The Jolliest School of All, Angela Brazil [rm book recommendations TXT] 📗

quoted Peachy with an extra wide grin. "Cheer up! Don't you realize it's only ten days to half-term? Oh, do, for goodness' sake, look less like a statue of melancholy! Do you know, child, that you're getting permanent wrinkles along that forehead of yours, and it makes you more like fifty than fifteen. You're too sedate. That's what's the matter with you, Lorna Carson! It's a fault that ought to be over[84]come. Copy Delia and me. We know how to enjoy ourselves. There—my lecture is over and now let's talk of earthquakes."

"It's all very well for you, you've got everything you want," murmured Lorna bitterly under her breath. "Some people haven't half the luck, and it's hard to be content with a short allowance and pretend you're the same as every one else. It can't always be done."

She turned away as she said it, so Peachy only caught the sound of a grumble and did not hear the actual words. Had she done so she might possibly have exhibited more sympathy, for she was a very kind-hearted girl. Neither she nor anybody at the Villa Camellia understood Lorna in the least. So far their classmate had been somewhat of a chestnut-bur, and nobody in the Transition had ever penetrated her husk of reserve. There is generally a reason for most things in life, if we could only know it, and poor Lorna's morose and hermit attitude at school was really the result of matters at home. To get into her innermost confidence we must follow her to Naples on her half-term holiday and see for ourselves the peculiar circumstances amid which she had been placed, and the disadvantages that had caused her to differ from other girls.

Lorna's family was the smallest possible, for it consisted only of her father. Nobody at the Villa Camellia had ever seen Mr. Carson—not even Miss Rodgers. He had communicated with her by writing[85] when he wished to place his daughter at the school, but he had never paid a single visit to Fossato. He pleaded stress of business as the excuse for this remissness, but Lorna herself knew only too well that he had no intention of coming. Except to the office at which he was employed he never went to any place where he would be likely to meet English visitors. The furnished rooms where he lived were in the strictly Italian portion of Naples, and not in the vicinity of the big hotels. Secretly Lorna dreaded her holidays. There was nothing for her to do while her father was at the office. She was not allowed to go out alone, and unless she could induce fat Signora Fiorenza, their landlady, to be philanthropic and chaperon her to look at the shops, she was obliged to amuse herself in the house during the day as best she could. In the evening things were certainly better. Her father would take her to dine at an Italian restaurant, and would sometimes treat her to a performance at a theater or cinema close at hand, or would escort her for a lamplight walk along the streets, but these brief expeditions were evidently made out of a sense of duty, and Mr. Carson was plainly unhappy until he was once more ensconced in his own sitting-room with his favorite books and his reading-lamp. He had seen so little of his daughter during the five years they had lived at Naples that, though in a sense he was fond of her, she was more of an embarrassment to him than an asset. Lorna realized this only too keenly.[86] Her sensitive disposition shrank away from her father. She was shy in his presence, and never knew what to say to him. She seemed always aware of some enormous shadow that hung over their lives and darkened the daylight. What this was she had no means of guessing, but it was emphatically there. She had learned, by bitter experience, never to ask to be taken to the fashionable portions of the city; she knew that the sound of a voice speaking English at a neighboring table was enough to cause her father to finish his meal in a hurry and leave the restaurant. They never went to the British Church, and even such cosmopolitan spots as the aquarium or the museum were equally taboo.

Long and often did Lorna puzzle over this idiosyncrasy of her father. She retained vague memories of her early childhood, when he had surely been utterly different and would come into the nursery to romp with her. It had not been altogether her mother's death; that had happened when she was only six years old, and there were bright memories after it of happy times together. No—it was when she was ten years old that the unknown catastrophe must have occurred which had ruined her father's life. She could remember plainly the visit of several gentlemen, and of loud angry voices talking inside the drawing-room; she was standing on the stairs as they came out into the hall, and her father had told her roughly to run away. Then had followed a hasty removal, and they had left their comfortable[87] home in London and had come to live in Naples. After a dreary time in a second-rate Italian boarding-house she had been sent to the Villa Camellia, and all link with England was lost and broken. No aunt or cousins ever wrote to her, and the earlier portion of her life seemed a period that was utterly ended.

So far Lorna had never had the courage to make any inquiries into the why and wherefore of this unsatisfactory state of affairs. If a question rose to her lips the sight of her father's forbidding face effectually curbed her curiosity. That some tragedy had been concealed from her she was positive. The suspicion, nay the absolute certainty, was sufficient to place a division between herself and other girls. She would hear her schoolfellows discussing their homes, relations, and friends, and when she contrasted their gay doings with her own barren holidays she shrank into her shell, and would make no allusion to her private affairs.

"Lorna's an absolute oyster, you can get nothing out of her," was the universal verdict of her form.

But if she said little she thought a great deal. She would listen jealously to the accounts of other people's fun, and a bitter feeling had grown in her heart. Why should her life be so shadowed? She had as much right to happiness as the rest of the school. Why should she seem singled out by a vindictive fate and separated from her companions?

In justice to the girls at the Villa Camellia it is[88] only fair to say that any separation was entirely of Lorna's own making. Had she been more expansive she would have readily enough found friends. No one knew of the misery of her home life, and she was simply judged as what her schoolfellows thought her—a queer-tempered crank who refused to join in the general fun of the place, and in consequence was left out of most things.

Irene, pleasant and hail-fellow-well-met with all comers, had at once noticed this attitude of the others towards Lorna. At the drawing of lots in the sorority she had somehow realized that everybody was extremely thankful to have escaped having her unpopular chum as a buddy. Chance remarks and slight allusions, hardly noticed at the time, but remembered later, had confirmed this.

"They're not exactly unkind, but they're down on that girl," she had concluded. "I haven't made up my mind yet whether I altogether like her, but I'm going to be decent to her all the same."

As the very first who had treated her on a real equality of girlhood Irene had been placed on a pedestal in Lorna's empty heart. The separation between the two added to the loneliness of the latter's brief half-term holiday. She had never missed school so much before, or hated her surroundings so entirely. The long week-end dragged itself slowly away. Sunday was wet and they stayed all day in the little sitting-room, Mr. Carson reading as usual, and Lorna trying to amuse herself with Italian maga[89]zines and fidgeting as much as she dared. Towards evening the rain cleared a little and her father went out, refusing, however, to allow her to accompany him. At the end of an hour he returned and flung himself heavily into his chair. He was in a state such as she had never witnessed before, violently excited, with glaring eyes and twitching hands.

"Lorna!" he exclaimed in quick panting accents, "I have met my enemy. The man who ruined me! Yes, the man who deliberately blackened and ruined me!"

Lorna turned to him half frightened.

"What is it, Father?" she asked. "Have you an enemy? You've never let me know before. Oh, I wish you'd tell me! I'm fifteen now, and surely old enough to hear. It's so horrible to feel there's something you're always keeping from me."

"I suppose you'll find out some time, so I may as well tell you myself," replied Mr. Carson grimly. "I'm a wronged, ruined man, Lorna, suffering for the sin of another who goes scotfree. The world judged me guilty of embezzlement, but before God I am innocent! I never touched a penny of the money. Do you believe me innocent? Surely my own daughter won't turn against me?"

"No, no, Father! Indeed I believe you innocent. Tell me how it happened. Was it when we left London? I seem to remember the trouble there was then, though you never explained. We had a different name then, hadn't we?"[90]

"You were too young at the time to understand, and it wasn't a subject I wished to revive. Briefly, a big sum, for which I was responsible, disappeared. The head of the firm believed me guilty, but for the sake of old associations he would not prosecute; he simply told me to go. I consulted my lawyer, and, if there had been the slightest chance of clearing myself, I'd have fought the matter to a finish, but he told me my case hadn't a leg to stand on, and that, if I were foolish enough to bring it into court, I should certainly be convicted of embezzlement, and sent to penal servitude; that it was only the clemency of my chief's attitude that saved me, and that he advised me to go abroad while I could. So I left England in a hurry, a disgraced man, disowned by his family and his friends. I changed my name to Carson, and through the kindness of a business acquaintance I was offered a clerkship in an Italian counting-house in Naples, which post I have kept ever since. How I should otherwise have made a living God only knows! It's always my haunting fear that some one in Naples will recognize me and tell them at the office who I am. If that old story leaks out I may once more be ruined."

"But who did it, Father?" asked Lorna. "Had you no clew at all?"

"Not enough to convict, only a strong suspicion, so strong that it is practically a certainty. The man who ruined me was once my friend. Now for five long years, he has been my bitterest enemy. We[91] were both heads of departments in the firm of Burgess and Co. Probably he's a partner now, as I ought to have been. I've never heard news of him since I left London, but to-day I saw him in the Corso. I saw him plainly without any possibility of mistake. What is he doing in Naples? Has he come here to ruin me again?"

"No, no, Dad, surely not! Perhaps he doesn't know you're in Italy. Probably he's only taking a holiday and will go back to England soon," faltered