Chapter VI

Daphne, her governess, and a new trunk marked D.D.T.B., were all in the Windsor train as it moved out of Paddington. A sense of well-being accompanied Miss Carrell too. So often had she seen parents bringing their children to Hemans House, and envied them the position in which they stood to the school and to the mistresses. It was the difference between the paying and the paid, between the clients of a firm and its servants. Not so much those whose children came for notoriously reduced fees; them she had rather pitied. And now here was she, wearing gracefully the clothes of the leisured classes, and bringing to Miss Vidella a best-paying child. Under a manner of graciousness and charm she would talk to the junior mistresses.

She could congratulate herself on the skill with which she had played for Mr. Bruno's decision. She had used Daphne first, hanging before her gaze pictures of life at Hemans House as it lived in her memory--its fun and mischief, its quaint customs, and its tales of friendship between girl and girl or between governess and pupil, till the child's imagination was possessed by Miss Vidella and her establishment, and she would pester her father to be sent to that school and no other. With the father Miss Carrell had kept her recommendation free from over-emphasis, though unmistakably strong. She made capital with the idea that Daphne would probably do best at a school on which she was keen. And Mr. Bruno had agreed.

Daphne was less happy than Miss Carrell. After all her noisy enthusiasm for school, she did not like to admit a present anxiety that was almost a dread. Even from herself she pushed away a wish that she and Owen and Miss Carrell could have gone on for ever in the schoolroom upstairs with the two desks. As the train hurried towards Windsor she gazed out of the window and affected, for her previous attitude demanded nothing less, a great excitement about the journey and its destination.

"You'll soon seen Windsor Castle," said Miss Carrell.

"Shall we? How ripping!" But she felt that the moment of seeing Windsor Castle, where it towered above the distant trees, would be a moment of something like fright; and one could wish that the train would roll on and on, so that the moment never came. The hunched carters whose wagons rumbled on the country roads were people to be envied for their age and freedom; so were the porters on the platforms, who would be doing to-morrow what they were doing this afternoon; and the engine driver, alone in his engine day after day, with no head mistress or big girls to overawe him. Something was wrong with her breathing; she kept wanting to rearrange it with a short, quick inhalation or a downward sigh or yawn. But when Miss Carrell, looking out of the window, began to search the skyline for the Round Tower of Windsor Castle, that she might point it out with an exhibitor's pride, and at last exclaimed: "There it is--there between the trees!" Daphne jumped up and stared out of the door-window in an imitation of effervescing delight. A sickish business, because her heart was not in the effervescence; it was lying somewhere lower than usual and beating too fast.

"Is Hemans House far from the station?" she asked, and though her voice was meant to suggest impatience, the words were really an appeal for delay.

"Yes, it's a mile or more, but we'll take a fly."

Usually taking a fly was a treat, but now, as the train slowed into Windsor station, the cab seemed little better than a Black Maria or a tumbrel. But life bustles you on regardless of your desire to go slow, or even to stop still, and Miss Carrell bustled her on to the platform. There as she waited, trembling in the cold wind, she sank herself deeper in that despairing envy of all the other persons who were getting out of the carriages: the young people whose schooldays were behind them, the middle-aged who must have forgotten all about school, and the old men who were near death.

Miss Carrell pushed her into the fly, and said "Hemans House" to the cabman, who nodded "Yes'm," and flicked at his horse, starting it up the hill.

Daphne watched out of the window. "Now we're almost there!" she exclaimed, to keep up the fiction of excited happiness.

The high garden wall of Hemans House was not likely to diminish her anxiety; nor the depressing tangle of trees on the other side of the wall, the moss-green gravel, and the stucco house. There was more cheer about the white hearthstoned steps and the green hall door. But the clang of the bell in the basement had a ring of irreparability, as if it had snapped off the past; and the waiting for the door to open was unlike any other waiting she had ever known. Fears seemed to have vivified her thinking and heightened her imagination above the normal. White hearthstoned steps, hollowed where the feet trod, were no longer steps and nothing more. Steps? Steps were romantic things. What one-time tenants of this old house had come up these steps and gone down them, and with what emotions! And now they were in their graves. Perhaps some daughter of the house had eloped down these steps with her lover, like Dorothy Vernon of Haddon Hall. A fraction of those hollows was made by their flying feet. School girls, converging from all parts, had come up these steps, and wondered what years lay before them. And after a time they had taken their farewell journey down them. Stirring, sweet thought, that last walk down them! Long after Miss Vidella had died--one could be selfishly happy if she died this afternoon--other tenants, not yet born perhaps, would come up these steps. A crowd would stand here to watch a wedding pair descend to their carriage on the drive. And the bodies of people would one day be carried in coffins, feet foremost, down the steps. That time they would make no impression on the hollows....

The door was opening, and a maid, who recognised Miss Carrell, was inviting them to come in. They were walking through a rather dark hall to the reception-room. Now they were waiting in the reception-room. This was like an interval between two parts of one's life, an empty, silent pause, like the place where the coupling was, between two coaches of a railway train.

Daphne here began to fill the interval, and thus to contract to commonplace thinking again, by a study of the framed portraits of former pupils. All of them seemed to have written, something like, "To dear Miss Vidella, from her affectionate Violet," and she was cheered by these proofs of lovableness in her head-mistress. How pleasant, when she should have left school for ever, to send a photograph, signed, "To my dear mistress, from her loving Daphne Deirdre Tenter Bruno!" She was startled away from the frames by the sound of a high-pitched voice outside; and the door opened, and Miss Vidella made a dignified entry. Daphne had heard from Miss Carrell that her future principal was "short, stout and very quaint," but the words had suggested no such caricature as this. With a moment's homesickness she knew that, had Owen and she in their former freedom seen such a figure in the street, they would have giggled and hurried out of sight.

"So this is little Daphne Bruno!" said Miss Vidella, stretching out a cold hand which Daphne took. The hand seemed to share none of the affection of the high-pitched voice, but to be a sort of perfunctory companion who did what was expected of it without enthusiasm.

"We generally call her Duffy at home," said Miss Carrell.

"Duffy! What a strange name! I don't think we can call her that here. Sounds too much like Duffer--and we have none of them here." Daphne wondered if this were supposed to be funny. "Besides, being her father's daughter, she'll be anything but a dunce. No, we shall only call her Daphne."

Daphne had a sense of seeing Duffy dismissed from the room.

"And how is your dear father?"

"Very-well-thank-you."

"And is he writing another of his splendid books?"

"Yes-I-think-so."

"That's right."

"He's always at work," interjected Miss Carrell.

"Dear me. You must be a proud little girl to be the daughter of so celebrated a parent. Are you?"

Daphne had never thought of it like that--one hardly did about one's father--but she dutifully mumbled "Yes."

"Well, Daphne dear, you must be happy with us. Your father was most careful to choose a school where you would be happy, and you mustn't disappoint him, but tell him how happy you are here." She turned to Miss Carrell. "I am hoping he will consent to act as a reference for us.... And I tell you what would be nice for you, Daphne, and make you feel more at home, if you could persuade some other dear little girl friends to come to school with you here. Will you?"

"Yes."

"And to think that Miss Carrell, whom I know so well, should have been helping you with your studies for the last few years! Have you learnt a lot from her?"

"Yes."

"That's right. Well, you're a little shy now, aren't you? Very natural, I am sure. Perhaps you'd like to go downstairs to the dining-room, and see some of your school-fellows. Would you like to do that?"

"Yes--thank--you."

"That's right." Miss Vidella struck a bell on the table beside her. "You'll stay here, won't you, Miss Carrell? I am expecting some more of the dear children's parents, and we shall have a cup of tea up here." The maid entered in response to the bell, and her mistress said: "Knight" (she achieved added dignity by calling all her maids by their surnames), "please take Miss Daphne Tenter Bruno and show her her dormitory--she's sleeping in the Eliza Cook room--and then show her to where the other young ladies are assembled in the dining-room. Miss Sims is looking after them."

"Yes, madam."

"Thank you.... Now do you go with Knight, dear, who will show you the way.... Ah, yes, yes, Miss Carrell will come and see you before she goes."

Daphne passed out of the door behind the maid, Knight. As the door closed, the thought of Miss Carrell partaking of an exalted tea with the parents made it seem as if she had been assumed into a heaven, leaving Daphne to work out her salvation in loneliness below.

"Come on, your Shyness," the maid surprised her by saying as, not without kindness, she took her by the hand. "You'll soon get used to us. There's worse places than school when all's said and done, and worse schools than this, I daresay. Come and see your bedroom. Up this way.... Just the next floor.... Now in here.... There ... That's where you'll sleep, and I wish I had half as good a room."

Daphne was in a large, bright room, with six beds whose top blankets were scarlet and their linen well laundered. On the floor at the foot of the nearest she recognised her trunk. The five other beds started more nervousness.

Knight helped her to remove her coat and hat, brush her hair and prepare for the dining-room. Then she led her downstairs to a big, bare room in the basement. Here were three long tables laid for tea, a vase of flowers at every four feet giving an air of gaiety suitable to the day when the girls returned. Round the walls were hung Maud Goodman's pictures: "Taller Than You, Mother," "When the Heart is Young," and "They Lived Happily ever Afterwards." In the bay window, whose panes looked out upon a shallow area, sat a young mistress, evidently Miss Sims. She was a short woman with a colourless face, not ill-featured, and dull, fair hair. Her popularity was shown by the girls who were dancing around her, or sitting with dangling legs on a table at her side.

All heads turned as the maid entered with Daphne.

"Here's one of the new girls, Miss Sims. She's Miss Daphne Brunner, or some name like that."

"Oh, yes. We've heard all about her--Daphne Bruno."

Miss Sims, in her relations with her pupils, was the complete sentimentalist. She lived with emotions she would have been ashamed to reveal. And yet, to herself, she liked to call these emotions the noblest thing in her. It was just this, she had to have somebody to love passionately. The six years of her teaching had been a chain of such hungry, largely concealed loves for some fair-featured pupil. And at the moment when Daphne first saw her, though she was laughing gaily with the girls, for all of whom she felt affection, her mind was really full of treasured regrets and self-pity, because an older pupil, Audrey Stanton, who had held her heart and filled her dreams, had left the school the previous term. "Doubtless," Miss Sims had thought during the holidays, "she will write me a few affectionate letters, and then forget all about me." The pathos of this had evoked a few verses, one of which ran:

Upon the threshold of a broader view,
Where lay revealed what girlhood sees,
I left my little pupil standing, and withdrew
To fondle memories.

And another, supposed to be written in ten years' time when all the girl-children on whom she had expended her love should be dispersed:

O Time, reverse the glass, and let flow back the sands!
Within a stucco house once more a figure stands,
And smiles on upturned faces, grasping outstretched hands.

Revive the past? Ah no! Nor yet retie the knot,
For time must move, and early-formed attachments rot,
And so the tale is told, a girlhood friend forgot.

The melancholy of her return this term to familiar walls empty of Audrey Stanton had been relieved (though in loyalty she hardly admitted it) by the hope that some new pupil would win her heart. When she had been told about the great Mr. Tenter Bruno's daughter, she had wondered whether this interesting child would be able to succeed to Audrey, and to give her all the exquisite delights and sufferings that that gracious girl had had the power to bestow.

And now she saw Daphne. She saw an eleven-year-old child whose brown hair had not yet been tied back with a ribbon. The eyes were brown, large and inquiring; the nose straight and small; the mouth at the moment, unmoving and sad--though the sadness, perhaps, was reflected from a timidity in the eyes. The narrow figure, with its early promise of long, thin limbs, was indistinguishable from a boy's.... The child looked lost.

Miss Sims's heart moved out to her aid, swelling with hope.

Daphne, quite unaware that there was a person in the room who was wondering whether she would be able to love her better than any one else in the world, was introduced to all the girls, none of whom made any impression on her except a certain Gertrude Wayne. This girl, who was perhaps a year older than Daphne, but no taller, had deliberately come and sat beside her, and studied to be pleasant.

(The hidden fact was that Gertrude Wayne had just finished reading a boys' school story, "The Best House at Whitefriars," whose hero, a Godfrey Baldwin, had always been very kind and protecting to new boys, and thereby earned their worship; and her behaviour just now was modelled on Godfrey's. She had even a hope that the bigger girls would be unkind to this new kid, so that she could stand up for her. It must be splendid to have the admiration that Godfrey inspired.)

"What did they say your name was?"

"Daphne Bruno."

"Any other names?"

'Yes; Daphne Deirdre Tenter Bruno."

"Oh, I think Deirdre is a ripping name. Which are you called by at home?"

"I'm generally called Duffy at home, but Miss Vidella says I'm not to be called by that here."

"She would. Nicknames are the same as slang to her, the old---- But's really she's not so bad." (Gertrude had suddenly remembered that Godfrey never spoke unkindly of any one.) "She did the same with me. I'm always called Trudy at home, but she said, 'My dear, what a strange name! It's too much like Judy,' and she made me be called Gertrude. I shall call you Duffy, if you'll call me Trudy. Will you?"

"Yes."

"Where are you sleeping?"

"In the Eliza Cook room I think it was called."

"Oh, blow! I'm in the Frances Burney room. Never mind. If there's anything I can do for you, let me know. I remember how rotten it was when I was new. I've been here two years now----"

The conversation was stopped by the sound of Miss Vidella's voice outside, and when she entered with some parents, all the girls stood up and kept silence. Some older ones giggled, though their lips were compressed.

"This is the dining-room," sang Miss Vidella, and the parents, male and female, gazed helpfully round. "Such a nice, cheerful room. South aspect, and gets the whole day's sun.... Sit down, dears.... You won't mind them sitting down, will you? Yes, they have all their meals here--not luxuries, I'm afraid, but good, plain, wholesome food." (She pronounced this word to rhyme with "good.") "Where's little Daphne Bruno? Ah, there she is. Getting quite at home already.... Come to me, dear, and let me introduce you. This is the great Mr. Tenter Bruno's only daughter."

"Tenter Bruno was an old Harrovian," said one corpulent father, interested for the first time. "He was at Harrow with me."

"There. Now isn't that interesting? Here's some one who was at school with your father. How small the world is! ... Now do you run away, dear."

She soon took out the parents again, who bowed graciously to Miss Sims before withdrawing. Then tea was brought in, the first day of term being celebrated by such extras as blanc-mange and jelly and bananas. The girls, now increased in numbers, were chatteringly occupied with the meal, under the supervision of Miss Sims and another mistress who had appeared, when all were compelled to stand again with full and giggling mouths by the entrance of Miss Vidella, and a second little shift of parents.

"Ah, they've started, I see.... Miss Sims and Miss Stevens." The parents bowed. "Yes, I don't pretend we give them luxuries, but we study always to have good, plain, nourishing food.... Well, sit down, dears, and get on with your meal. I am sure you will be excused. This is one of my new girls this term." Daphne stood up, blushing because her mouth was full, and she was overborne by this semicircle of parents about her. "She's Mr. Tenter Bruno's daughter."

"Really?" exclaimed one lady.

"Yes, he's just sent her..... Sit down, dear.... It's a fine, cheery room, isn't it? Perhaps you'd like to see the dormitories."

They filed out, and the frost-bound chattering violently thawed.

After tea, Daphne was left quite alone and unspoken to, Trudy Wayne having gone away, and Miss Sims been relieved by Miss Stevens. She sat on the edge of a table, and passed the time looking up and round at the Maud Goodman pictures, or watching some big girl whose voice was commanding a moment's attention. Quite half an hour must have gone before Miss Carrell came into the room to kiss her good-bye.

"Good-bye, Duffy, dear. I've got to be off to my train. Try to be very happy."

"I think it's lovely," said Daphne.