Modern Flirtations. Sinclair Catherine
from their sight. Summer flowers alone were implanted in their minds, but no thoughts, hopes, or affections, such as may last for winter wear. To them their birth seemed merely to have been the commencement of an existence, given entirely for their own individual pleasure or advantage, which was finally to terminate at their death.
Before Marion had been long at school, however, she formed an intimacy which produced a permanent and most happy effect on all her subsequent life and feelings. Clara Granville, several years older than herself, had been nurtured, like her brother, in holiness, and in every domestic excellence, while she lived only for the dictates of a chastened and sanctified heart. Delicate in health, and fragile in extreme to appearance, there was something almost seraphic in the delicate purity of her lovely countenance, and in the tranquil composure of her graceful manner. During a long and tedious illness, with which Clara was seized, a short time before leaving school, she testified a tender and almost exclusive affection for Marion, who spent all her leisure hours—or rather moments, for hours were scarce at Mrs. Penfold's—in the most assiduous attention to the beloved invalid, and in imbibing those elements of good, those feelings and principles of religion which were to be guides of all her future life, and thus she became, before long, an enlightened, well informed, and deeply pious Christian, not shrinking from the society of one who excelled herself, but humbly and gratefully seeking, on all occasions, her advice and instruction, while both had their hearts filled with a fervent desire, steadily and consistently to pursue their own best interests, and an anxious wish also to succor and benefit others, in all the troubles and sorrows of life, though Marion was apt to feel like the poet—
Ready to aid all beings, I would go
The world around to succor human woe,
Yet am so largely happy, that it seems,
There are no woes, and sorrows are but dreams.
Marion's health and spirits were refreshed and invigorated by frequent excursions to visit Sir Arthur, who endeared himself to his eager young auditors, Henry and Marion, by expatiating with all the freshness of youth, to their wondering ears, on the times long past, when holidays, romping, sight-seeing, birth-days, and festivals, were still in fashion, but these were the days of his own boyhood, before children were too wise and busy to have time for natural enjoyment. The Admiral was thought, by Mrs. Penfold, a sad marplot, having already, as she knew, done all in his power to dissuade Sir Patrick from placing the "little fairy," as he called his favorite, in such a tread-mill as her school-room, where he said the only knowledge to be acquired was, that knowledge of the world which ruins the heart, and where fascination was to be taught as one of the fine arts, but all his representations, whether in jest or in earnest, were in vain. Sir Patrick, being the guardian of both his sisters, had determined to expend a considerable part of the provision bequeathed by their father in training them up as carefully, for the course of fashionable life, as he would have trained a promising race-horse which was expected to win the St. Leger, confidently anticipating a short and brilliant career of admiration and success, ending with a splendid trousseau, a chariot and four, and a profusion of wedding favors.
Even the gay, frolicsome Caroline Smythe, many years older than Marion, and the most seditious and unruly of pupils, became speedily tamed down to mechanical obedience at school, where, losing her naturally intense enjoyment of mere existence, she seemed at best almost a habitual drudge in the usual routine of labor. There was a mystery never apparently to be fathomed about this lively girl, which excited the most intense curiosity among her companions, but though she was gifted with an extraordinary degree of volubility, which astonished and diverted the whole school, talking in a rapid and irregular manner of all events, past, present, or to come, with a brilliant confusion of drollery and humor, still she never dropped a hint which threw the most transient light on her own situation and affairs. No one knew whence she came or who she was, but though defying all the powers of all the masters to render her accomplished, yet Mrs. Penfold evidently treated her with extraordinary consideration, and almost with respect.
Many were the restrictions and directions given respecting her to the scholars and teachers, which seemed to them most unaccountable, and several of which were voted by the juvenile community to be so peculiarly barbarous and oppressive, that though the young lady herself seemed neither surprised nor annoyed by the rigid watchfulness exercised over all her motions, it excited among her companions an indignant pity, and a keen spirit of partizanship. She was never on any occasion known to walk with the governesses and the other girls beyond the narrow limits of the high garden walls, and on Sundays, instead of attending the parish church, it was observed that one of the teachers invariably remained at home to read prayers with her. No general invitations sent for all the pupils by the friends of other girls, were ever accepted for Caroline, who had special permission to visit with Marion at Sir Arthur Dunbar's, but at no other house in the visible world.
She never spoke of home—received no letters, and once only had a visitor, an object of keen and eager scrutiny to the little gossiping community of Dartmore House, who discovered nothing more, however, than that Caroline's aunt, Mrs. Smythe, was a gay, fantastic-looking, showily-dressed little woman of no certain age, for whom her niece seemed to care very little, as the whole flood of her affections was concentrated on her companions at school. Money she had in the most lavish abundance, while she squandered it with a degree of reckless, and almost contemptuous profusion, perfectly startling to those who scarcely received as much in a year as she seemed able to spend in a day on presents for those she loved, which was the chief use to which her large funds were devoted.
Marion, the companion and pet of her two elder companions, Clara and Caroline, tried with all her powers to extend her affection also to Mrs. Penfold, but her feelings found nothing to feed upon in the cold, formal, rigid manner, and stern upright appearance of the schoolmistress, who repelled all intercourse with her pupils, considering them necessary grievances to be endured in her house, as a source of existence to herself, but not of pleasure. Towards these little slaves of education, driven from task to task with ceaseless pertinacity, no confidence was shown, and between them conversation became systematically discouraged. A governess was appointed to sleep in each room to secure silence among the pupils, few of whom had that glow of heart and imagination peculiar to Marion, and it was fortunate, perhaps, that her large stock of sympathy was not more frequently in requisition, as the most astounding confidences were sometimes imparted to her wondering ears.
One young lady, in a high fever of romance, described to Marion at great length, in the strictest confidence, an elopement which took place from the school where she had last been educated, on which occasion the young narrator had accompanied the bride part of her way, and returned home without detection, by climbing in at an open window. Another of the pupils asked if she did not think Monsieur D'Ambereau, the Italian master, wore singularly handsome mustachios, adding that it was a very common custom now for noblemen to go about in disguise, teaching at boarding-schools, in order to see the young ladies; and a third of Marion's young friends pointed out to her notice that many a ringlet appeared to be more carefully curled than usual, and many a dress to be put on with unwonted solicitude, when Monsieur Frescati, the singing-master, was expected.
Girls in a boarding school are as unnaturally situated as nuns in a convent, where the feelings and emotions, being checked in their spontaneous course, are thrust into channels for which they never were originally intended. Marion had a sufficient object in view, every time she entered a room, from the desire she felt to please all with whom she associated, which gave a vent to the warmth of her affections in seeking the reciprocal attachment of her companions; but many of the other pupils, shut out from nature with her sunshine and flowers, her feelings and emotions, and wearied by a monotonous, uneventful life of dictionaries and grammars, snatched at every legitimate or illegitimate source of novelty or excitement, and their conversation became as frivolous as a toy-shop, while the hopeless vacancy of their thoughts obtained relief if even a blind fiddler or a hand-organ appeared beneath their windows. It was an object of romantic interest for the day, to most of the girls, if an officer in uniform passed along the high-road within sight; an equestrian in plain clothes, if tolerably mounted, furnished them with a subject of exclamations during the following half-hour, and even the very Doctor, a mere country pill-box, who prescribed for Mrs. Penfold's pupils, being well-dressed, and not much above forty, would himself have