The Truants Part 1

The Truants.

by A. E. W. (Alfred Edward Woodley) Mason.

CHAPTER I

PAMELA MARDALE LEARNS A VERY LITTLE HISTORY

There were only two amongst all Pamela Mardale's friends who guessed that anything was wrong with her; and those two included neither her father nor her mother. Her mother, indeed, might have guessed, had she been a different woman. But she was a woman of schemes and little plots, who watched with concentration their immediate developments, but had no eyes for any lasting consequence. And it was no doubt as well for her peace of mind that she never guessed. But of the others it was unlikely that any one would suspect the truth. For Pamela made no outward sign. She hunted through the winter from her home under the Croft Hill in Leicesters.h.i.+re; she went everywhere, as the saying is, during the season in London; she held her own in her own world, lacking neither good spirits nor the look of health. There were, perhaps, two small peculiarities which marked her off from her companions. She was interested in things rather than in persons, and she preferred to talk to old men rather than to youths. But such points, taken by themselves, were not of an importance to attract attention.

Yet there were two amongst her friends who suspected: Alan Warrisden and the schoolmaster of Roquebrune, the little village carved out of the hillside to the east of Monte Carlo. The schoolmaster was the nearer to the truth, for he not only knew that something was amiss, he suspected what the something was. But then he had a certain advantage, since he had known Pamela Mardale when she was a child. Their acquaintance came about in the following way--

He was leaning one evening of December over the parapet of the tiny square beside the schoolhouse, when a servant from the Villa Pontignard approached him.

"Could M. Giraud make it convenient to call at the villa at noon to-morrow?" the servant asked. "Madame Mardale was anxious to speak to him."

M. Giraud turned about with a glow of pleasure upon his face.

"Certainly," he replied. "But nothing could be more simple. I will be at the Villa Pontignard as the clock strikes."

The servant bowed, and without another word paced away across the square and up the narrow winding street of Roquebrune, leaving the schoolmaster a little abashed at his display of eagerness. M. Giraud recognised that in one man's mind, at all events, he was now set down for a sn.o.b, for a lackey disguised as a schoolmaster. But the moment of shame pa.s.sed. He had no doubt as to the reason of the summons, and he tingled with pride from head to foot. It was his little brochure upon the history of the village--written with what timidity, and printed at what cost to his meagre purse!--which had brought him recognition from the lady of the villa upon the spur of the hill.

Looking upwards he could just see the white walls of the villa glimmering through the dusk, he could imagine its garden of trim lawns and dark cypresses falling from bank to bank in ordered tiers down the hillside.

"To-morrow at noon," he repeated to himself; and now he was seized with a s.h.i.+ver of fear at the thought of the mistakes in behaviour which he was likely to make. What if Madame Mardale asked him to breakfast? There would be unfamiliar dishes to be eaten with particular forks. Sometimes a knife should be used and sometimes not.

He turned back to the parapet with the thought that he had better, perhaps, send up a note in the morning pleading his duties at the school as a reason for breaking his engagement. But he was young, and as he looked down the steep slope of rock on which the village is perched, antic.i.p.ation again got the better of fear. He began to build up his life like a fairy palace from the foundation of this brief message.

A long lane of steps led winding down from the square, and his eyes followed it, as his feet had often done, to the little railway station by the sea through which people journeyed to and fro between the great cities, westwards to France and Paris, eastwards to Rome and Italy.

His eyes followed the signal lights towards another station of many lamps far away to the right, and as he looked there blazed out suddenly other lights of a great size and a glowing brilliancy, lights which had the look of amazing jewels discovered in an eastern cave.

These were the lights upon the terrace of Monte Carlo. The schoolmaster had walked that terrace on his mornings of leisure, had sat unnoticed on the benches, all wors.h.i.+p of the women and their daintiness, all envy of the men and the composure of their manner. He knew none of them, and yet one of them had actually sent for him, and had heard of his work. He was to speak with her at noon to-morrow.

Let it be said at once that there was nothing of the lackey under the schoolmaster's shabby coat. The visit which he was bidden to pay was to him not so much a step upwards as outwards. Living always in this remote high village, where the rock cropped out between the houses, and the streets climbed through tunnels of rock, he was always tormented with visions of great cities and thoroughfares ablaze; he longed for the jostle of men, he craved for other companions.h.i.+p than he could get in the village wineshop on the first floor, as a fainting man craves for air. The stars came out above his head; it was a clear night, and they had never shone brighter. The Mediterranean, dark and noiseless, swept out at his feet beyond the woods of Cap Martin. But he saw neither the Mediterranean nor any star. His eyes turned to the glowing terrace upon his right, and to the red signal-lamps below the terrace.

M. Giraud kept his engagement punctually. The clock chimed upon the mantelpiece a few seconds after he was standing in the drawing-room of the Villa Pontignard, and before the clock had stopped chiming Mrs.

Mardale came in to him. She was a tall woman, who, in spite of her years, still retained the elegance of her youth, but her face was hard and a trifle querulous, and M. Giraud was utterly intimidated. On the other hand, she had good manners, and the friendly simplicity with which she greeted him began to set him at his ease.

"You are a native of Roquebrune, Monsieur?" said she.

"No, Madame, my father was a peasant at Aigues-Mortes. I was born there," he replied frankly.

"Yet you write, if I may say so, with the love of a native for his village," she went on. M. Giraud was on the point of explaining. Mrs.

Mardale, however, was not in the least interested in his explanation, and she asked him to sit down.

"My daughter, Monsieur, has an English governess," she explained, "but it seems a pity that she should spend her winters here and lose the chance of becoming really proficient in French. The cure recommended me to apply to you, and I sent for you to see whether we could arrange that you should read history with her in French during your spare hours."

M. Giraud felt his head turning. Here was his opportunity so long dreamed of come at last. It might be the beginning of a career--it was at all events that first difficult step outwards. He was to be the teacher in appearance; at the bottom of his heart he knew that he was to be the pupil, he accepted the offer with enthusiasm, and the arrangements were made. Three afternoons a week he was to spend an hour at the Villa Pontignard.

"Well, I hope the plan will succeed, said Mrs. Mardale, but she spoke in a voice which showed that she had no great hopes of success. And as M. Giraud replied that he would at all events do his best, she rejoined plaintively--

"It is not of you, Monsieur, that I have any doubts. But you do not know my daughter. She will learn nothing which she does not want to learn, she will not endure any governess who is not entirely her slave, and she is fifteen and she really must learn something."

Pamela Mardale, indeed, was at this time the despair of her mother.

Mrs. Mardale had mapped out for her daughter an ideal career. She was to be a model of decorum in the Early Victorian style, at once an ornament for a drawing-room and an excellent housekeeper, and she was subsequently to make a brilliant marriage. The weak point of the scheme was that it left Pamela out of the reckoning. There was her pa.s.sion for horses for one thing, and her distinct refusal, besides, to sit quietly in any drawing-room. When she was a child, horses had been persons to Pamela rather than animals, and, as her conduct showed, persons preferable by far to human beings. Visitors to the house under Croft Hill were at times promised a sight of Pamela, and indeed they sometimes did see a girl in a white frock, with long black legs, and her hair tumbled all over her forehead, neighing and prancing at them from behind the gate of the stable yard. But they did not see her at closer quarters than that, and it was certain that if by any chance her lessons were properly learnt, they had been learnt upon the corn-bin in the stables. Portraits of Pamela at the age of nine remain, and they show a girl who was very pretty, but who might quite well have been a boy, with a ma.s.s of unruly dark hair, a pair of active dark eyes, and a good-humoured face alertly watching for any mischief which might come its way.

Something of the troubles which M. Giraud was likely to find ahead of him Mrs. Mardale disclosed that morning, and the schoolmaster returned to his house filled with apprehensions. The apprehensions, however, were not justified. The little schoolmaster was so shy, so timid, that Pamela was disarmed. She could be gentle when she chose, and she chose now. She saw, too, M. Giraud's anxiety to justify her mother's choice of him, and she determined with a sense of extreme virtue to be a credit to his teaching. They became friends, and thus one afternoon, when they had taken their books out into the garden of the villa, M.

Giraud confided to her the history of the brochure which had made them acquainted.

"It was not love for Roquebrune which led me to write it," he said.

"It was, on the contrary, my discontent. I was tortured with longings, I was not content with the children's lessons for my working hours, and the wineshop for my leisure. I took long walks over Cap Martin to Mentone, along the Corniche road to La Turbie, and up Mont Agel. But still I had my longings as my constant companions, and since everywhere I saw traces of antiquity, I wrote this little history as a relief. It kept my thoughts away from the great world."

The garden ran here to a point at the extreme end of that outcropping spur of rock on which the villa was built. They were facing westwards, and the sun was setting behind the hills. It lay red upon the Mediterranean on their left, but the ravine and front was already dark, and down the hillside the shadows of the trees were lengthening.

At their feet, a long way below, a stream tumbled and roared amongst the oleanders in the depths of the ravine. Pamela sat gazing downwards, her lips parted in a smile.

"The great world," she said in a low voice of eagerness. "I wonder what it's like."

That afternoon marked a distinct step in their friends.h.i.+p, and thereafter in the intervals of their reading they talked continually upon this one point they had in common, their curiosity as to the life of the world beyond their village. But it happened that Pamela did the greater part of the talking, and one afternoon that fact occurred to her.

"You always listen now, Monsieur," she said. "Why have you grown so silent?"

"You know more than I do, Mademoiselle."

"I?" she exclaimed in surprise. "I only know about horses." Then she laughed. "Really, we both know nothing. We can only guess and guess."

And that was the truth. Pamela's ideas of the world were as visionary, as dreamlike as his, but they were not his, as he was quick to recognise. The instincts of her cla.s.s, her traditions, the influence of her friends, were all audible in her voice as well as in her words.

To her the world was a great flower garden of pleasure with plenty of room for horses. To him it was a crowded place of enn.o.bling strife.

"But it's pleasant work guessing," she continued, "isn't it? Then why have you stopped?"

"I will tell you, Mademoiselle. I am beginning to guess through your eyes."

The whistle of a train, the train from Paris, mounted through the still air to their ears.

"Well," said Pamela, with a shrug of impatience, "we shall both know the truth some time."

"You will, Mademoiselle," said the schoolmaster, suddenly falling out of his dream.

Pamela looked quickly at him. The idea that he would be left behind, that he would stay here all his life listening to the sing-song drone of the children in the schoolroom, teaching over and over again with an infinite weariness the same elementary lessons, until he became shabby and worn as the lesson-books he handled, had never struck her till this moment. The trouble which clouded his face was reflected by sympathy upon hers.

"But you won't stay here," she said gently. "Oh no! Let me think!" and she thought with a child's oblivion of obstacles and a child's confidence. She imparted the wise result of her reflections to M.

Giraud the next afternoon.

He came to the garden with his eyes fevered and his face drawn.

"You are ill?" said Pamela. "We will not work to-day."

"It's nothing," he replied.

"Tell me," said she.