“How’s that shy little mouse of a girl we had here a month or two ago?” Mr. Shepherd had inquired. “Let me see—what was her name again?”
To which Miss Isabella had replied: “Well, you know, Robby dear, you really hardly saw her. You had so much to do, poor boy, just when she was here. Her name was Laura—Laura Rambotham.”
And Mrs. Shepherd gently: “Yes, a nice little girl. But very young for her age. And so shy.”
“You wretched little lying sneak!”
In vain Laura wept and protested.
“You made me do it. I should never have told a word, if it hadn’t been for you.”
This point of view enraged them. “What? You want to put it on us now, do you? … you dirty little skunk! To say we made you tell that pack of lies?—Look here: as long as you stay in this blooming shop, I’ll never open my mouth to you again!”
“Someone ought to tell old Gurley and have her expelled. That’s all she’s fit for. Spreading disgusting stories about people who’ve been kind to her. They probably only asked her there out of charity. She’s as poor as dirt.”
“Wants her bottom smacked—that’s what I say!”
Thus Maria, and, with her, Kate Horner.
Tilly was cooler and bitterer. “I was a dashed fool ever to believe a word. I might have known her little game. She? Why, when I took her out to see my cousin Bob, she couldn’t say boo to a goose. He laughed about her afterwards like anything; said she ought to have come in a perambulator, with a nurse. You make anyone in love with you—you!” And Tilly spat, to show her disdain.
“What have they been saying to you, Laura?” whispered Chinky, pale and frightened. “Whatever is the matter?”
“Mind your own business and go away,” sobbed Laura.
“I am, I’m going,” said Chinky humbly. “Oh, Laura, I wish you had that ring.”
“Oh, blow you and your ring! I hate the very name of it,” cried Laura, maddened. And retreating to a lavatory, which was the only private place in the school, she wept her full.
They all, every girl of them, understood white lies, and practised them. They might also have forgiven her a lie of the good, plain, straightforward, thumping order. What they could not forgive, or get over, was the extraordinary circumstantiality of the fictions which with she had gulled them: to be able to invent lies with such proficiency meant that you had been born with a criminal bent. And as a criminal she was accordingly treated.
Even the grown-up girls heard a garbled version of the story.
“Whyever did you do it?” one of them asked Laura curiously; it was a very pretty girl, called Evelyn, with twinkling brown eyes.
“I don’t know,” said Laura abjectly; and this was almost true.
“But I say! … nasty tarradiddles about people who’d been so nice to you? What made you tell them?”
“I don’t know. They just came.”
The girl’s eyes smiled. “Well, I never! Poor little Kiddy,” she said as she turned away.
But this was the only kind word Laura heard. For many and many a night after, she cried herself to sleep.
XIX
Thus Laura went to Coventry. Not that the social banishment she now suffered was known by that name. To the majority of the girls Coventry was just a word in the geography book, a place where ribbons were said to be made, and where for a better-read few, someone had hung with grooms and porters on a bridge; this detail, odd to say, making a deeper impression on their young minds than the story of Lady Godiva, which was looked upon merely as a naughty anecdote.
But, by whatever name it was known, Laura’s ostracism was complete. She had been sampled, tested, put on one side. And not the softest-hearted could find an excuse for her behaviour.
It was but another instance of how misfortune dogs him who is down, that Chinky should choose this very moment to bring further shame upon her.
On one of the miserable days that were now the rule, when Laura would have liked best to be a rabbit, hid deep in its burrow; as she was going upstairs one afternoon, she met Jacob, the man-of-all-work, coming down. He had a trunk on his shoulder. Throughout the day she had been aware of a subdued excitement among the boarders; they had stood about in groups, talking in low voices—talking about her, she believed, from the glances that were thrown over shoulders at her as she passed. She made herself as small as she could; but when teatime came, and then supper, and Chinky had not appeared at either meal, curiosity got the better of her, and she tried to pump one of the younger girls.
Maria came up while she was speaking, and the child ran away; for the little ones aped their elders in making Laura taboo.
“What, liar? You want to stuff us you don’t know why she’s gone?” said Maria. “No, thank you, it’s not good enough. You can’t bamboozle us this time.”
“Sapphira up to her tricks again, is she?” threw in the inseparable Kate, who had caught the last words. “No, by dad, we don’t tell liars what they know already. So put that in your pipe and smoke it!”
Only bit by bit did Laura dig out their meaning: then, the horrible truth lay bare. Chinky had been dismissed—privately because she was a boarder—from the school. Her crime was: she had taken half-a-sovereign from the purse of one of her roommates. When taxed with the theft, she wept that she had not taken it for herself, but to buy a ring for Laura Rambotham; and, with this admission on her lips, she passed out of their lives, leaving Laura, her confederate, behind. Yes, confederate; for, in the minds of most, liar and thief were synonymous.
Laura had not cared two straws for Chinky; she found what the latter had done, “mean and disgusting,” and said so, stormily; but of course was not believed. Usually
