“Go on! As poor as all that?”
“As poor as a church-mouse. But, oh,” she hastened to add, at the visible cooling-off of the four faces, “he comes of a most distinguished family. His father was a lord or a baronet or something like that, but he married a beautiful girl who hadn’t a penny against his father’s will and so he cut him out of his will.”
“I say!”
“Oh, never mind the father.”
“Yes. Well, now he feels under an awful obligation to her, and all that sort of thing, you know.”
“And she drives it home, I bet. She looks a nipper.”
“Is always throwing it in his face.”
“What a ghoul!”
“He’d do just anything to get rid of her, but—Girls, it’s a dead secret; you must swear you won’t tell.”
Gestures of assurance were showered on her.
“Well, he’s to be a Bishop some day. It’s promised him.”
“Holy Moses!”
“And I suppose he can’t divorce her, because of that?”
“No, of course not. He’ll have to drag her with him like millstone round his neck.”
“And he’d twigged right enough you were gone on him?”
Laura’s coy smile hinted many things. “I should say so. Since the very first day in church. He said—but I don’t like to tell you what he said.”
“You must!”
“No. You’ll only call me conceited.”
“No fear, Kiddy. Out with it!”
“Well, then, he said he saw me as soon as he got in the pulpit, and he wondered ever so much who the girl was with the eyes like sloes, and the skin like … like cream.”
“Snakes-alive-oh! He went it strong.”
“And how often were you alone with him?”
“Yes, and if he had met me before he was married—but no, I can’t tell any more.”
“Oh, don’t be such an ass!”
“No, I can’t. Well, I’ll whisper it then … but only to Maria,” and leaning over Laura put her lips to Maria’s ear.
The reason for this by-stroke she could not have told: the detail she imparted did not differ substantially from those that had gone before. But by now she was at the end of her tether.
Here, fortunately for Laura, the dinner-bell rang, and the girls had to take to their heels in order to get their books put away before grace. Throughout the meal, from their scattered seats, they exchanged looks of understanding, and their cheeks were pink.
In the afternoon, Laura was again called on to prove her mettle. Her companion on the daily walk was Kate Horner. Kate had been one of the four, and did not lose this chance of beating up fresh particulars.
After those first few awkward moments, however, which had come well-nigh being a fiasco, Laura had no more trouble with her story. Indeed, the plunge once taken, it was astounding how easy it became to make up things about the Shepherds; the difficulty was, to know where to stop. Fictitious details crowded thick and fast upon her—a regular hotchpotch; she had only to stretch out her hand and seize what she needed. It was simpler than the five-times multiplication-table, and did not need to be learnt. But all the same she was not idle: she polished away at her flimflams, bringing them nearer and nearer probability, never, thanks to her sound memory, contradicting herself or making a slip, and always able to begin again from the beginning.
Such initial scepticism as may have lurked in her hearers was soon got the better of. For, crass realists though these young colonials were, and bluntly as they faced facts, they were none the less just as hungry for romance as the most insatiable novel-reader. Romance in any guise was hailed by them, and swallowed uncritically, though it was no more permitted to interfere with the practical conduct of their lives than it is in the case of just that novel-reader, who puts untruth and unreality from him, when he lays his book aside. Another and weightier reason was, their slower brains could not conceive the possibility of such extraordinarily detailed lying as that to which Laura now subjected them. Its very elaboration stood for its truth.
And the days passed, and Laura had the happiest ideas. A strange thing about them was that they came to her quite unsought, dropping on her like Aladdin’s oranges on his turban. All she had to do was to fit them into their niche in her fabrication.
At first, her tale had been chiefly concerned with the internal rift in Mr. Shepherd’s home-life, and only in a minor degree with herself. But her public savoured the love-story most, and hence, consulting its taste, as it is the tale-maker’s bounden duty to do, Laura was obliged to develop this side of her narrative at the expense of the other. And the more the girls heard, the more they wished to hear. She had early turned Miss Isabella into a staunch ally of her own, in the dissension she had introduced into the curate’s household; and one day she arrived at a hasty kiss, stolen in the vestry after evening service, while Mr. Shepherd was taking off his surplice. The puzzle had been, to get herself into the vestry; but, once there, she saw what followed as if it had actually happened. She saw Mr. Shepherd’s arm slipped with diffident alacrity round her waist, and her own virtuous recoil; saw Maisie and Isabella waiting, sheep-like, in their pew, till it should please the couple to emerge; saw the form of the verger moving about the darkening church, as he put the lights out, one by one.
But the success this incident brought her turned Laura’s head, making her so foolhardy in her inventions that Maria, who for all her boldness of speech was at heart a prude like the rest, grew uneasy.
“You’re not to go to that house again, Kiddy. If you do, I’ll peach to old Gurley.”
Laura ran upstairs to dress for tea, taking two steps at
