CHAPTER I

THE MISS CLARKSONS' EDUCATIONAL ESTABLISHMENT FOR YOUNG LADIES

A goodly number of years ago there stood in one of the northern suburbs of London a large, old-fashioned red-brick house. In former days, somewhere about the middle of the last century, it had been a stately family mansion. A broad flight of stone steps led up to the hall-door, and in the iron railings on either side there still remained the extinguishers with which the linkboys had been wont to put their torches out, after escorting some fashionable lady home in her sedan-chair from a gay rout or assembly.

Within doors, too, the stone-flagged hall, the wide staircase, and the lofty rooms with their carved mantel-pieces and richly-decorated ceilings, bore witness to the ancient glories of Treherne House. Those glories, however, had long passed away. The original owners, the Trehernes, had sold it many years before, when fashionable people moved to other parts of London; and though the old house retained its high-sounding name, it had known many vicissitudes and changed hands many times since then. For some dozen years or so it had been owned by three middle-aged sisters, the Miss Clarksons, the principals of a large and flourishing school, or--to quote the inscription on the huge brass plate affixed to the hall-door--of an educational establishment for young ladies.

If anyone had chanced to stand in the entrance-hall of Treherne House upon a certain sunny spring morning, he could not have failed to perceive that this work of education was being carried on even more vigorously than usual. A busy hum of voices pervaded the whole house, and burst forth more loudly every now and again with the opening of a class-room door, while somewhere far aloft indefatigable fingers raced up and down the piano over sharps and flats in persevering efforts to master a difficult passage.

Both pupils and teachers, indeed, were working at full pressure, for the Easter holidays were barely three weeks off, and the examinations which marked the conclusion of each school-term were to begin the following week.

To Miss Euphemia, the youngest of the three Miss Clarksons, the care of the juniors of the school was specially confided. She was at present giving a geography lesson to her class, which numbered fourteen or fifteen girls of ages ranging from eleven to thirteen, in a large and dingy room on the ground-floor.

"Turkey in Asia lies between latitudes 30° and 41° North, longitudes 26° and 48° East," a flabby-looking, flaxen-haired girl was drawling out. "It is bounded on the north by the Dardanelles, the Sea of Marmora, the Bosphorus, the Black Sea, and the Caucasus; upon the east by Persia, upon the south by the Persian Gulf and Arabia, and on the west by the Mediterranean."

"Very correctly answered indeed, Louisa, my dear. Constance Lane, which are the principal rivers of Turkey in Asia?"

"The Euphrates and Tigris, falling into the Persian Gulf; the Kizil Irmak, into the Black Sea; the Sihoon, Jihon, and Orontes, into the Mediterranean; and the Jordan into the Dead Sea."

"Quite right also. Norah O'Brien, name the chief towns in the order of their relative importance."

This time there was not the same ready response. Miss Euphemia rapped her desk sharply with her pencil and spoke again.

"Norah O'Brien, be good enough to attend to the lesson instead of staring out of the window! What have I just asked you?"

A well-meant nudge from a neighbour's elbow helped to bring the little girl addressed to herself with a sudden start. She was the youngest in the class, but sat nearly two-thirds up the row of girls; and her eyes, as Miss Euphemia had said, had wandered away from the dismal class-room, with its well-worn school furniture and walls hung with smoke-stained maps, out through the window opposite to her. There was not much to be seen there, only a wilderness of roofs and walls, with the spring sunshine lying bright and hot upon them, and three smutty sparrows chirping with might and main on the solitary plane-tree that grew in the back-garden, and which, notwithstanding London smoke and soot, was sending out fresh green buds all along its grimy branches.

"Chief towns," good-naturedly whispered a big girl who sat beside Norah, the one who had already given her that friendly midge. But Norah, whose thoughts had strayed away far beyond the back-garden and its sparrows, and who had only been brought back to stern reality by the rapping of Miss Euphemia's pencil and the sudden, sharp question fired off at her like a pistol-shot, was too confused and bewildered to profit by the kindly hint. The silence of the class made her aware that a reply of some sort was expected from her, and answering, not Miss Euphemia's question, but the train of thought in which she had herself been engaged, she stammered out:

"Tuesday fortnight, Miss Euphemia."

There was a general titter from all the girls. Tuesday fortnight was the day on which the school was to break up for the Easter holidays, so no one had any difficulty in guessing where Norah's thoughts had drifted to. A frown from Miss Euphemia and another tap of her pencil brought instant silence however.

"Norah O'Brien, go to the bottom of the class! You will not accompany the rest of the school upon their walk this afternoon. You will remain indoors and write out the geography lesson instead. If I have to call you to order again for inattention I shall be compelled to report you to Miss Clarkson."

There was no penalty more dreaded by all the girls in Treherne House than to be reported to Miss Clarkson, the severe and stately ruler of the educational establishment, and to be summoned to appear in her special sanctum for reprimand and admonition. It was with no little dismay, therefore, that Norah gathered up her books and moved down the class to the place assigned to her, seating herself below a little girl with pretty pink cheeks and long silky curls, who till then had occupied the lowest place with all apparent contentment.

Lily Allardyce was the next youngest girl in the school to Norah, and they were close friends and companions. She gave Norah's hand a little consolatory squeeze as she moved up to make room for her, and whispered:

"Never mind, Norah, it's ever so much nicer when we're together than when you're up near the top of the class. It's Fräulein's turn to go out with us to-day, and I'll coax her to let me buy something to bring home to you."

Lily was the little heiress of the school, and always more abundantly provided with pocket-money than anybody else. Her parents were wealthy people, who delighted in heaping presents of clothes, of books, of playthings, and of expensive trifles of every kind upon their only child. It was strange that she and Norah should have come to be such allies, for not only in their appearance, but in their tastes and dispositions, and in all other respects, they were as great a contrast as two children nearly of an age could possibly be.

Lily, as already said, was a soft, fair, pink and white little thing, always beautifully dressed in the daintiest of frocks. No one had ever seen Lily flushed, or tossed, or untidy. She was always well-behaved too; a quiet, plodding little maiden who was not brilliant in any way, but who learned her lessons steadily and never got into scrapes, except when she was led into them by her more venturesome companion.

One of her brothers had once teasingly, but not at all inaptly, described Norah as "short and dark, like a winter's day". She was so small as to look much less than her eleven years, and she had a thick shock of short black hair which resembled a pony's shaggy mane more than anything else. With her turned-up nose and rather wide mouth Norah would have been undeniably plain, if not absolutely ugly, if it had not been for her dark-blue eyes--Irish eyes, Norah loved to have them called. In general those eyes of Norah's were brimful of fun and mischief, but on this particular morning they looked as though tears were much nearer to them than laughter, for together with her Irish eyes Norah had inherited the quick Irish temperament with all its April-day changes of mood. Usually she was the ringleader in every frolic and in every piece of mischief that was set on foot, and at once the torment and the delight of her teachers. She was so bright and intelligent that when she gave her mind to her lessons she could master them in half the time that it took the rest of the class to plod through them, and girls considerably her seniors were wont to consult her about difficulties in their sums and exercises. Unhappily, however, there were very frequent occasions when Norah's mind was not given to her lessons, but was running on all sorts of other things, so that it was no uncommon experience to her to find herself, as at present, sent to the bottom of the class with a punishment in prospect. Not even the strictest of her governesses, however, could retain their displeasure against her very long, and as for the girls, they one and all adored little Norah. The elder ones petted and made much of her, and amongst the juniors, youngest of all though she was, she had constituted herself the leading spirit, the originator of freaks and schemes of daring which would never have occurred to any of them except herself.

"I'm Irish, you know, it all comes of that," Norah would say modestly when complimented on her fertility of invention.

There was nothing indeed of which she was so proud as of her Irish name and her Irish descent, although she herself had never set foot in Ireland in all her life. She did her best--not very successfully--to cultivate an Irish brogue, and no one could have displeased her more than by spelling her Christian name without the concluding _h_, which marked it as distinctively Irish. The shabby black frock which Norah wore, adorned by more than one unscientifically-cobbled rent, with cuffs and collar of frayed-out crape, betokened that she must be in mourning for someone near to her, not long dead; and there were times, as all her companions knew, when even in her wildest and merriest moods some chance word carelessly uttered would call up old memories and send Norah in floods of tears into some dark corner to sob her heart out in passionate grief and fruitless longings.

Poor Norah's troubles were weighing very heavily upon her on this first morning of our making her acquaintance. It was her first term at school, and as has been seen, the holidays were close at hand. Already the forty girls at Treherne House talked of little else but what each of them hoped and intended to do during those happy weeks; Norah alone, out of the whole forty, had no home to go to, no plans or projects to make. Lily Allardyce, however, had promised to ask leave to bring her down with her to her home in Hampshire, and Norah knew that Lily's parents were not the least likely to refuse her anything which she might ask.

On this very morning, however, Lily had had a letter from her mother, to tell her that she and her father were so pleased by Miss Clarkson's report of her conduct and progress during the term, that they had determined, as a reward for her diligence, to take her to Paris in the holidays, and to let her have her first glimpse of foreign life.

"You shall come to us in summer instead, Norah," Lily had said consolingly. "We shall have six weeks' holidays then instead of three, and there will be picnics and boating parties, and ever so much more fun than we'd have had now."

To poor Norah, however, the prospect of a longer and pleasanter visit several months off seemed but meagre compensation for three weeks of loneliness and desertion in the immediate future. Even the Miss Clarksons themselves were going to the sea-side for the holidays, and she would be left to inhabit the gaunt, empty rooms, with no other company than Fräulein Glock, the German governess. She had loyally done her best to conceal her disappointment and to enter into Lily's delight at the promised trip, but it was hardly to be wondered at if her eyes strayed wistfully out of the prison-like school-room to the sunshine outside, or if her thoughts wandered away from Turkey in Asia and its towns and rivers back to her old home on Hampstead Heath, and to the joyous, untroubled home life which had been interrupted so rudely by her father's death six months before.

It had been a very easy-going, harum-scarum household in which Norah had grown up, almost as Irish in its ways as if it had been situated amongst the old ancestral possessions of the O'Briens on the wild west coast of Ireland instead of in an eminently orderly and respectable suburb of London. Norah's father, Piers O'Brien, with his cheery, genial manner, his unfailing spirits, and the soft Irish accent which he had never lost, had been the life and soul of the little home on the green heights of Hampstead. He had been its mainstay and support too, for it was the brilliant, racy articles for newspapers and magazines, which flowed so freely from his pen, that furnished the means for providing for the wants of the household. But coming out from London one wet night in the previous autumn Piers O'Brien had caught a severe chill. A sudden and serious illness followed. There were a few days of agonized anxiety and distress, and then all was over, and the young O'Briens found themselves left, orphaned and well-nigh penniless, to face the world as best they could.

Their mother had died long before, quite beyond Norah's memory; but Norah had never felt the want of a mother's love, her elder sister Anstace, with her sweet womanly ways, had filled the vacant place so completely. Anstace was the second of the family; the eldest was Roderick, the tall brother of whom they were all so proud, who had just finished his college career with honours and distinction, and who was to have gone to the bar. He was twenty-one, and Anstace was two years younger, and after her there had been a stretch of seven years before the next brother, Manus, the special object of Norah's devotion, had made his appearance. Norah herself, the fourth and youngest, made the little family circle complete.

Roderick and Anstace were both very young to have such a heavy load of anxiety and responsibility thrust suddenly upon them. Careless and easy-going in money matters as in everything else, their father had not troubled himself about laying up any provision for the future, and when once the expenses of his illness and the funeral had been paid, there was but little left. The brother and sister, however, set themselves to bear their burden bravely. They decided with all promptitude that what little money remained, together with all that they could spare from their own scanty earnings, must be devoted to the two children and to their education, whilst they made shift to provide for themselves as best they could.

Anstace in former days had been a favourite pupil in the Miss Clarksons' educational establishment, and she had always kept up friendly relations with its principals. They now offered to take Norah into Treherne House on very much reduced terms, an offer which Roderick and Anstace most gratefully accepted. A cheap school, too, was, after some trouble, found for Manus in Kent. Roderick, relinquishing his hopes of the bar, accepted employment as a lawyer's clerk with as much apparent cheerfulness as if he had never looked forward to any other career, while Anstace became governess in the family of the doctor who had attended their father in his last illness, who had come to know their circumstances and was anxious to befriend them.