Two months passed. I was frantic with anxiety; and one day Miss Emily sent for me to come to the study. It was an arid place with its polished floor, its reverent silence broken only by the ticking of the ormolu clock on the macrame-draped mantelpiece. Miss Emily was seated at the desk, her expression one of pain which suggested, erroneously, that what was to follow hurt her more than it hurt me. Parents thought Miss Emily very kind and gratefully entrusted their children to her; they felt she would protect their darlings from the harsher rule of Miss Grainger. In fact it was mild-seeming Miss Emily who was really in charge, but she liked it to be believed that the unpopular rules and regulations were made by her sister.
“I am sure,” she said, her elbows resting on the desk, the tips of her fingers pressed together while she regarded me with some severity, “I am quite sure that you would not wish for charity. It is now two months since we heard from your father and while Miss Grainger is always prepared to be reasonable, she cannot be expected to feed and clothe you, at the same time giving you an education fit for the daughter of a gentleman.”
“I am convinced that a letter from my father is on the way.” Miss Emily coughed.
“It is a long time coming.”
“He is in Australia, Miss Emily. Posts are delayed.”
“Those were exactly Miss Grainger’s words in the beginning. Now three months’ school bills are outstanding.”
“But I am sure it will be all right. Something has delayed the letters. I am certain of it.”
“I wish I could be … for your sake. Miss Grainger is distressed but she has decided she can wait no longer. She cannot continue to support you—feed you, clothe you, educate you….” She made each item sound like a labour of Hercules.
“But, however, she does not wish to turn you out.”
“Perhaps,” I said haughtily, ‘it would be better if I left. “
“That is a rather foolish statement, I fear. Where would you go, pray?”
When Miss Emily ‘prayed’ it meant that she was really annoyed; but I was too apprehensive for caution. My fears for my father’s safety—because I knew that only if something dreadful had happened to him could those letters have failed to arrive—made the wrath of Miss Emily comparatively unimportant to me.
“I could do something, I suppose,” I said spiritedly.
“You have no knowledge of the world. You, a girl of what is it?
Sixteen? “
“Seventeen next month. Miss Emily.”
“Well, Miss Grainger is going to be very generous. She is not going to turn you adrift. She has a proposition and of course you will wish to accept it. Indeed you can do nothing else when you consider the alternative.”
Miss Emily’s smile was pious; the palms of her hands were now pressed together and she turned her eyes up to the ceiling.
“You may stay at the school as one of our pupil teachers. That will go a little way towards earning your keep.”
So I became a pupil teacher and knew utter despair. It was not because of my position in the school but because with every passing day, when no letter came, my fears increased. I “had never been so miserable in the whole of my life. Every day I would tell myself that a letter must come; and every night when I lay in my little attic bed—for I had been moved from the dormitory—I asked myself whether it ever would.
Should I live the rest of my life at Danesworth House waiting for news? I should grow old and fusty like Miss Graeme whose hair resembled a bird’s nest made of grey-brown fluff; I should become pale and wan like Miss Carter; I should peer myopically like Mademoiselle and worry because I could not control the girls.
In the meantime I was less important than they were. I joined Mary Farrow in the attic bedroom with its bare boards and rush mats. Mary had been an orphan in the care of her grandmother and when Mary was sixteen the grandmother had died and Mary was left penniless. Miss Grainger had been magnanimous as with me, and Mary had become a pupil teacher. She was as colourless in her character as in her complexion, and was resigned to her future as I never could be.
We fared worse than the servants. They at least were not constantly reminded that they owed their position to Miss Grainger’s charity.
They were more useful than we were, too. We were apprentices and our’ board and lodgings were our only payment. We must not only give me your their lessons but act as nursemaids to them; w our attic clean and be prepared to perform a might be imposed on us by Miss Emily or Miss G they saw that there were plenty.
The mistresses despised us—as did the serval children realized that they might take liberties in which they dared take in no others. Miss Emily of coming silently into a classroom—always where unruly—and standing and listening with her before she delivered a reproof in front of the eh made them more certain than ever that they could. Poor Mary suffered more from them than I wasn't meek; I had a fiery temper and I think they were in awe of me.
Sometimes I would lie in my narrow bed at an attic waiting for the ghostly touch of the ches the wind moved gently through its branches, i say to myself.
“Abandoned! This is the second life. Why is it that people abandon you? The should be reason for it. Twice in one lifetime.”
But my father would never abandon me. He back. I could not face a world without him. I had such contentment merely to be with him and, and the greatest gift to childhood—security. Not morality, but the only kind which is important to the security of being loved.
I had been a pupil teacher for barely a mont seemed more like a year—when the news came.
I was reading to my class that morning, but I w attending. It was a warm spring day. A bee was i up the window, now flying off in exasperation t fling itself against the glass in a desperate el itself. It was trapped. There was no way out; but on the other side of the room was open and creature would not go there. He continued to tic ally up and down. Caught! Like myself.
The door opened suddenly and there was Missing at me oddly. I noticed that the breeze from it sent the bee in the opposite direction. He found window and flew out.
“You are wanted in the study,” said Miss Gr My first thought was: There is news of him. I I reach the study he will be there.
I turned to the door.
“You should leave your class some work,” reproved Miss Graeme.
I told them to go on reading; then I fled past Miss Graeme, up the stairs to the study. I knocked at the door and waited for the response. Miss Emily was seated at the desk, a letter before her.
“You may sit down, Nora. I have a letter here. There has been some delay in the posts owing to the floods in Australia.” I sat, keeping my eyes on her face.
“You will have to be brave, my dear,” she went on gently.
I felt sick with apprehension. It must be very bad news since she called me ‘my dear’. It was. There could be nothing more terrible.
“The reason we have not heard from your father is that he is dead.”
I stumbled up to my attic and lay on my bed. The leaves of the’ chestnut tree lightly touched the window; the breeze made a soft moaning noise and the sunshine threw dancing patterns on the wall.
I should never see him again. There would be no fortune, no travels, no being together—only utter desolation. He was buried on the other side of the world, and all the time I had been waiting for a letter from him he had been lying in a coffin with the earth on top of him.
Even Miss Emily was sorry for me.
“Go to your room,” she had said.
“You will need to recover from the shock of this.”