighted that she quite forgot her first shocked impression of the attic. In fact, when she was lifted down from the table and returned to earthly things, as it were, Sara was able to point out to her many beauties in the room which she herself would not have suspected the existence of.

“It is so little and so high above everything,” she said, “that it is almost like a nest in a tree. The slanting ceiling is so funny. See, you can scarcely stand up at this end of the room; and when the morning begins to come I can lie in bed and look right up into the sky through that flat window in the roof. It is like a square patch of light. If the sun is going to shine, little pink clouds float about, and I feel as if I could touch them. And if it rains, the drops patter and patter as if they were saying something nice. Then if there are stars, you can lie and try to count how many go into the patch. It takes such a lot. And just look at that tiny, rusty grate in the corner. If it was polished and there was a fire in it, just think how nice it would be. You see, it’s really a beautiful little room.”

She was walking round the small place, holding Lottie’s hand and making gestures which described all the beauties she was making herself see. She quite made Lottie see them, too. Lottie could always believe in the things Sara made pictures of.

“You see,” she said, “there could be a thick, soft blue Indian rug on the floor; and in that corner there could be a soft little sofa, with cushions to curl up on; and just over it could be a shelf full of books so that one could reach them easily; and there could be a fur rug before the fire, and hangings on the wall to cover up the whitewash, and pictures. They would have to be little ones, but they could be beautiful; and there could be a lamp with a deep rose-colored shade; and a table in the middle, with things to have tea with; and a little fat copper kettle singing on the hob; and the bed could be quite different. It could be made soft and covered with a lovely silk coverlet. It could be beautiful. And perhaps we could coax the sparrows until we made such friends with them that they would come and peck at the window and ask to be let in.”

“Oh, Sara!” cried Lottie; “I should like to live here!”

When Sara had persuaded her to go down-stairs again, and, after setting her in her way, had come back to her attic, she stood in the middle of it and looked about her. The enchantment of her imaginings for Lottie had died away. The bed was hard and covered with its dingy quilt. The whitewashed wall showed its broken patches, the floor was cold and bare, the grate was broken and rusty, and the battered footstool, tilted sideways on its injured leg, the only seat in the room. She sat down on it for a few minutes and let her head drop in her hands. The mere fact that Lottie had come and gone away again made things seem a little worse—just as perhaps prisoners feel a little more desolate after visitors come and go, leaving them behind.

“It’s a lonely place,” she said. “Sometimes it’s the loneliest place in the world.”

She was sitting in this way when her attention was attracted by a slight sound near her. She lifted her head to see where it came from, and if she had been a nervous child she would have left her seat on the battered footstool in a great hurry. A large rat was sitting up on his hind quarters and sniffing the air in an interested manner. Some of Lottie’s crumbs had dropped upon the floor and their scent had drawn him out of his hole.

He looked so queer and so like a gray-whiskered dwarf or gnome that Sara was rather fascinated. He looked at her with his bright eyes, as if he were asking a question. He was evidently so doubtful that one of the child’s queer thoughts came into her mind.

“I dare say it is rather hard to be a rat,” she mused. “Nobody likes you. People jump and run away and scream out, ‘Oh, a horrid rat!’ I shouldn’t like people to scream and jump and say, ‘Oh, a horrid Sara!’ the moment they saw me. And set traps for me, and pretend they were dinner. It’s so different to be a sparrow. But nobody asked this rat if he wanted to be a rat when he was made. Nobody said, ‘Wouldn’t you rather be a sparrow?’”

She had sat so quietly that the rat had begun to take courage. He was very much afraid of her, but perhaps he had a heart like the sparrow and it told him that she was not a thing which pounced. He was very hungry. He had a wife and a large family in the wall, and they had had frightfully bad luck for several days. He had left the children crying bitterly, and felt he would risk a good deal for a few crumbs, so he cautiously dropped upon his feet.

“Come on,” said Sara; “I’m not a trap. You can have them, poor thing! Prisoners in the Bastille used to make friends with rats. Suppose I make friends with you.”

How it is that animals understand things I do not know, but it is certain that they do understand. Perhaps there is a language which is not made of words and everything in the world understands it. Perhaps there is a soul hidden in everything and it can always speak, without even making a sound, to another soul. But whatsoever was the reason, the rat knew from that moment that he was safe—even though he was a rat. He knew that this young human being sitting on the red footstool would not jump up and terrify him with wild, sharp noises or throw heavy objects at him which, if they did not fall and crush him, would send him limping in his scurry back to his hole. He was really a very nice rat, and did not mean the least harm. When he had stood on his hind legs and sniffed the air, with his bright eyes fixed on Sara, he had hoped that she would understand this, and would not begin by hating him as an enemy. When the mysterious thing which speaks without saying any words told him that she would not, he went softly toward the crumbs and began to eat them. As he did it he glanced every now and then at Sara, just as the sparrows had done, and his expression was so very apologetic that it touched her heart.

She sat and watched him without making any movement. One crumb was very much larger than the others—in fact, it could scarcely be called a crumb. It was evident that he wanted that piece very much, but it lay quite near the footstool and he was still rather timid.

“I believe he wants it to carry to his family in the wall,” Sara thought. “If I do not stir at all, perhaps he will come and get it.”

She scarcely allowed herself to breathe, she was so deeply interested. The rat shuffled a little nearer and ate a few more crumbs, then he stopped and sniffed delicately, giving a side glance at the occupant of the footstool; then he darted at the piece of bun with something very like the sudden boldness of the sparrow, and the instant he had possession of it fled back to the wall, slipped down a crack in the skirting board, and was gone.

“I knew he wanted it for his children,” said Sara. “I do believe I could make friends with him.”

A week or so afterward, on one of the rare nights when Ermengarde found it safe to steal up to the attic, when she tapped on the door with the tips of her fingers Sara did not come to her for two or three minutes. There was, indeed, such a silence in the room at first that Ermengarde wondered if she could have fallen asleep. Then, to her surprise, she heard her utter a little, low laugh and speak coaxingly to some one.

“There!” Ermengarde heard her say. “Take it and go home, Melchisedec! Go home to your wife!”

Almost immediately Sara opened the door, and when she did so she found Ermengarde standing with alarmed eyes upon the threshold.

“Who—who are you talking to, Sara?” she gasped out.

Sara drew her in cautiously, but she looked as if something pleased and amused her.

“You must promise not to be frightened—not to scream the least bit, or I can’t tell you,” she answered.

Ermengarde felt almost inclined to scream on the spot, but managed to control herself. She looked all round the attic and saw no one. And yet Sara had certainly been speaking to some one. She thought of ghosts.

“Is it—something that will frighten me?” she asked timorously.

“Some people are afraid of them,” said Sara. “I was at first,—but I am not now.”

“Was it—a ghost?” quaked Ermengarde.

“No,” said Sara, laughing. “It was my rat.”

Ermengarde made one bound, and landed in the middle of the little dingy bed. She tucked her feet under her night-gown and the red shawl. She did not scream, but she gasped with fright.

“Oh! oh!” she cried under her breath. “A rat! A rat!”

“I was afraid you would be frightened,” said Sara. “But you needn’t be. I am making him tame. He actually knows me and comes out when I call him. Are you too frightened to want to see him?”

The truth was that, as the days had gone on and, with the aid of scraps brought up from the kitchen, her curious friendship had developed, she had gradually forgotten that the timid creature she was becoming familiar with was a mere rat.

At first Ermengarde was too much alarmed to do anything but huddle in a heap upon the bed and tuck up her feet, but the sight of Sara’s composed little countenance and the story of Melchisedec’s first appearance began at last to rouse her curiosity, and she leaned forward over the edge of the bed and watched Sara go and kneel down by the hole in the skirting board.

“He—he won’t run out quickly and jump on the bed, will he?” she said.

“No,” answered Sara. “He’s as polite as we are. He is just like a person. Now watch!”

She began to make a low, whistling sound—so low and coaxing that it could only have been heard in entire stillness. She did it several times, looking entirely absorbed in it. Ermengarde thought she looked as if she were working a spell. And at last, evidently in response to it, a gray-whiskered, bright-eyed head peeped out of the hole. Sara had some crumbs in her hand. She dropped them, and Melchisedec came quietly forth and ate them. A piece of larger size than the rest he took and carried in the most businesslike manner back to his home.

“You see,” said Sara, “that is for his wife and children. He is very nice. He only eats the little bits. After he goes back I can always hear his family squeaking for joy. There are three kinds of squeaks. One kind is the children’s, and one is Mrs. Melchisedec’s, and one is Melchisedec’s own.”

Ermengarde began to laugh.

“Oh, Sara!” she said. “You are queer,—but you are nice.”

“I know I am queer,” admitted Sara, cheerfully; “and I try to be nice.” She rubbed her forehead with her little brown paw, and a puzzled, tender look came into her face. “Papa always laughed at me,” she said; “but I liked it. He thought I was queer, but he liked me to make up things. I—I can’t help making up things. If I didn’t, I don’t believe I could live.” She paused and glanced round the attic. “I’m sure I couldn’t live here,” she added in a low voice.

Ermengarde was interested, as she always was. “When you talk about things,” she said, “they seem as if they grew real. You talk about Melchisedec as if he was a person.”

“He is a person,” said Sara. “He gets hungry and frightened, just as we do; and he is married and has children. How do we know he doesn’t think things, just as we do? His eyes look as if he was a person. That was why I gave him a name.”

She sat down on the floor in her favorite attitude, holding her knees.

“Besides,” she said, “he is a Bastille rat sent to be my friend. I can always get a bit of bread the cook has thrown away, and it is quite enough to support him.”

“Is it the Bastille yet?” asked Ermengarde, eagerly. “Do you always pretend it is the Bastille?”

“Nearly always,” answered Sara. “Sometimes I try to pretend it is another kind of place; but the Bastille is generally easiest—particularly when it is cold.”

Just at that moment Ermengarde almost jumped off the bed, she was so startled by a sound she heard. It was like two distinct knocks on the wall.

“What is that?” she exclaimed.

Sara got up from the floor and answered quite dramatically:

“It is the prisoner in the next cell.”

“Becky!” cried Ermengarde, enraptured.

“Yes,” said Sara. “Listen; the two knocks meant, ‘Prisoner, are you there?’”

She knocked three times on the wall herself, as if in answer.

“That means, ‘Yes, I am here, and all is well.’”

Four knocks came from Becky’s side of the wall.

“That means,” explained Sara, “‘Then, fellow-sufferer, we will sleep in peace. Good-night.’”

Ermengarde quite beamed with delight.

“Oh, Sara!” she whispered joyfully. “It is like a story!”

“It is a story,” said Sara. “Everything’s a story. You are a story—I am a story. Miss Minchin is a story.”

And she sat down again and talked until Ermengarde forgot that she was a sort of escaped prisoner herself, and had to be reminded by Sara that she could not remain in the Bastille all night, but must steal noiselessly down-stairs again and creep back into her deserted bed.

CHAPTER X

THE INDIAN GENTLEMAN

But it was a perilous thing for Ermengarde and Lottie to make pilgrimages to the attic. They could never be quite sure when Sara would be there, and they could scarcely ever be certain that Miss Amelia would not make a tour of inspection through the bedrooms after the pupils were supposed to be asleep. So their visits were rare ones, and Sara lived a strange and lonely life. It was a lonelier life when she was down-stairs than when she was in her attic. She had no one to talk to; and when she was sent out on errands and walked through the streets, a forlorn little figure carrying a basket or a parcel, trying to hold her hat on when the wind was blowing, and feeling the water soak through her shoes when it was raining, she felt as if the crowds hurrying past her made her loneliness greater. When she had been the Princess Sara, driving through the streets in her brougham, or walking, attended by Mariette, the sight of her bright, eager little face and picturesque coats and hats had often caused people to look after her. A happy, beautifully cared for little girl naturally attracts attention. Shabby, poorly dressed children are not rare enough and pretty enough to make people turn around to look at them and smile. No one looked at Sara in these days, and no one seemed to see her as she hurried along the crowded pavements. She had begun to grow very fast, and, as she was dressed only in such clothes as the plainer remnants of her wardrobe would supply, she knew she looked very queer, indeed. All her valuable garments had been disposed of, and such as had been left for her use she was expected to wear so long as she could put them on at all. Sometimes, when she passed a shop window with a mirror in it, she almost laughed outright on catching a glimpse of herself, and sometimes her face went red and she bit her lip and turned away.

In the evening, when she passed houses whose windows were lighted up, she used to look into the warm rooms and amuse herself by imagining things about the people she saw sitting before the fires or about the tables. It always interested her to catch glimpses of rooms before the shutters were closed. There were several families in the square in which Miss Minchin lived, with which she had become quite familiar in a way of her own. The one she liked best she called the Large Family. She called it the Large Family not because the members of it were big,—for, indeed, most of them were little,—but because there were so many of them. There were eight children in the Large Family, and a stout, rosy mother, and a stout, rosy father, and a stout, rosy grandmother, and any number of servants. The eight children were always either being taken out to walk or to ride in perambulators by comfortable nurses, or they were going to drive with their mamma, or they were flying to the door in the evening to meet their papa and kiss him and dance around him and drag off his overcoat and look in the pockets for packages, or they were crowding about the nursery windows and looking out and pushing each other and laughing—in fact, they were always doing something enjoyable and suited to the tastes of a large family. Sara was quite fond of them, and had given them names out of books—quite romantic names. She called them the Montmorencys when she did not call them the Large Family. The fat, fair baby with the lace cap was Ethelberta Beauchamp Montmorency; the next baby was Violet Cholmondeley Montmorency; the little boy who could just stagger and who had such round legs was Sydney Cecil Vivian Montmorency; and then came Lilian Evangeline Maud Marion, Rosalind Gladys, Guy Clarence, Veronica Eustacia, and Claude Harold Hector.

One evening a very funny thing happened—though, perhaps, in one sense it was not a funny thing at all.

Several of the Montmorencys were evidently going to a children’s party, and just as Sara was about to pass the door they were crossing the pavement to get into the carriage which was waiting for them. Veronica Eustacia and Rosalind Gladys, in white-lace frocks and lovely sashes, had just got in, and Guy Clarence, aged five, was following them. He was such a pretty fellow and had such rosy cheeks and blue eyes, and such a darling little round head covered with curls, that Sara forgot her basket and shabby cloak altogether—in fact, forgot everything but that she wanted to look at him for a moment. So she paused and looked.

It was Christmas time, and the Large Family had been hearing many stories about children who were poor and had no mammas and papas to fill their stockings and take them to the pantomime—children who were, in fact, cold and thinly clad and hungry. In the stories, kind people—sometimes little boys and girls with tender hearts—invariably saw the poor children and gave them money or rich gifts, or took them home to beautiful dinners. Guy Clarence had been affected to tears that very afternoon by the reading of such a story, and he had burned with a desire to find such a poor child and give her a certain sixpence he possessed, and thus provide for her for life. An entire sixpence, he was sure, would mean affluence for evermore. As he crossed the strip of red carpet laid across the pavement from the door to the carriage, he had this very sixpence in the pocket of his very short man-o’-war trousers. And just as Rosalind Gladys got into the vehicle and jumped on to the seat in order to feel the cushions spring under her, he saw Sara standing on the wet pavement in her shabby frock and hat, with her old basket on her arm, looking at him hungrily.

He thought that her eyes looked hungry because she had perhaps had nothing to eat for a long time. He did not know that they looked so because she was hungry for the warm, merry life his home held and his rosy face spoke of, and that she had a hungry wish to snatch him in her arms and kiss him. He only knew that she had big eyes and a thin face and thin legs and a common basket and poor clothes. So he put his hand in his pocket and found his sixpence and walked up to her benignly.

“Here, poor little girl,” he said. “Here is a sixpence. I will give it to you.”

Sara started, and all at once realized that she looked exactly like poor children she had seen, in her better days, waiting on the pavement to watch her as she got out of her brougham. And she had given them pennies many a time. Her face went red and then it went pale, and for a second she felt as if she could not take the dear little sixpence.

“Oh, no!” she said. “Oh, no, thank you; I mustn’t take it, indeed!”

Her voice was so unlike an ordinary street child’s voice and her manner was so like the manner of a well-bred little person that Veronica Eustacia (whose real name was Janet) and Rosalind Gladys (who was really called Nora) leaned forward to listen.

But Guy Clarence was not to be thwarted in his benevolence. He thrust the sixpence into her hand.

“Yes, you must take it, poor little girl!” he insisted stoutly. “You can buy things to eat with it. It is a whole sixpence!”

There was something so honest and kind in his face, and he looked so likely to be heartbrokenly disappointed if she did not take it, that Sara knew she must not refuse him. To be as proud as that would be a cruel thing. So she actually put her pride in her pocket, though it must be admitted her cheeks burned.

“Thank you,” she said. “You are a kind, kind little darling thing.” And as he scrambled joyfully into the carriage she went away, trying to smile, though she caught her breath quickly and her eyes were shining through a mist. She had known that she looked odd and shabby, but until now she had not known that she might be taken for a beggar.

As the Large Family’s carriage drove away, the children inside it were talking with interested excitement.

“Oh, Donald” (this was Guy Clarence’s name), Janet exclaimed alarmedly, “why did you offer that little girl your sixpence? I’m sure she is not a beggar!”

“She didn’t speak like a beggar!” cried Nora; “and her face didn’t really look like a beggar’s face!”

“Besides, she didn’t beg,” said Janet. “I was so afraid she might be angry with you. You know, it makes people angry to be taken for beggars when they are not beggars.”

“She wasn’t angry,” said Donald, a trifle dismayed, but still firm. “She laughed a little, and she said I was a kind, kind little darling thing. And I was!”—stoutly. “It was my whole sixpence.”

Janet and Nora exchanged glances.

“A beggar girl would never have said that,” decided Janet. “She would have said, ‘Thank yer kindly, little gentleman—thank yer, sir’; and perhaps she would have bobbed a courtesy.”

Sara knew nothing about the fact, but from that time the Large Family was as profoundly interested in her as she was in it. Faces used to appear at the nursery windows when she passed, and many discussions concerning her were held round the fire.

“She is a kind of servant at the seminary,” Janet said. “I don’t believe she belongs to anybody. I believe she is an orphan. But she is not a beggar, however shabby she looks.”

And afterward she was called by all of them, “The-little-girl-who-is-not-a-beggar,” which was, of course, rather a long name, and sounded very funny sometimes when the youngest ones said it in a hurry.

Sara managed to bore a hole in the sixpence and hung it on an old bit of narrow ribbon round her neck. Her affection for the Large Family increased—as, indeed, her affection for everything she could love increased. She grew fonder and fonder of Becky, and she used to look forward to the two mornings a week when she went into the school-room to give the little ones their French lesson. Her small pupils loved her, and strove with each other for the privilege of standing close to her and insinuating their small hands into hers. It fed her hungry heart to feel them nestling up to her. She made such friends with the sparrows that when she stood upon the table, put her head and shoulders out of the attic window, and chirped, she heard almost immediately a flutter of wings and answering twitters, and a little flock of dingy town birds appeared and alighted on the slates to talk to her and make much of the crumbs she scattered. With Melchisedec she had become so intimate that he actually brought Mrs. Melchisedec with him sometimes, and now and then one or two of his children. She used to talk to him, and, somehow, he looked quite as if he understood.

There had grown in her mind rather a strange feeling about Emily, who always sat and looked on at everything. It arose in one of her moments of great desolateness. She would have liked to believe or pretend to believe that Emily understood and sympathized with her. She did not like to own to herself that her only companion could feel and hear nothing. She used to put her in a chair sometimes and sit opposite to her on the old red footstool, and stare and pretend about her until her own eyes would grow large with something which was almost like fear—particularly at night when everything was so still, when the only sound in the attic was the occasional sudden scurry and squeak of Melchisedec’s family in the wall. One of her “pretends” was that Emily was a kind of good witch who could protect her. Sometimes, after she had stared at her until she was wrought up to the highest pitch of fancifulness, she would ask her questions and find herself almost feeling as if she would presently answer. But she never did.

“As to answering, though,” said Sara, trying to console herself, “I don’t answer very often. I never answer when I can help it. When people are insulting you, there is nothing so good for them as not to say a word—just to look at them and think. Miss Minchin turns pale with rage when I do it, Miss Amelia looks frightened, and so do the girls. When you will not fly into a passion people know you are stronger than they are, because you are strong enough to hold in your rage, and they are not, and they say stupid things they wish they hadn’t said afterward. There’s nothing so strong as rage, except what makes you hold it in—that’s stronger. It’s a good thing not to answer your enemies. I scarcely ever do. Perhaps Emily is more like me than I am like myself. Perhaps she would rather not answer her friends, even. She keeps it all in her heart.”

But though she tried to satisfy herself with these arguments, she did not find it easy. When, after a long, hard day, in which she had been sent here and there, sometimes on long errands through wind and cold and rain, she came in wet and hungry, and was sent out again because nobody chose to remember that she was only a child, and that her slim legs might be tired and her small body might be chilled; when she had been given only harsh words and cold, slighting looks for thanks; when the cook had been vulgar and insolent; when Miss Minchin had been in her worst mood, and when she had seen the girls sneering among themselves at her shabbiness—then she was not always able to comfort her sore, proud, desolate heart with fancies when Emily merely sat upright in her old chair and stared.

One of these nights, when she came up to the attic cold and hungry, with a tempest raging in her young breast, Emily’s stare seemed so vacant, her sawdust legs and arms so inexpressive, that Sara lost all control over herself. There was nobody but Emily—no one in the world. And there she sat.

“I shall die presently,” she said at first.

Emily simply stared.

“I can’t bear this,” said the poor child, trembling. “I know I shall die. I’m cold; I’m wet; I’m starving to death. I’ve walked a thousand miles today, and they have done nothing but scold me from morning until night. And because I could not find that last thing the cook sent me for, they would not give me any supper. Some men laughed at me because my old shoes made me slip down in the mud. I’m covered with mud now. And they laughed. Do you hear?”

She looked at the staring glass eyes and complacent face, and suddenly a sort of heartbroken rage seized her. She lifted her little savage hand and knocked Emily off the chair, bursting into a passion of sobbing,—Sara who never cried.

“You are nothing but a doll!” she cried; “nothing but a doll—doll—doll! You care for nothing. You are stuffed with sawdust. You never had a heart. Nothing could ever make you feel. You are a doll!”

Emily lay on the floor, with her legs ignominiously doubled up over her head, and a new flat place on the end of her nose; but she was calm, even dignified. Sara hid her face in her arms. The rats in the wall began to fight and bite each other and squeak and scramble. Melchisedec was chastising some of his family.

Sara’s sobs gradually quieted themselves. It was so unlike her to break down that she was surprised at herself. After a while she raised her face and looked at Emily, who seemed to be gazing at her round the side of one angle, and, somehow, by this time actually with a kind of glassy-eyed sympathy. Sara bent and picked her up. Remorse overtook her. She even smiled at herself a very little smile.

“You can’t help being a doll,” she said with a resigned sigh, “any more than Lavinia and Jessie can help not having any sense. We are not all made alike. Perhaps you do your sawdust best.” And she kissed her and shook her clothes straight, and put her back upon her chair.

She had wished very much that some one would take the empty house next door. She wished it because of the attic window which was so near hers. It seemed as if it would be so nice to see it propped open some day and a head and shoulders rising out of the square aperture.

“If it looked a nice head,” she thought, “I might begin by saying, ‘Good morning,’ and all sorts of things might happen. But, of course, it’s not really likely that any one but under servants would sleep there.”

One morning, on turning the corner of the square after a visit to the grocer’s, the butcher’s, and the baker’s, she saw, to her great delight, that during her rather prolonged absence, a van full of furniture had stopped before the next house, the front doors were thrown open, and men in shirt sleeves were going in and out carrying heavy packages and pieces of furniture.

“It’s taken!” she said. “It really is taken! Oh, I do hope a nice head will look out of the attic window!”

She would almost have liked to join the group of loiterers who had stopped on the pavement to watch the things carried in. She had an idea that if she could see some of the furniture she could guess something about the people it belonged to.

“Miss Minchin’s tables and chairs are just like her,” she thought; “I remember thinking that the first minute I saw her, even though I was so little. I told papa afterward, and he laughed and said it was true. I am sure the Large Family have fat, comfortable arm-chairs and sofas, and I can see that their red-flowery wall-paper is exactly like them. It’s warm and cheerful and kind-looking and happy.”

She was sent out for parsley to the greengrocer’s later in the day, and when she came up the area steps her heart gave quite a quick beat of recognition. Several pieces of furniture had been set out of the van upon the pavement. There was a beautiful table of elaborately wrought teak-wood, and some chairs, and a screen covered with rich Oriental embroidery. The sight of them gave her a weird, homesick feeling. She had seen things so like them in India. One of the things Miss Minchin had taken from her was a carved teak-wood desk her father had sent her.

“They are beautiful things,” she said; “they look as if they ought to belong to a nice person. All the things look rather grand. I suppose it is a rich family.”

The vans of furniture came and were unloaded and gave place to others all the day. Several times it so happened that Sara had an opportunity of seeing things carried in. It became plain that she had been right in guessing that the new-comers were people of large means. All the furniture was rich and beautiful, and a great deal of it was Oriental. Wonderful rugs and draperies and ornaments were taken from the vans, many pictures, and books enough for a library. Among other things there was a superb god Buddha in a splendid shrine.

“Some one in the family must have been in India,” Sara thought. “They have got used to Indian things and like them. I am glad. I shall feel as if they were friends, even if a head never looks out of the attic window.”

When she was taking in the evening’s milk for the cook (there was really no odd job she was not called upon to do), she saw something occur which made the situation more interesting than ever. The handsome, rosy man who was the father of the Large Family walked across the square in the most matter-of-fact manner, and ran up the steps of the next-door house. He ran up them as if he felt quite at home and expected to run up and down them many a time in the future. He stayed inside quite a long time, and several times came out and gave directions to the workmen, as if he had a right to do so. It was quite certain that he was in some intimate way connected with the new-comers and was acting for them.

“If the new people have children,” Sara speculated, “the Large Family children will be sure to come and play with them, and they might come up into the attic just for fun.”

At night, after her work was done, Becky came in to see her fellow-prisoner and bring her news.

“It’s a’ Nindian gentleman that’s comin’ to live next door, miss,” she said. “I don’t know whether he’s a black gentleman or not, but he’s a Nindian one. He’s very rich, an’ he’s ill, an’ the gentleman of the Large Family is his lawyer. He’s had a lot of trouble, an’ it’s made him ill an’ low in his mind. He worships idols, miss. He’s an ’eathen an’ bows down to wood an’ stone. I seen a’ idol bein’ carried in for him to worship. Somebody had oughter send him a trac’. You can get a trac’ for a penny.”

Sara laughed a little.

“I don’t believe he worships that idol,” she said; “some people like to keep them to look at because they are interesting. My papa had a beautiful one, and he did not worship it.”

But Becky was rather inclined to prefer to believe that the new neighbor was “an ’eathen.” It sounded so much more romantic than that he should merely be the ordinary kind of gentleman who went to church with a prayer-book. She sat and talked long that night of what he would be like, of what his wife would be like if he had one, and of what his children would be like if they had children. Sara saw that privately she could not help hoping very much that they would all be black, and would wear turbans, and, above all, that—like their parent—they would all be “’eathens.”

“I never lived next door to no ’eathens, miss,” she said; “I should like to see what sort o’ ways they’d have.”

It was several weeks before her curiosity was satisfied, and then it was revealed that the new occupant had neither wife nor children. He was a solitary man with no family at all, and it was evident that he was shattered in health and unhappy in mind.

A carriage drove up one day and stopped before the house. When the footman dismounted from the box and opened the door the gentleman who was the father of the Large Family got out first. After him there descended a nurse in uniform, then came down the steps two men-servants. They came to assist their master, who, when he was helped out of the carriage, proved to be a man with a haggard, distressed face, and a skeleton body wrapped in furs. He was carried up the steps, and the head of the Large Family went with him, looking very anxious. Shortly afterward a doctor’s carriage arrived, and the doctor went in—plainly to take care of him.

“There is such a yellow gentleman next door, Sara,” Lottie whispered at the French class afterward. “Do you think he is a Chinee? The geography says the Chinee men are yellow.”

“No, he is not Chinese,” Sara whispered back; “he is very ill. Go on with your exercise, Lottie. ‘Non, monsieur. Je n’ai pas le canif de mon oncle.’”

That was the beginning of the story of the Indian gentleman.