Chapter 21 Three Girls from School by L. T. Meade
Confessions
Mr Manchuri was a person who seldom had his soft moods; but he was very kind to Priscilla. She found the house most luxurious, and was allowed to do exactly what she liked in it. The housekeeper, Mrs Wolf, petted her a good deal, and the other servants were most respectful to her. She was given a large, luxurious room to sleep in, and was allowed to do what she liked with herself while Mr Manchuri was busy all day long over his business affairs.
So one day lengthened into two, and two into three; and a week passed, and still Priscilla was the guest of old Mr Manchuri. It was a Sunday evening, the first Sunday after her visit, when she and the old man were seated together, and the old man put out his hand and touched hers and said:
“There is a dress of Esther’s upstairs; it is all grey and long and straight, and belongs to no special fashion, and I believe if you put it on it would exactly fit you; and I think, in this sort of half-light, if you came down to me in that dress I should almost believe that Esther had returned.”
“But I can’t wear the dress,” said Priscilla, “because of that which I have told you; nor can I see the portrait of your Esther for the same reason.”
“Now, my dear,” said Mr Manchuri, “I won’t ask you to wear the dress and I won’t show you the portrait of my child until you yourself ask me to do so. But what I do want to say is this: that whatever happens, I am your friend; and as to your having done something that you call wicked—why, there—I don’t believe it. What can a young girl who is not yet seventeen have done? Why, look at me, my dear. I am as worldly an old fellow as ever lived, and I have made a capital good bit of business while at Interlaken. It is connected with that secret that I hinted to you about when we were on our way back from Interlaken.”
“Mr Manchuri,” said Priscilla, “what you have done in your life cannot affect what I have done in mine. I have done a very bad thing. It seems dreadful to me, and”—here she looked at him in a frightened way—“you attract me very much,” she said. “You have been so wonderfully kind to me, and the thought of your Esther seems to give me a sort of fascination towards you, and if you will let me I—I—should like to tell you what I have done.”
“Ay?” said the old man, rubbing his hands. “Now we are coming to the point.”
“You will send me away, of course,” said Priscilla; “I know that. I know, too, that you will counsel me to do the only right thing left, and that is to make a clean breast of everything to Mrs Lyttelton.”
“She is your schoolmistress?”
“Yes.”
“Then it is something you have done at school?”
“That is it.”
“Oh, a schoolgirl offence—a scrape of that sort! My dear young lady, my dear Priscilla, when you come to my age you won’t think much of things of that sort.”
“I hope I shall never think lightly of them,” said Priscilla; “that would be quite the worst of all.”
“Well, out with it now. I am ready to listen.”
“I want you to do more than listen,” said Priscilla. She took one of his hands and held it in both of hers. “I want you to be Esther for the time being. I want you to judge me as Esther would judge me if she were here.”
“My God!” said the old man. “I cannot do that. I cannot look at you with her eyes.”
“Try to, won’t you? Try to, very hard.”
“You move me, Priscilla. But tell me the story.”
“It implicates other people,” said Priscilla—she sank back again in her seat—“and in telling you my share in it I must mention no names; but the facts are simply these. I have a great and very passionate love for learning. I am also ambitious. I was sent to Mrs Lyttelton’s most excellent school by an uncle in the country. He could not very well afford to pay the fees of the school, and his intention was to remove me from it at the end of last term. I ought to tell you, perhaps, that I have a father in India; but he has married a second time and has a young family, and he is very poor. Uncle Josiah is my mother’s brother, and he has always done what he could for me. But he is a rather rough, uneducated man; in short, he is a farmer in the south-west of England. Towards the end of the last term I received a letter from him saying that he could not afford to keep me at school any longer, and that I was to come back to him and either help my aunt in the house-work—which meant giving up my books and all my dreams of life—or that I was to be apprenticed to a dressmaker in the village.
“Now both these prospects were equally odious to me. I struggled and fought against them. The suffering I endured was very keen and most real. Then, just when I was most miserable, there came a temptation. By the very post which brought me the dreadful letter from my uncle Josiah, there came a letter to another girl in the school who was most keenly desirous to leave it. I cannot mention the girl’s name, but she was told that unless she won the first prize for literature at the break-up she was to remain for another year. You see, Mr Manchuri, this was the position. One girl wanted to go; another girl wanted to stay. Now I wanted to stay, oh! so tremendously, for another year at school would give me a chance which would almost have been a certainty of getting a big scholarship, which would have enabled me to go from Mrs Lyttelton’s school to Girton or Newnham, and from there I could have continued my intellectual life and earned my bread honourably as a teacher.”
“This is quite interesting,” said Mr Manchuri. “And what happened? You are still at school—at least, so you tell me.”
“Yes,” said Priscilla, “I am still at school; I am there because I—sinned.”
“How, child? Speak, Priscilla; speak.”
“There was another girl in the school, and she was wonderfully clever. I must not tell you her name. She managed the thing. She managed that the girl who wanted to leave the school should get the prize for literature, and that I should stay for a year longer at Mrs Lyttelton’s.”
“But how? How could she do it?”
“She was so marvellously clever that she did do it—of course with my connivance.”
“Oh, with your connivance. How?”
“Well, you see, I could write better essays than most girls in the school, and—and—it was arranged, and—and I consented to give up my essay to the girl who wanted to go, and to allow her to put her signature to it, and I took her essay and put my signature to hers. So she got the first prize for literature and left the school, and I stayed on, my reward being that my fees were to be paid for the ensuing year. That is the wicked thing I have done, and it has sunk into my heart and has made life unendurable.”
“Thank you; thank you very much,” said Mr Manchuri.
Priscilla bowed her head. The old man started up and began to pace up and down the room. After a time he went up to the girl, just touched her on her bowed head, and said very gently: “We will judge this thing, if you please, in the presence of my daughter Esther. Come with me now to her room; you shall see her. The portrait of her is so good that you will almost feel that you are looking at her living self.” Priscilla rose tremblingly. She was weak and exhausted in every limb, but it seemed to her that a powerful hand was drawing her forward, and that she had very little will to resist. Mr Manchuri took the girl up to a room on the first floor. It was a beautifully large room, but scantily furnished. He lit some candles that had been previously arranged in front of a large picture which stood on an easel. This picture had been painted by one of the great portrait-painters of thirty years ago. It was a most speaking likeness, and Priscilla, when first she saw it, started, turned very white, and clasped Mr Manchuri’s hand.
“Why, it is I!” she said; “it is I! I have seen myself like—like that in the glass.”
Mr Manchuri drew a deep breath of relief.
“Didn’t I know it?” he said. “Didn’t I say that you were like her? And see—she smiles at you.—You forgive Priscilla, don’t you, Esther? Smile at her again, Esther, if you forgive her.” The smile on the young face of the girl who had so long been dead seemed to become more pronounced, more sweet, more radiant.
“There,” said Mr Manchuri, “Esther has judged just as God does, I take it; and the thing is forgiven as only God forgives; but what you have to do, Priscilla Weir, is this. You have to put yourself right with your schoolmistress, and in doing so you cannot, in any justice, shield your schoolfellows. I am no fool, dear girl, and I know their names well enough. One of them is that Miss Lushington whom I met at the Hotel Belle Vue, and the other—the girl who arranged the plot and carried it through with such cleverness—is no less an individual than my little quondam friend, Annie Brooke. You see, my dear, there is no genius in my making this discovery, for I have heard them both talk of Mrs Lyttelton’s school, and Miss Brooke often entertained me in the most charming way by giving me a minute description of Miss Lushington’s talents and how she won the great literature prize. Little, little did I then guess that I should be so much interested in you, my dear. We will leave Esther now. Come downstairs with me again.”