The Youngest Girl in the School Part 19

As luck would have it, the Canon expressed a wish that evening to see what the young people were doing with themselves; and it happened that Miss Finlayson brought him through the curtain into the junior playroom just after the six ringleaders had been ordered to stand up.

'Very nice, very charming, to be sure!' murmured the old gentleman, whose benevolent face had gone a long way in carrying his address home to the hearts of his hearers. 'Such a beautiful and womanly sight, too! I suppose you are all working for the poor, eh, my dears? Very excellent indeed, I'm sure!'

His niece was busy talking with Miss Smythe, and did not correct his mistake; and the children were too shy to do more than look at one another and giggle faintly. The Canon went on, and bent over Mary Wells, who appealed to him at once by the serious expression of her face and her diligent application to the head-flannel.

'And for whom are you working so industriously, may I ask?' he inquired benignly.

'It's for my sister--I mean the baby,' stammered Mary, much fl.u.s.tered at being thus singled out. The Canon felt a little perplexed, not having supposed Mary Wells or her sister to belong to what he largely called 'the poor'; and he pa.s.sed on hurriedly to where the six culprits stood first on one leg and then on the other, trying to st.i.tch at their work with wavering and unsteadied fingers.

[Ill.u.s.tration: 'Dear me!' he said, slightly taken aback.]

'Dear me!' he said, slightly taken aback. 'Is it--is it quite usual--I mean, do you find it _convenient_ to perform your--your embroidery in that exceedingly arduous position?'

The six girls edged up to one another; and more giggles, very nervous ones this time, greeted the Canon's remark. He put on his eye-gla.s.ses, and began slowly to grasp the meaning of their uncomfortable position.

'Ah!' he said, with a knowing smile. 'So you have done something you shouldn't, eh, my dears? Shocking, shocking! Let us see what the cause of offence is, and perhaps we can get the punishment mitigated for you.

How would that be, eh?'

He turned to look for Miss Smythe, and the six put their heads together for a hasty, whispered consultation.

'Let's tell him it's through his sermon,' urged Barbara, all agog with mischief. 'It would be such fun!'

'Certainly not!' decided Angela, solemnly. 'He must never know. Didn't he say it was splendid to suffer for righteousness's sake, and isn't this _real_ righteousness?'

She carried the remaining four with her; and by the time Finny and Miss Smythe joined the Canon in front of them, five out of the six faces glowed with the fervour of martyrdom. The sixth was glowing too, but hardly from such a lofty motive.

'Well,' said Miss Finlayson, gently, 'and what is the reason of this?'

Miss Smythe coughed and hesitated. She did not understand her pupils in the least, but she had a certain feeling of loyalty towards them, and she did not want to get them into trouble. Added to this, she really did not know the reason of it.

'They--they were a little tiresome, and I made them stand up,' she explained hurriedly. 'No doubt--only high spirits, and--and so on.

I--I could not quite grasp what had been upsetting them this evening, and I always find standing up is--is an excellent remedy for--for high spirits, in short.'

It was the opinion of the junior playroom afterwards that 'Smithy' had got out of it very well; and she went up in its estimation henceforth. But her explanation failed to satisfy Miss Finlayson. There was something about the virtuousness on the offenders' faces that struck her as being overdone; and she turned to the one at the end of the row, whose countenance was a study in suppressed emotions, and tried to get at the truth of the matter.

'What was it, Barbara?' she asked in that tone of hers that would make any girl tell her anything. Not that Barbara, on this occasion, needed forcing.

'It was because of the sermon yesterday,' she said, bubbling over with enjoyment of the situation. 'And we were all trying to sacrifice ourselves, and it was so difficult, because n.o.body wanted anything done; and then Mary Wells sacrificed herself for me, so I tried to do the same for her, and I only spoiled the baby's head-flannel, and made Smithy--I mean Miss Smythe--wild. That was why I stood up. The other five stood up because they all tried to sacrifice themselves for Jean's thimble; and Miss Smythe hadn't heard the sermon, you see, and she only thought they were being naughty, so----'

'That will do,' said Miss Finlayson, and she turned her back hurriedly on the row of martyrs. The needlework mistress was almost in tears at what she considered a wilfully frivolous manner of referring to a sermon by a real canon. But the Canon just pa.s.sed his hand across his mouth, and then gave up the attempt to look shocked.

'You are very good little girls to listen so attentively to people's sermons,' he said, smiling openly. 'And I think, if anybody ought to stand up, it should be by rights a certain old gentleman who preaches them. What do you say, Miss Smythe? If I promise to stand up for the rest of the evening, will you let these six young ladies sit down?'

CHAPTER XII

THE FURTHER PURSUIT OF GOOD WORKS

'All the same,' said Jean Murray afterwards, 'it doesn't mean that the Canon's sermon was wrong just because all of you were so stupid in the way you tried to make it work.'

She could not really resist such an enticing opportunity of showing her superiority; but her less fortunate school-fellows found it difficult to appreciate her point of view, and they resented it accordingly.

'It's only just by chance that it wasn't you as well,' Barbara hastened to point out.

'And you know you began by being jealous because _we_ were doing all the sacrificing,' added Angela.

The others, not being in the inner circle of Jean's friends.h.i.+p, did not venture on an open remonstrance; but one of them asked her bluntly what she considered the Canon did mean by his address.

Jean drew herself up complacently. 'Well, of course he meant much bigger things than just picking up people's thimbles and interfering with everybody all round,' she began rather contemptuously.

'He said _little_ things, all the same,' observed Mary Wells, doggedly.

'That,' said Jean, airily, 'was only his way of putting it--and because he was a canon,' she added, struck by a brilliant thought. 'When you are a canon, the things you consider little are the same as the things that ordinary people call big.'

'Bravo, Jean,' said Charlotte Bigley, sarcastically. 'Now, let us hear what the big things are.'

Jean was on her mettle, and she gave herself a moment's desperate reflection.

'Well, things like helping the poor, and taking food to people who are starving, and giving up your pocket-money to buy things for them, and not minding how dirty they are, nor how wicked and dishonest and--and tipsy,'

she proclaimed.

The junior playroom was much impressed by this new view of the Canon's sermon.

'Isn't Jean clever?' demanded Angela, proudly, of her immediate neighbours. One of these happened to be Barbara, who fully agreed with her, but still appeared a little puzzled.

'It will be very difficult to do all that,' she observed. 'How can we do things for the poor, when we never see any poor?'

'You never know when the chance may come,' answered Jean, who was rarely at a loss. 'Besides, there's the holidays.'

'What!' said Mary, in a voice of dismay. 'Have we got to wait till the _holidays_ before we can be unselfish?'

'Well,' replied Jean, vaguely, 'you can't say that, for an opportunity may occur at any minute. What we've got to do is to be on the look-out for it.'

This unsatisfactory way of disposing of the Canon's address fell very flat after the recent excitement in the juniors' room concerning it; and most of Jean's listeners grumbled loudly as soon as she was out of hearing.

But Babs and Angela unhesitatingly threw in their lot with Jean. They were not quite sure what she meant, but they never doubted her right to be their leader in this as in everything.

'We'll all keep on the look-out,' they said to one another; 'and the first who sees an opportunity of helping the poor must promise to share it with the other two.'

Sat.u.r.day afternoon came round in another day or two, and on Sat.u.r.day afternoon the girls could do pretty much as they liked, as soon as the hockey practice was over. It was one of those late wintry days in March which bring with them a promise of spring to come: there was a sharpness in the air, now that the sun was nearing the west, that proclaimed it still to be winter, while a faint earthiness of smell, a tumult of birds'

voices in the hedge, and an intense blueness above, all told of the warmer season in store. The triumvirate, as Margaret Hulme had nicknamed Jean and her two inseparable companions, were much too fond of the open air to go indoors before they were obliged; so, while most of their school-fellows voted for the fire and a story-book, they wandered off down the nine-acre field, their arms linked affectionately together.

Their conversation was very engrossing, for it turned on the gymnastic compet.i.tion that was going to be held at the end of the term, for which the Canon had just offered a prize of six morocco-bound books, to be chosen by the successful compet.i.tor herself.

'That's where this hole is such a nice hole for a school,' said Jean. 'At the other school I went to, they never asked you what books you'd like; and they always gave you _poetry_.'

'Some poetry is all right. I think I like poetry when it's got a story in it, and the rhymes are not too far away from one another, and the lines jog along without your having to bother about them,' remarked Babs.