A Little Princess

Once on a dark winter’s day, when the yellow fog hung so thick and heavy in the streets of London that the lamps were lighted and the shop windows blazed with gas as they do at night, an odd- looking little girl sat in a cab with her father and was driven rather slowly through the big thoroughfares.
She sat with her feet tucked under her, and leaned against her father, who held her in his arm, as she stared out of the window at the passing people with a queer old-fashioned thoughtfulness in her big eyes.
She was such a little girl that one did not expect to see such a look on her small face. It would have been an old look for a child of twelve, and Sara Crewe was only seven. The fact was, however, that she was always dreaming and thinking odd things and could not herself remember any time when she had not been thinking things about grown-up people and the world they belonged to. She felt as if she had lived a long, long time.
At this moment she was remembering the voyage she had just made from Bombay with her father, Captain Crewe. She was thinking of the big ship, of the Lascars passing silently to and fro on it, of the children playing about on the hot deck, and of some young officers’ wives who used to try to make her talk to them and laugh at the things she said.
Principally, she was thinking of what a queer thing it was that at one time one was in India in the blazing sun, and then in the middle of the ocean, and then driving in a strange vehicle through strange streets where the day was as dark as the night. She found this so puzzling that she moved closer to her father.
“Papa,” she said in a low, mysterious little voice which was almost a whisper, “papa.”
“What is it, darling?” Captain Crewe answered, holding her closer and looking down into her face. “What is Sara thinking of?”
“Is this the place?” Sara whispered, cuddling still closer to him. “Is it, papa?”
“Yes, little Sara, it is. We have reached it at last.” And though she was only seven years old, she knew that he felt sad when he said it.
It seemed to her many years since he had begun to prepare her mind for “the place,” as she always called it. Her mother had died when she was born, so she had never known or missed her. Her young, handsome, rich, petting father seemed to be the only relation she had in the world. They had always played together and been fond of each other. She only knew he was rich because she had heard people say so when they thought she was not listening, and she had also heard them say that when she grew up she would be rich, too. She did not know all that being rich meant. She had always lived in a beautiful bungalow, and had been used to seeing many servants who made salaams to her and called her “Missee Sahib,” and gave her her own way in everything. She had had toys and pets and an ayah who worshipped her, and she had gradually learned that people who were rich had these things. That, however, was all she knew about it.
During her short life only one thing had troubled her, and that thing was “the place” she was to be taken to some day. The climate of India was very bad for children, and as soon as possible they were sent away from it—generally to England and to school. She had seen other children go away, and had heard their fathers and mothers talk about the letters they received from them. She had known that she would be obliged to go also, and though sometimes her father’s stories of the voyage and the new country had attracted her, she had been troubled by the thought that he could not stay with her.
“Couldn’t you go to that place with me, papa?” she had asked when she was five years old. “Couldn’t you go to school, too? I would help you with your lessons.”
“But you will not have to stay for a very long time, little Sara,” he had always said. “You will go to a nice house where there will be a lot of little girls, and you will play together, and I will send you plenty of books, and you will grow so fast that it will seem scarcely a year before you are big enough and clever enough to come back and take care of papa.”
She had liked to think of that. To keep the house for her father; to ride with him, and sit at the head of his table when he had dinner parties; to talk to him and read his books—that would be what she would like most in the world, and if one must go away to “the place” in England to attain it, she must make up her mind to go. She did not care very much for other little girls, but if she had plenty of books she could console herself. She liked books more than anything else, and was, in fact, always inventing stories of beautiful things and telling them to herself. Sometimes she had told them to her father, and he had liked them as much as she did.
“Well, papa,” she said softly, “if we are here I suppose we must be resigned.”
He laughed at her old-fashioned speech and kissed her. He was really not at all resigned himself, though he knew he must keep that a secret. His quaint little Sara had been a great companion to him, and he felt he should be a lonely fellow when, on his return to India, he went into his bungalow knowing he need not expect to see the small figure in its white frock come forward to meet him. So he held her very closely in his arms as the cab rolled into the big, dull square in which stood the house which was their destination.
It was a big, dull, brick house, exactly like all the others in its row, but that on the front door there shone a brass plate on which was engraved in black letters:
Miss Minchin,
Select Seminary for Young Ladies.
“Here we are, Sara,” said Captain Crewe, making his voice sound as cheerful as possible. Then he lifted her out of the cab and they mounted the steps and rang the bell. Sara often thought afterward that the house was somehow exactly like Miss Minchin. It was respectable and well furnished, but everything in it was ugly; and the very armchairs seemed to have hard bones in them. In the hall everything was hard and polished—even the red cheeks of the moon face on the tall clock in the corner had a severe varnished look. The drawing room into which they were ushered was covered by a carpet with a square pattern upon it, the chairs were square, and a heavy marble timepiece stood upon the heavy marble mantel.
As she sat down in one of the stiff mahogany chairs, Sara cast one of her quick looks about her.
“I don’t like it, papa,” she said. “But then I dare say soldiers— even brave ones—don’t really like going into battle.”
Captain Crewe laughed outright at this. He was young and full of fun, and he never tired of hearing Sara’s queer speeches.
“Oh, little Sara,” he said. “What shall I do when I have no one to say solemn things to me? No one else is as solemn as you are.”
“But why do solemn things make you laugh so?” inquired Sara.
“Because you are such fun when you say them,” he answered, laughing still more. And then suddenly he swept her into his arms and kissed her very hard, stopping laughing all at once and looking almost as if tears had come into his eyes.
It was just then that Miss Minchin entered the room. She was very like her house, Sara felt: tall and dull, and respectable and ugly. She had large, cold, fishy eyes, and a large, cold, fishy smile. It spread itself into a very large smile when she saw Sara and Captain Crewe. She had heard a great many desirable things of the young soldier from the lady who had recommended her school to him. Among other things, she had heard that he was a rich father who was willing to spend a great deal of money on his little daughter.
“It will be a great privilege to have charge of such a beautiful and promising child, Captain Crewe,” she said, taking Sara’s hand and stroking it. “Lady Meredith has told me of her unusual cleverness. A clever child is a great treasure in an establishment like mine.”
Sara stood quietly, with her eyes fixed upon Miss Minchin’s face. She was thinking something odd, as usual.
“Why does she say I am a beautiful child?” she was thinking. “I am not beautiful at all. Colonel Grange’s little girl, Isobel, is beautiful. She has dimples and rose-colored cheeks, and long hair the color of gold. I have short black hair and green eyes; besides which, I am a thin child and not fair in the least. I am one of the ugliest children I ever saw. She is beginning by telling a story.”
She was mistaken, however, in thinking she was an ugly child. She was not in the least like Isobel Grange, who had been the beauty of the regiment, but she had an odd charm of her own. She was a slim, supple creature, rather tall for her age, and had an intense, attractive little face. Her hair was heavy and quite black and only curled at the tips; her eyes were greenish gray, it is true, but they were big, wonderful eyes with long, black lashes, and though she herself did not like the color of them, many other people did. Still she was very firm in her belief that she was an ugly little girl, and she was not at all elated by Miss Minchin’s flattery.
“I should be telling a story if I said she was beautiful,” she thought; “and I should know I was telling a story. I believe I am as ugly as she is—in my way. What did she say that for?”
After she had known Miss Minchin longer she learned why she had said it. She discovered that she said the same thing to each papa and mamma who brought a child to her school.
Sara stood near her father and listened while he and Miss Minchin talked. She had been brought to the seminary because Lady Meredith’s two little girls had been educated there, and Captain Crewe had a great respect for Lady Meredith’s experience. Sara was to be what was known as “a parlor boarder,” and she was to enjoy even greater privileges than parlor boarders usually did. She was to have a pretty bedroom and sitting room of her own; she was to have a pony and a carriage, and a maid to take the place of the ayah who had been her nurse in India.
“I am not in the least anxious about her education,” Captain Crewe said, with his gay laugh, as he held Sara’s hand and patted it. “The difficulty will be to keep her from learning too fast and too much. She is always sitting with her little nose burrowing into books. She doesn’t read them, Miss Minchin; she gobbles them up as if she were a little wolf instead of a little girl. She is always starving for new books to gobble, and she wants grown-up books—great, big, fat ones—French and German as well as English—history and biography and poets, and all sorts of things. Drag her away from her books when she reads too much. Make her ride her pony in the Row or go out and buy a new doll. She ought to play more with dolls.”
“Papa,” said Sara, “you see, if I went out and bought a new doll every few days I should have more than I could be fond of. Dolls ought to be intimate friends. Emily is going to be my intimate friend.”
Captain Crewe looked at Miss Minchin and Miss Minchin looked at Captain Crewe.
“Who is Emily?” she inquired.
“Tell her, Sara,” Captain Crewe said, smiling.
Sara’s green-gray eyes looked very solemn and quite soft as she answered.
“She is a doll I haven’t got yet,” she said. “She is a doll papa is going to buy for me. We are going out together to find her. I have called her Emily. She is going to be my friend when papa is gone. I want her to talk to about him.”
Miss Minchin’s large, fishy smile became very flattering indeed.
“What an original child!” she said. “What a darling little creature!”
“Yes,” said Captain Crewe, drawing Sara close. “She is a darling little creature. Take great care of her for me, Miss Minchin.”
Sara stayed with her father at his hotel for several days; in fact, she remained with him until he sailed away again to India. They went out and visited many big shops together, and bought a great many things. They bought, indeed, a great many more things than Sara needed; but Captain Crewe was a rash, innocent young man and wanted his little girl to have everything she admired and everything he admired himself, so between them they collected a wardrobe much too grand for a child of seven. There were velvet dresses trimmed with costly furs, and lace dresses, and embroidered ones, and hats with great, soft ostrich feathers, and ermine coats and muffs, and boxes of tiny gloves and handkerchiefs and silk stockings in such abundant supplies that the polite young women behind the counters whispered to each other that the odd little girl with the big, solemn eyes must be at least some foreign princess—perhaps the little daughter of an Indian rajah.
And at last they found Emily, but they went to a number of toy shops and looked at a great many dolls before they discovered her.
“I want her to look as if she wasn’t a doll really,” Sara said. “I want her to look as if she listens when I talk to her. The trouble with dolls, papa”—and she put her head on one side and reflected as she said it—”the trouble with dolls is that they never seem to hear.” So they looked at big ones and little ones— at dolls with black eyes and dolls with blue—at dolls with brown curls and dolls with golden braids, dolls dressed and dolls undressed.
“You see,” Sara said when they were examining one who had no clothes. “If, when I find her, she has no frocks, we can take her to a dressmaker and have her things made to fit. They will fit better if they are tried on.”
After a number of disappointments they decided to walk and look in at the shop windows and let the cab follow them. They had passed two or three places without even going in, when, as they were approaching a shop which was really not a very large one, Sara suddenly started and clutched her father’s arm.
“Oh, papa!” she cried. “There is Emily!”
A flush had risen to her face and there was an expression in her green-gray eyes as if she had just recognized someone she was intimate with and fond of.
“She is actually waiting there for us!” she said. “Let us go in to her.”
“Dear me,” said Captain Crewe, “I feel as if we ought to have someone to introduce us.”
“You must introduce me and I will introduce you,” said Sara. “But I knew her the minute I saw her—so perhaps she knew me, too.”
Perhaps she had known her. She had certainly a very intelligent expression in her eyes when Sara took her in her arms. She was a large doll, but not too large to carry about easily; she had naturally curling golden-brown hair, which hung like a mantle about her, and her eyes were a deep, clear, gray-blue, with soft, thick eyelashes which were real eyelashes and not mere painted lines.
“Of course,” said Sara, looking into her face as she held her on her knee, “of course papa, this is Emily.”
So Emily was bought and actually taken to a children’s outfitter’s shop and measured for a wardrobe as grand as Sara’s own. She had lace frocks, too, and velvet and muslin ones, and hats and coats and beautiful lace-trimmed underclothes, and gloves and handkerchiefs and furs.
“I should like her always to look as if she was a child with a good mother,” said Sara. “I’m her mother, though I am going to make a companion of her.”
Captain Crewe would really have enjoyed the shopping tremendously, but that a sad thought kept tugging at his heart. This all meant that he was going to be separated from his beloved, quaint little comrade.
He got out of his bed in the middle of that night and went and stood looking down at Sara, who lay asleep with Emily in her arms. Her black hair was spread out on the pillow and Emily’s golden-brown hair mingled with it, both of them had lace-ruffled nightgowns, and both had long eyelashes which lay and curled up on their cheeks. Emily looked so like a real child that Captain Crewe felt glad she was there. He drew a big sigh and pulled his mustache with a boyish expression.
“Heigh-ho, little Sara!” he said to himself “I don’t believe you know how much your daddy will miss you.”
The next day he took her to Miss Minchin’s and left her there. He was to sail away the next morning. He explained to Miss Minchin that his solicitors, Messrs. Barrow & Skipworth, had charge of his affairs in England and would give her any advice she wanted, and that they would pay the bills she sent in for Sara’s expenses. He would write to Sara twice a week, and she was to be given every pleasure she asked for.
“She is a sensible little thing, and she never wants anything it isn’t safe to give her,” he said.
Then he went with Sara into her little sitting room and they bade each other good-by. Sara sat on his knee and held the lapels of his coat in her small hands, and looked long and hard at his face.
“Are you learning me by heart, little Sara?” he said, stroking her hair.
“No,” she answered. “I know you by heart. You are inside my heart.” And they put their arms round each other and kissed as if they would never let each other go.
When the cab drove away from the door, Sara was sitting on the floor of her sitting room, with her hands under her chin and her eyes following it until it had turned the corner of the square. Emily was sitting by her, and she looked after it, too. When Miss Minchin sent her sister, Miss Amelia, to see what the child was doing, she found she could not open the door.
“I have locked it,” said a queer, polite little voice from inside. “I want to be quite by myself, if you please.”
Miss Amelia was fat and dumpy, and stood very much in awe of her sister. She was really the better-natured person of the two, but she never disobeyed Miss Minchin. She went downstairs again, looking almost alarmed.
“I never saw such a funny, old-fashioned child, sister,” she said. “She has locked herself in, and she is not making the least particle of noise.”
“It is much better than if she kicked and screamed, as some of them do,” Miss Minchin answered. “I expected that a child as much spoiled as she is would set the whole house in an uproar. If ever a child was given her own way in everything, she is.”
“I’ve been opening her trunks and putting her things away,” said Miss Amelia. “I never saw anything like them—sable and ermine on her coats, and real Valenciennes lace on her underclothing. You have seen some of her clothes. What do you think of them?”
“I think they are perfectly ridiculous,” replied Miss Minchin, sharply; “but they will look very well at the head of the line when we take the schoolchildren to church on Sunday. She has been provided for as if she were a little princess.”
And upstairs in the locked room Sara and Emily sat on the floor and stared at the corner round which the cab had disappeared, while Captain Crewe looked backward, waving and kissing his hand as if he could not bear to stop.

Chapter 1: Sara

When Sara entered the schoolroom the next morning everybody looked at her with wide, interested eyes. By that time every pupil— from Lavinia Herbert, who was nearly thirteen and felt quite grown up, to Lottie Legh, who was only just four and the baby of the school— had heard a great deal about her. They knew very certainly that she was Miss Minchin’s show pupil and was considered a credit to the establishment. One or two of them had even caught a glimpse of her French maid, Mariette, who had arrived the evening before. Lavinia had managed to pass Sara’s room when the door was open, and had seen Mariette opening a box which had arrived late from some shop.
“It was full of petticoats with lace frills on them—frills and frills,” she whispered to her friend Jessie as she bent over her geography. “I saw her shaking them out. I heard Miss Minchin say to Miss Amelia that her clothes were so grand that they were ridiculous for a child. My mamma says that children should be dressed simply. She has got one of those petticoats on now. I saw it when she sat down.”
“She has silk stockings on!” whispered Jessie, bending over her geography also. “And what little feet! I never saw such little feet.”
“Oh,” sniffed Lavinia, spitefully, “that is the way her slippers are made. My mamma says that even big feet can be made to look small if you have a clever shoemaker. I don’t think she is pretty at all. Her eyes are such a queer color.”
“She isn’t pretty as other pretty people are,” said Jessie, stealing a glance across the room; “but she makes you want to look at her again. She has tremendously long eyelashes, but her eyes are almost green.”
Sara was sitting quietly in her seat, waiting to be told what to do. She had been placed near Miss Minchin’s desk. She was not abashed at all by the many pairs of eyes watching her. She was interested and looked back quietly at the children who looked at her. She wondered what they were thinking of, and if they liked Miss Minchin, and if they cared for their lessons, and if any of them had a papa at all like her own. She had had a long talk with Emily about her papa that morning.
“He is on the sea now, Emily,” she had said. “We must be very great friends to each other and tell each other things. Emily, look at me. You have the nicest eyes I ever saw—but I wish you could speak.”
She was a child full of imaginings and whimsical thoughts, and one of her fancies was that there would be a great deal of comfort in even pretending that Emily was alive and really heard and understood. After Mariette had dressed her in her dark-blue schoolroom frock and tied her hair with a dark-blue ribbon, she went to Emily, who sat in a chair of her own, and gave her a book.
“You can read that while I am downstairs,” she said; and, seeing Mariette looking at her curiously, she spoke to her with a serious little face.
“What I believe about dolls,” she said, “is that they can do things they will not let us know about. Perhaps, really, Emily can read and talk and walk, but she will only do it when people are out of the room. That is her secret. You see, if people knew that dolls could do things, they would make them work. So, perhaps, they have promised each other to keep it a secret. If you stay in the room, Emily will just sit there and stare; but if you go out, she will begin to read, perhaps, or go and look out of the window. Then if she heard either of us coming, she would just run back and jump into her chair and pretend she had been there all the time.”
“Comme elle est drole!” Mariette said to herself, and when she went downstairs she told the head housemaid about it. But she had already begun to like this odd little girl who had such an intelligent small face and such perfect manners. She had taken care of children before who were not so polite. Sara was a very fine little person, and had a gentle, appreciative way of saying, “If you please, Mariette,” “Thank you, Mariette,” which was very charming. Mariette told the head housemaid that she thanked her as if she was thanking a lady.
“Elle a l’air d’une princesse, cette petite,” she said. Indeed, she was very much pleased with her new little mistress and liked her place greatly.
After Sara had sat in her seat in the schoolroom for a few minutes, being looked at by the pupils, Miss Minchin rapped in a dignified manner upon her desk.
“Young ladies,” she said, “I wish to introduce you to your new companion.” All the little girls rose in their places, and Sara rose also. “I shall expect you all to be very agreeable to Miss Crewe; she has just come to us from a great distance—in fact, from India. As soon as lessons are over you must make each other’s acquaintance.”
The pupils bowed ceremoniously, and Sara made a little curtsy, and then they sat down and looked at each other again.
“Sara,” said Miss Minchin in her schoolroom manner, “come here to me.”
She had taken a book from the desk and was turning over its leaves. Sara went to her politely.
“As your papa has engaged a French maid for you,” she began, “I conclude that he wishes you to make a special study of the French language.”
Sara felt a little awkward.
“I think he engaged her,” she said, “because he—he thought I would like her, Miss Minchin.”
“I am afraid,” said Miss Minchin, with a slightly sour smile, “that you have been a very spoiled little girl and always imagine that things are done because you like them. My impression is that your papa wished you to learn French.”
If Sara had been older or less punctilious about being quite polite to people, she could have explained herself in a very few words. But, as it was, she felt a flush rising on her cheeks. Miss Minchin was a very severe and imposing person, and she seemed so absolutely sure that Sara knew nothing whatever of French that she felt as if it would be almost rude to correct her. The truth was that Sara could not remember the time when she had not seemed to know French. Her father had often spoken it to her when she had been a baby. Her mother had been a French woman, and Captain Crewe had loved her language, so it happened that Sara had always heard and been familiar with it.
“I—I have never really learned French, but—but—” she began, trying shyly to make herself clear.
One of Miss Minchin’s chief secret annoyances was that she did not speak French herself, and was desirous of concealing the irritating fact. She, therefore, had no intention of discussing the matter and laying herself open to innocent questioning by a new little pupil.
“That is enough,” she said with polite tartness. “If you have not learned, you must begin at once. The French master, Monsieur Dufarge, will be here in a few minutes. Take this book and look at it until he arrives.”
Sara’s cheeks felt warm. She went back to her seat and opened the book. She looked at the first page with a grave face. She knew it would be rude to smile, and she was very determined not to be rude. But it was very odd to find herself expected to study a page which told her that “le pere” meant “the father,” and “la mere” meant “the mother.”
Miss Minchin glanced toward her scrutinizingly.
“You look rather cross, Sara,” she said. “I am sorry you do not like the idea of learning French.”
“I am very fond of it,” answered Sara, thinking she would try again; “but—”
“You must not say `but’ when you are told to do things,” said Miss Minchin. “Look at your book again.”
And Sara did so, and did not smile, even when she found that “le fils” meant “the son,” and “le frere” meant “the brother.”
“When Monsieur Dufarge comes,” she thought, “I can make him understand.”
Monsieur Dufarge arrived very shortly afterward. He was a very nice, intelligent, middle-aged Frenchman, and he looked interested when his eyes fell upon Sara trying politely to seem absorbed in her little book of phrases.
“Is this a new pupil for me, madame?” he said to Miss Minchin. “I hope that is my good fortune.”
“Her papa—Captain Crewe—is very anxious that she should begin the language. But I am afraid she has a childish prejudice against it. She does not seem to wish to learn,” said Miss Minchin.
“I am sorry of that, mademoiselle,” he said kindly to Sara. “Perhaps, when we begin to study together, I may show you that it is a charming tongue.”
Little Sara rose in her seat. She was beginning to feel rather desperate, as if she were almost in disgrace. She looked up into Monsieur Dufarge’s face with her big, green-gray eyes, and they were quite innocently appealing. She knew that he would understand as soon as she spoke. She began to explain quite simply in pretty and fluent French. Madame had not understood. She had not learned French exactly—not out of books—but her papa and other people had always spoken it to her, and she had read it and written it as she had read and written English. Her papa loved it, and she loved it because he did. Her dear mamma, who had died when she was born, had been French. She would be glad to learn anything monsieur would teach her, but what she had tried to explain to madame was that she already knew the words in this book— and she held out the little book of phrases.
When she began to speak Miss Minchin started quite violently and sat staring at her over her eyeglasses, almost indignantly, until she had finished. Monsieur Dufarge began to smile, and his smile was one of great pleasure. To hear this pretty childish voice speaking his own language so simply and charmingly made him feel almost as if he were in his native land—which in dark, foggy days in London sometimes seemed worlds away. When she had finished, he took the phrase book from her, with a look almost affectionate. But he spoke to Miss Minchin.
“Ah, madame,” he said, “there is not much I can teach her. She has not learned French; she is French. Her accent is exquisite.”
“You ought to have told me,” exclaimed Miss Minchin, much mortified, turning to Sara.
“I—I tried,” said Sara. “I—I suppose I did not begin right.”
Miss Minchin knew she had tried, and that it had not been her fault that she was not allowed to explain. And when she saw that the pupils had been listening and that Lavinia and Jessie were giggling behind their French grammars, she felt infuriated.
“Silence, young ladies!” she said severely, rapping upon the desk. “Silence at once!”
And she began from that minute to feel rather a grudge against her show pupil.

Chapter 2: A French Lesson

On that first morning, when Sara sat at Miss Minchin’s side, aware that the whole schoolroom was devoting itself to observing her, she had noticed very soon one little girl, about her own age, who looked at her very hard with a pair of light, rather dull, blue eyes. She was a fat child who did not look as if she were in the least clever, but she had a good-naturedly pouting mouth. Her flaxen hair was braided in a tight pigtail, tied with a ribbon, and she had pulled this pigtail around her neck, and was biting the end of the ribbon, resting her elbows on the desk, as she stared wonderingly at the new pupil. When Monsieur Dufarge began to speak to Sara, she looked a little frightened; and when Sara stepped forward and, looking at him with the innocent, appealing eyes, answered him, without any warning, in French, the fat little girl gave a startled jump, and grew quite red in her awed amazement. Having wept hopeless tears for weeks in her efforts to remember that “la mere” meant “the mother,” and “le pere,” “the father,”— when one spoke sensible English—it was almost too much for her suddenly to find herself listening to a child her own age who seemed not only quite familiar with these words, but apparently knew any number of others, and could mix them up with verbs as if they were mere trifles.
She stared so hard and bit the ribbon on her pigtail so fast that she attracted the attention of Miss Minchin, who, feeling extremely cross at the moment, immediately pounced upon her.
“Miss St. John!” she exclaimed severely. “What do you mean by such conduct? Remove your elbows! Take your ribbon out of your mouth! Sit up at once!”
Upon which Miss St. John gave another jump, and when Lavinia and Jessie tittered she became redder than ever—so red, indeed, that she almost looked as if tears were coming into her poor, dull, childish eyes; and Sara saw her and was so sorry for her that she began rather to like her and want to be her friend. It was a way of hers always to want to spring into any fray in which someone was made uncomfortable or unhappy.
“If Sara had been a boy and lived a few centuries ago,” her father used to say, “she would have gone about the country with her sword drawn, rescuing and defending everyone in distress. She always wants to fight when she sees people in trouble.”
So she took rather a fancy to fat, slow, little Miss St. John, and kept glancing toward her through the morning. She saw that lessons were no easy matter to her, and that there was no danger of her ever being spoiled by being treated as a show pupil. Her French lesson was a pathetic thing. Her pronunciation made even Monsieur Dufarge smile in spite of himself, and Lavinia and Jessie and the more fortunate girls either giggled or looked at her in wondering disdain. But Sara did not laugh. She tried to look as if she did not hear when Miss St. John called “le bon pain,” “lee bong pang.” She had a fine, hot little temper of her own, and it made her feel rather savage when she heard the titters and saw the poor, stupid, distressed child’s face.
“It isn’t funny, really,” she said between her teeth, as she bent over her book. “They ought not to laugh.”
When lessons were over and the pupils gathered together in groups to talk, Sara looked for Miss St. John, and finding her bundled rather disconsolately in a window-seat, she walked over to her and spoke. She only said the kind of thing little girls always say to each other by way of beginning an acquaintance, but there was something friendly about Sara, and people always felt it.
“What is your name?” she said.
To explain Miss St. John’s amazement one must recall that a new pupil is, for a short time, a somewhat uncertain thing; and of this new pupil the entire school had talked the night before until it fell asleep quite exhausted by excitement and contradictory stories. A new pupil with a carriage and a pony and a maid, and a voyage from India to discuss, was not an ordinary acquaintance.
“My name’s Ermengarde St. John,” she answered.
“Mine is Sara Crewe,” said Sara. “Yours is very pretty. It sounds like a story book.”
“Do you like it?” fluttered Ermengarde. “I—I like yours.”
Miss St. John’s chief trouble in life was that she had a clever father. Sometimes this seemed to her a dreadful calamity. If you have a father who knows everything, who speaks seven or eight languages, and has thousands of volumes which he has apparently learned by heart, he frequently expects you to be familiar with the contents of your lesson books at least; and it is not improbable that he will feel you ought to be able to remember a few incidents of history and to write a French exercise. Ermengarde was a severe trial to Mr. St. John. He could not understand how a child of his could be a notably and unmistakably dull creature who never shone in anything.
“Good heavens!” he had said more than once, as he stared at her, “there are times when I think she is as stupid as her Aunt Eliza!”
If her Aunt Eliza had been slow to learn and quick to forget a thing entirely when she had learned it, Ermengarde was strikingly like her. She was the monumental dunce of the school, and it could not be denied.
“She must be made to learn,” her father said to Miss Minchin.
Consequently Ermengarde spent the greater part of her life in disgrace or in tears. She learned things and forgot them; or, if she remembered them, she did not understand them. So it was natural that, having made Sara’s acquaintance, she should sit and stare at her with profound admiration.
“You can speak French, can’t you?” she said respectfully.
Sara got on to the window-seat, which was a big, deep one, and, tucking up her feet, sat with her hands clasped round her knees.
“I can speak it because I have heard it all my life,” she answered. “You could speak it if you had always heard it.”
“Oh, no, I couldn’t,” said Ermengarde. “I never could speak it!”
“Why?” inquired Sara, curiously.
Ermengarde shook her head so that the pigtail wobbled.
“You heard me just now,” she said. “I’m always like that. I can’t say the words. They’re so queer.”
She paused a moment, and then added with a touch of awe in her voice, “You are clever, aren’t you?”
Sara looked out of the window into the dingy square, where the sparrows were hopping and twittering on the wet, iron railings and the sooty branches of the trees. She reflected a few moments. She had heard it said very often that she was “clever,” and she wondered if she was—and if she was, how it had happened.
“I don’t know,” she said. “I can’t tell.” Then, seeing a mournful look on the round, chubby face, she gave a little laugh and changed the subject.
“Would you like to see Emily?” she inquired.
“Who is Emily?” Ermengarde asked, just as Miss Minchin had done.
“Come up to my room and see,” said Sara, holding out her hand.
They jumped down from the window-seat together, and went upstairs.
“Is it true,” Ermengarde whispered, as they went through the hall- -“is it true that you have a playroom all to yourself?”
“Yes,” Sara answered. “Papa asked Miss Minchin to let me have one, because—well, it was because when I play I make up stories and tell them to myself, and I don’t like people to hear me. It spoils it if I think people listen.”
They had reached the passage leading to Sara’s room by this time, and Ermengarde stopped short, staring, and quite losing her breath.
“You make up stories!” she gasped. “Can you do that—as well as speak French? Can you?”
Sara looked at her in simple surprise.
“Why, anyone can make up things,” she said. “Have you never tried?”
She put her hand warningly on Ermengarde’s.
“Let us go very quietly to the door,” she whispered, “and then I will open it quite suddenly; perhaps we may catch her.”
She was half laughing, but there was a touch of mysterious hope in her eyes which fascinated Ermengarde, though she had not the remotest idea what it meant, or whom it was she wanted to “catch,” or why she wanted to catch her. Whatsoever she meant, Ermengarde was sure it was something delightfully exciting. So, quite thrilled with expectation, she followed her on tiptoe along the passage. They made not the least noise until they reached the door. Then Sara suddenly turned the handle, and threw it wide open. Its opening revealed the room quite neat and quiet, a fire gently burning in the grate, and a wonderful doll sitting in a chair by it, apparently reading a book.
“Oh, she got back to her seat before we could see her!” Sara explained. “Of course they always do. They are as quick as lightning.”
Ermengarde looked from her to the doll and back again.
“Can she—walk?” she asked breathlessly.
“Yes,” answered Sara. “At least I believe she can. At least I pretend I believe she can. And that makes it seem as if it were true. Have you never pretended things?”
“No,” said Ermengarde. “Never. I—tell me about it.”
She was so bewitched by this odd, new companion that she actually stared at Sara instead of at Emily—notwithstanding that Emily was the most attractive doll person she had ever seen.
“Let us sit down,” said Sara, “and I will tell you. It’s so easy that when you begin you can’t stop. You just go on and on doing it always. And it’s beautiful. Emily, you must listen. This is Ermengarde St. John, Emily. Ermengarde, this is Emily. Would you like to hold her?”
“Oh, may I?” said Ermengarde. “May I, really? She is beautiful!” And Emily was put into her arms.
Never in her dull, short life had Miss St. John dreamed of such an hour as the one she spent with the queer new pupil before they heard the lunch-bell ring and were obliged to go downstairs.
Sara sat upon the hearth-rug and told her strange things. She sat rather huddled up, and her green eyes shone and her cheeks flushed. She told stories of the voyage, and stories of India; but what fascinated Ermengarde the most was her fancy about the dolls who walked and talked, and who could do anything they chose when the human beings were out of the room, but who must keep their powers a secret and so flew back to their places “like lightning” when people returned to the room.
“We couldn’t do it,” said Sara, seriously. “You see, it’s a kind of magic.”
Once, when she was relating the story of the search for Emily, Ermengarde saw her face suddenly change. A cloud seemed to pass over it and put out the light in her shining eyes. She drew her breath in so sharply that it made a funny, sad little sound, and then she shut her lips and held them tightly closed, as if she was determined either to do or not to do something. Ermengarde had an idea that if she had been like any other little girl, she might have suddenly burst out sobbing and crying. But she did not.
“Have you a—a pain?” Ermengarde ventured.
“Yes,” Sara answered, after a moment’s silence. “But it is not in my body.” Then she added something in a low voice which she tried to keep quite steady, and it was this: “Do you love your father more than anything else in all the whole world?”
Ermengarde’s mouth fell open a little. She knew that it would be far from behaving like a respectable child at a select seminary to say that it had never occurred to you that you could love your father, that you would do anything desperate to avoid being left alone in his society for ten minutes. She was, indeed, greatly embarrassed.
“I—I scarcely ever see him,” she stammered. “He is always in the library—reading things.”
“I love mine more than all the world ten times over,” Sara said. “That is what my pain is. He has gone away.”
She put her head quietly down on her little, huddled-up knees, and sat very still for a few minutes.
“She’s going to cry out loud,” thought Ermengarde, fearfully.
But she did not. Her short, black locks tumbled about her ears, and she sat still. Then she spoke without lifting her head.
“I promised him I would bear it,” she said. “And I will. You have to bear things. Think what soldiers bear! Papa is a soldier. If there was a war he would have to bear marching and thirstiness and, perhaps, deep wounds. And he would never say a word—not one word.”
Ermengarde could only gaze at her, but she felt that she was beginning to adore her. She was so wonderful and different from anyone else.
Presently, she lifted her face and shook back her black locks, with a queer little smile.
“If I go on talking and talking,” she said, “and telling you things about pretending, I shall bear it better. You don’t forget, but you bear it better.”
Ermengarde did not know why a lump came into her throat and her eyes felt as if tears were in them.
“Lavinia and Jessie are `best friends,’” she said rather huskily. “I wish we could be `best friends.’ Would you have me for yours? You’re clever, and I’m the stupidest child in the school, but I— oh, I do so like you!”
“I’m glad of that,” said Sara. “It makes you thankful when you are liked. Yes. We will be friends. And I’ll tell you what”— a sudden gleam lighting her face—”I can help you with your French lessons.”

Chapter 3: Ermengarde

If Sara had been a different kind of child, the life she led at Miss Minchin’s Select Seminary for the next few years would not have been at all good for her. She was treated more as if she were a distinguished guest at the establishment than as if she were a mere little girl. If she had been a self-opinionated, domineering child, she might have become disagreeable enough to be unbearable through being so much indulged and flattered. If she had been an indolent child, she would have learned nothing. Privately Miss Minchin disliked her, but she was far too worldly a woman to do or say anything which might make such a desirable pupil wish to leave her school. She knew quite well that if Sara wrote to her papa to tell him she was uncomfortable or unhappy, Captain Crewe would remove her at once. Miss Minchin’s opinion was that if a child were continually praised and never forbidden to do what she liked, she would be sure to be fond of the place where she was so treated. Accordingly, Sara was praised for her quickness at her lessons, for her good manners, for her amiability to her fellow pupils, for her generosity if she gave sixpence to a beggar out of her full little purse; the simplest thing she did was treated as if it were a virtue, and if she had not had a disposition and a clever little brain, she might have been a very self-satisfied young person. But the clever little brain told her a great many sensible and true things about herself and her circumstances, and now and then she talked these things over to Ermengarde as time went on.
“Things happen to people by accident,” she used to say. “A lot of nice accidents have happened to me. It just happened that I always liked lessons and books, and could remember things when I learned them. It just happened that I was born with a father who was beautiful and nice and clever, and could give me everything I liked. Perhaps I have not really a good temper at all, but if you have everything you want and everyone is kind to you, how can you help but be good-tempered? I don’t know”—looking quite serious—”how I shall ever find out whether I am really a nice child or a horrid one. Perhaps I’m a hideous child, and no one will ever know, just because I never have any trials.”
“Lavinia has no trials,” said Ermengarde, stolidly, “and she is horrid enough.”
Sara rubbed the end of her little nose reflectively, as she thought the matter over.
“Well,” she said at last, “perhaps—perhaps that is because Lavinia is growing.” This was the result of a charitable recollection of having heard Miss Amelia say that Lavinia was growing so fast that she believed it affected her health and temper.
Lavinia, in fact, was spiteful. She was inordinately jealous of Sara. Until the new pupil’s arrival, she had felt herself the leader in the school. She had led because she was capable of making herself extremely disagreeable if the others did not follow her. She domineered over the little children, and assumed grand airs with those big enough to be her companions. She was rather pretty, and had been the best-dressed pupil in the procession when the Select Seminary walked out two by two, until Sara’s velvet coats and sable muffs appeared, combined with drooping ostrich feathers, and were led by Miss Minchin at the head of the line. This, at the beginning, had been bitter enough; but as time went on it became apparent that Sara was a leader, too, and not because she could make herself disagreeable, but because she never did.
“There’s one thing about Sara Crewe,” Jessie had enraged her “best friend” by saying honestly, “she’s never `grand’ about herself the least bit, and you know she might be, Lavvie. I believe I couldn’t help being—just a little—if I had so many fine things and was made such a fuss over. It’s disgusting, the way Miss Minchin shows her off when parents come.”
”`Dear Sara must come into the drawing room and talk to Mrs. Musgrave about India,’” mimicked Lavinia, in her most highly flavored imitation of Miss Minchin. ”`Dear Sara must speak French to Lady Pitkin. Her accent is so perfect.’ She didn’t learn her French at the Seminary, at any rate. And there’s nothing so clever in her knowing it. She says herself she didn’t learn it at all. She just picked it up, because she always heard her papa speak it. And, as to her papa, there is nothing so grand in being an Indian officer.”
“Well,” said Jessie, slowly, “he’s killed tigers. He killed the one in the skin Sara has in her room. That’s why she likes it so. She lies on it and strokes its head, and talks to it as if it was a cat.”
“She’s always doing something silly,” snapped Lavinia. “My mamma says that way of hers of pretending things is silly. She says she will grow up eccentric.”
It was quite true that Sara was never “grand.” She was a friendly little soul, and shared her privileges and belongings with a free hand. The little ones, who were accustomed to being disdained and ordered out of the way by mature ladies aged ten and twelve, were never made to cry by this most envied of them all. She was a motherly young person, and when people fell down and scraped their knees, she ran and helped them up and patted them, or found in her pocket a bonbon or some other article of a soothing nature. She never pushed them out of her way or alluded to their years as a humiliation and a blot upon their small characters.
“If you are four you are four,” she said severely to Lavinia on an occasion of her having—it must be confessed—slapped Lottie and called her “a brat;” “but you will be five next year, and six the year after that. And,” opening large, convicting eyes, “it takes sixteen years to make you twenty.”
“Dear me,” said Lavinia, “how we can calculate!” In fact, it was not to be denied that sixteen and four made twenty—and twenty was an age the most daring were scarcely bold enough to dream of.
So the younger children adored Sara. More than once she had been known to have a tea party, made up of these despised ones, in her own room. And Emily had been played with, and Emily’s own tea service used— the one with cups which held quite a lot of much-sweetened weak tea and had blue flowers on them. No one had seen such a very real doll’s tea set before. From that afternoon Sara was regarded as a goddess and a queen by the entire alphabet class.
Lottle Legh worshipped her to such an extent that if Sara had not been a motherly person, she would have found her tiresome. Lottie had been sent to school by a rather flighty young papa who could not imagine what else to do with her. Her young mother had died, and as the child had been treated like a favorite doll or a very spoiled pet monkey or lap dog ever since the first hour of her life, she was a very appalling little creature. When she wanted anything or did not want anything she wept and howled; and, as she always wanted the things she could not have, and did not want the things that were best for her, her shrill little voice was usually to be heard uplifted in wails in one part of the house or another.
Her strongest weapon was that in some mysterious way she had found out that a very small girl who had lost her mother was a person who ought to be pitied and made much of. She had probably heard some grown-up people talking her over in the early days, after her mother’s death. So it became her habit to make great use of this knowledge.
The first time Sara took her in charge was one morning when, on passing a sitting room, she heard both Miss Minchin and Miss Amelia trying to suppress the angry wails of some child who, evidently, refused to be silenced. She refused so strenuously indeed that Miss Minchin was obliged to almost shout—in a stately and severe manner— to make herself heard.
“What is she crying for?” she almost yelled.
“Oh—oh—oh!” Sara heard; “I haven’t got any mam—ma-a!”
“Oh, Lottie!” screamed Miss Amelia. “Do stop, darling! Don’t cry! Please don’t!”
“Oh! Oh! Oh! Oh! Oh!” Lottle howled tempestuously. “Haven’t- -got—any—mam—ma-a!”
“She ought to be whipped,” Miss Minchin proclaimed. “You shall be whipped, you naughty child!”
Lottle wailed more loudly than ever. Miss Amelia began to cry. Miss Minchin’s voice rose until it almost thundered, then suddenly she sprang up from her chair in impotent indignation and flounced out of the room, leaving Miss Amelia to arrange the matter.
Sara had paused in the hall, wondering if she ought to go into the room, because she had recently begun a friendly acquaintance with Lottie and might be able to quiet her. When Miss Minchin came out and saw her, she looked rather annoyed. She realized that her voice, as heard from inside the room, could not have sounded either dignified or amiable.
“Oh, Sara!” she exclaimed, endeavoring to produce a suitable smile.
“I stopped,” explained Sara, “because I knew it was Lottie— and I thought, perhaps—just perhaps, I could make her be quiet. May I try, Miss Minchin?”
“If you can, you are a clever child,” answered Miss Minchin, drawing in her mouth sharply. Then, seeing that Sara looked slightly chilled by her asperity, she changed her manner. “But you are clever in everything,” she said in her approving way. “I dare say you can manage her. Go in.” And she left her.
When Sara entered the room, Lottie was lying upon the floor, screaming and kicking her small fat legs violently, and Miss Amelia was bending over her in consternation and despair, looking quite red and damp with heat. Lottie had always found, when in her own nursery at home, that kicking and screaming would always be quieted by any means she insisted on. Poor plump Miss Amelia was trying first one method, and then another.
“Poor darling,” she said one moment, “I know you haven’t any mamma, poor—” Then in quite another tone, “If you don’t stop, Lottie, I will shake you. Poor little angel! There—! You wicked, bad, detestable child, I will smack you! I will!”
Sara went to them quietly. She did not know at all what she was going to do, but she had a vague inward conviction that it would be better not to say such different kinds of things quite so helplessly and excitedly.
“Miss Amelia,” she said in a low voice, “Miss Minchin says I may try to make her stop—may I?”
Miss Amelia turned and looked at her hopelessly. “Oh, do you think you can?” she gasped.
“I don’t know whether I can”, answered Sara, still in her half- whisper; “but I will try.”
Miss Amelia stumbled up from her knees with a heavy sigh, and Lottie’s fat little legs kicked as hard as ever.
“If you will steal out of the room,” said Sara, “I will stay with her.”
“Oh, Sara!” almost whimpered Miss Amelia. “We never had such a dreadful child before. I don’t believe we can keep her.”
But she crept out of the room, and was very much relieved to find an excuse for doing it.
Sara stood by the howling furious child for a few moments, and looked down at her without saying anything. Then she sat down flat on the floor beside her and waited. Except for Lottie’s angry screams, the room was quite quiet. This was a new state of affairs for little Miss Legh, who was accustomed, when she screamed, to hear other people protest and implore and command and coax by turns. To lie and kick and shriek, and find the only person near you not seeming to mind in the least, attracted her attention. She opened her tight-shut streaming eyes to see who this person was. And it was only another little girl. But it was the one who owned Emily and all the nice things. And she was looking at her steadily and as if she was merely thinking. Having paused for a few seconds to find this out, Lottie thought she must begin again, but the quiet of the room and of Sara’s odd, interested face made her first howl rather half-hearted.
“I—haven’t—any—ma—ma—ma-a!” she announced; but her voice was not so strong.
Sara looked at her still more steadily, but with a sort of understanding in her eyes.
“Neither have I,” she said.
This was so unexpected that it was astounding. Lottie actually dropped her legs, gave a wriggle, and lay and stared. A new idea will stop a crying child when nothing else will. Also it was true that while Lottie disliked Miss Minchin, who was cross, and Miss Amelia, who was foolishly indulgent, she rather liked Sara, little as she knew her. She did not want to give up her grievance, but her thoughts were distracted from it, so she wriggled again, and, after a sulky sob, said, “Where is she?”
Sara paused a moment. Because she had been told that her mamma was in heaven, she had thought a great deal about the matter, and her thoughts had not been quite like those of other people.
“She went to heaven,” she said. “But I am sure she comes out sometimes to see me—though I don’t see her. So does yours. Perhaps they can both see us now. Perhaps they are both in this room.”
Lottle sat bolt upright, and looked about her. She was a pretty, little, curly-headed creature, and her round eyes were like wet forget-me-nots. If her mamma had seen her during the last half-hour, she might not have thought her the kind of child who ought to be related to an angel.
Sara went on talking. Perhaps some people might think that what she said was rather like a fairy story, but it was all so real to her own imagination that Lottie began to listen in spite of herself. She had been told that her mamma had wings and a crown, and she had been shown pictures of ladies in beautiful white nightgowns, who were said to be angels. But Sara seemed to be telling a real story about a lovely country where real people were.
“There are fields and fields of flowers,” she said, forgetting herself, as usual, when she began, and talking rather as if she were in a dream, “fields and fields of lilies—and when the soft wind blows over them it wafts the scent of them into the air—and everybody always breathes it, because the soft wind is always blowing. And little children run about in the lily fields and gather armfuls of them, and laugh and make little wreaths. And the streets are shining. And people are never tired, however far they walk. They can float anywhere they like. And there are walls made of pearl and gold all round the city, but they are low enough for the people to go and lean on them, and look down onto the earth and smile, and send beautiful messages.”
Whatsoever story she had begun to tell, Lottie would, no doubt, have stopped crying, and been fascinated into listening; but there was no denying that this story was prettier than most others. She dragged herself close to Sara, and drank in every word until the end came—far too soon. When it did come, she was so sorry that she put up her lip ominously.
“I want to go there,” she cried. “I—haven’t any mamma in this school.”
Sara saw the danger signal, and came out of her dream. She took hold of the chubby hand and pulled her close to her side with a coaxing little laugh.
“I will be your mamma,” she said. “We will play that you are my little girl. And Emily shall be your sister.”
Lottie’s dimples all began to show themselves.
“Shall she?” she said.
“Yes,” answered Sara, jumping to her feet. “Let us go and tell her. And then I will wash your face and brush your hair.”
To which Lottie agreed quite cheerfully, and trotted out of the room and upstairs with her, without seeming even to remember that the whole of the last hour’s tragedy had been caused by the fact that she had refused to be washed and brushed for lunch and Miss Minchin had been called in to use her majestic authority.
And from that time Sara was an adopted mother.

Chapter 4: Lottie

Of course the greatest power Sara possessed and the one which gained her even more followers than her luxuries and the fact that she was “the show pupil,” the power that Lavinia and certain other girls were most envious of, and at the same time most fascinated by in spite of themselves, was her power of telling stories and of making everything she talked about seem like a story, whether it was one or not.
Anyone who has been at school with a teller of stories knows what the wonder means—how he or she is followed about and besought in a whisper to relate romances; how groups gather round and hang on the outskirts of the favored party in the hope of being allowed to join in and listen. Sara not only could tell stories, but she adored telling them. When she sat or stood in the midst of a circle and began to invent wonderful things, her green eyes grew big and shining, her cheeks flushed, and, without knowing that she was doing it, she began to act and made what she told lovely or alarming by the raising or dropping of her voice, the bend and sway of her slim body, and the dramatic movement of her hands. She forgot that she was talking to listening children; she saw and lived with the fairy folk, or the kings and queens and beautiful ladies, whose adventures she was narrating. Sometimes when she had finished her story, she was quite out of breath with excitement, and would lay her hand on her thin, little, quick-rising chest, and half laugh as if at herself.
“When I am telling it,” she would say, “it doesn’t seem as if it was only made up. It seems more real than you are—more real than the schoolroom. I feel as if I were all the people in the story—one after the other. It is queer.”
She had been at Miss Minchin’s school about two years when, one foggy winter’s afternoon, as she was getting out of her carriage, comfortably wrapped up in her warmest velvets and furs and looking very much grander than she knew, she caught sight, as she crossed the pavement, of a dingy little figure standing on the area steps, and stretching its neck so that its wide-open eyes might peer at her through the railings. Something in the eagerness and timidity of the smudgy face made her look at it, and when she looked she smiled because it was her way to smile at people.
But the owner of the smudgy face and the wide-open eyes evidently was afraid that she ought not to have been caught looking at pupils of importance. She dodged out of sight like a jack-in-the-box and scurried back into the kitchen, disappearing so suddenly that if she had not been such a poor little forlorn thing, Sara would have laughed in spite of herself. That very evening, as Sara was sitting in the midst of a group of listeners in a corner of the schoolroom telling one of her stories, the very same figure timidly entered the room, carrying a coal box much too heavy for her, and knelt down upon the hearth rug to replenish the fire and sweep up the ashes.
She was cleaner than she had been when she peeped through the area railings, but she looked just as frightened. She was evidently afraid to look at the children or seem to be listening. She put on pieces of coal cautiously with her fingers so that she might make no disturbing noise, and she swept about the fire irons very softly. But Sara saw in two minutes that she was deeply interested in what was going on, and that she was doing her work slowly in the hope of catching a word here and there. And realizing this, she raised her voice and spoke more clearly.
“The Mermaids swam softly about in the crystal-green water, and dragged after them a fishing-net woven of deep-sea pearls,” she said. “The Princess sat on the white rock and watched them.”
It was a wonderful story about a princess who was loved by a Prince Merman, and went to live with him in shining caves under the sea.
The small drudge before the grate swept the hearth once and then swept it again. Having done it twice, she did it three times; and, as she was doing it the third time, the sound of the story so lured her to listen that she fell under the spell and actually forgot that she had no right to listen at all, and also forgot everything else. She sat down upon her heels as she knelt on the hearth rug, and the brush hung idly in her fingers. The voice of the storyteller went on and drew her with it into winding grottos under the sea, glowing with soft, clear blue light, and paved with pure golden sands. Strange sea flowers and grasses waved about her, and far away faint singing and music echoed.
The hearth brush fell from the work-roughened hand, and Lavinia Herbert looked round.
“That girl has been listening,” she said.
The culprit snatched up her brush, and scrambled to her feet. She caught at the coal box and simply scuttled out of the room like a frightened rabbit.
Sara felt rather hot-tempered.
“I knew she was listening,” she said. “Why shouldn’t she?”
Lavinia tossed her head with great elegance.
“Well,” she remarked, “I do not know whether your mamma would like you to tell stories to servant girls, but I know my mamma wouldn’t like me to do it.”
“My mamma!” said Sara, looking odd. “I don’t believe she would mind in the least. She knows that stories belong to everybody.”
“I thought,” retorted Lavinia, in severe recollection, “that your mamma was dead. How can she know things?”
“Do you think she doesn’t know things?” said Sara, in her stern little voice. Sometimes she had a rather stern little voice.
“Sara’s mamma knows everything,” piped in Lottie. “So does my mamma—’cept Sara is my mamma at Miss Minchin’s—my other one knows everything. The streets are shining, and there are fields and fields of lilies, and everybody gathers them. Sara tells me when she puts me to bed.”
“You wicked thing,” said Lavinia, turning on Sara; “making fairy stories about heaven.”
“There are much more splendid stories in Revelation,” returned Sara. “Just look and see! How do you know mine are fairy stories? But I can tell you”—with a fine bit of unheavenly temper—”you will never find out whether they are or not if you’re not kinder to people than you are now. Come along, Lottie.” And she marched out of the room, rather hoping that she might see the little servant again somewhere, but she found no trace of her when she got into the hall.
“Who is that little girl who makes the fires?” she asked Mariette that night.
Mariette broke forth into a flow of description.
Ah, indeed, Mademoiselle Sara might well ask. She was a forlorn little thing who had just taken the place of scullery maid— though, as to being scullery maid, she was everything else besides. She blacked boots and grates, and carried heavy coal- scuttles up and down stairs, and scrubbed floors and cleaned windows, and was ordered about by everybody. She was fourteen years old, but was so stunted in growth that she looked about twelve. In truth, Mariette was sorry for her. She was so timid that if one chanced to speak to her it appeared as if her poor, frightened eyes would jump out of her head.
“What is her name?” asked Sara, who had sat by the table, with her chin on her hands, as she listened absorbedly to the recital.
Her name was Becky. Mariette heard everyone below-stairs calling, “Becky, do this,” and “Becky, do that,” every five minutes in the day.
Sara sat and looked into the fire, reflecting on Becky for some time after Mariette left her. She made up a story of which Becky was the ill-used heroine. She thought she looked as if she had never had quite enough to eat. Her very eyes were hungry. She hoped she should see her again, but though she caught sight of her carrying things up or down stairs on several occasions, she always seemed in such a hurry and so afraid of being seen that it was impossible to speak to her.
But a few weeks later, on another foggy afternoon, when she entered her sitting room she found herself confronting a rather pathetic picture. In her own special and pet easy-chair before the bright fire, Becky—with a coal smudge on her nose and several on her apron, with her poor little cap hanging half off her head, and an empty coal box on the floor near her—sat fast asleep, tired out beyond even the endurance of her hard-working young body. She had been sent up to put the bedrooms in order for the evening. There were a great many of them, and she had been running about all day. Sara’s rooms she had saved until the last. They were not like the other rooms, which were plain and bare. Ordinary pupils were expected to be satisfied with mere necessaries. Sara’s comfortable sitting room seemed a bower of luxury to the scullery maid, though it was, in fact, merely a nice, bright little room. But there were pictures and books in it, and curious things from India; there was a sofa and the low, soft chair; Emily sat in a chair of her own, with the air of a presiding goddess, and there was always a glowing fire and a polished grate. Becky saved it until the end of her afternoon’s work, because it rested her to go into it, and she always hoped to snatch a few minutes to sit down in the soft chair and look about her, and think about the wonderful good fortune of the child who owned such surroundings and who went out on the cold days in beautiful hats and coats one tried to catch a glimpse of through the area railing.
On this afternoon, when she had sat down, the sensation of relief to her short, aching legs had been so wonderful and delightful that it had seemed to soothe her whole body, and the glow of warmth and comfort from the fire had crept over her like a spell, until, as she looked at the red coals, a tired, slow smile stole over her smudged face, her head nodded forward without her being aware of it, her eyes drooped, and she fell fast asleep. She had really been only about ten minutes in the room when Sara entered, but she was in as deep a sleep as if she had been, like the Sleeping Beauty, slumbering for a hundred years. But she did not look—poor Becky— like a Sleeping Beauty at all. She looked only like an ugly, stunted, worn-out little scullery drudge.
Sara seemed as much unlike her as if she were a creature from another world.
On this particular afternoon she had been taking her dancing lesson, and the afternoon on which the dancing master appeared was rather a grand occasion at the seminary, though it occurred every week. The pupils were attired in their prettiest frocks, and as Sara danced particularly well, she was very much brought forward, and Mariette was requested to make her as diaphanous and fine as possible.
Today a frock the color of a rose had been put on her, and Mariette had bought some real buds and made her a wreath to wear on her black locks. She had been learning a new, delightful dance in which she had been skimming and flying about the room, like a large rose-colored butterfly, and the enjoyment and exercise had brought a brilliant, happy glow into her face.
When she entered the room, she floated in with a few of the butterfly steps—and there sat Becky, nodding her cap sideways off her head.
“Oh!” cried Sara, softly, when she saw her. “That poor thing!”
It did not occur to her to feel cross at finding her pet chair occupied by the small, dingy figure. To tell the truth, she was quite glad to find it there. When the ill-used heroine of her story wakened, she could talk to her. She crept toward her quietly, and stood looking at her. Becky gave a little snore.
“I wish she’d waken herself,” Sara said. “I don’t like to waken her. But Miss Minchin would be cross if she found out. I’ll just wait a few minutes.”
She took a seat on the edge of the table, and sat swinging her slim, rose-colored legs, and wondering what it would be best to do. Miss Amelia might come in at any moment, and if she did, Becky would be sure to be scolded.
“But she is so tired,” she thought. “She is so tired!”
A piece of flaming coal ended her perplexity for her that very moment. It broke off from a large lump and fell on to the fender. Becky started, and opened her eyes with a frightened gasp. She did not know she had fallen asleep. She had only sat down for one moment and felt the beautiful glow—and here she found herself staring in wild alarm at the wonderful pupil, who sat perched quite near her, like a rose-colored fairy, with interested eyes.
She sprang up and clutched at her cap. She felt it dangling over her ear, and tried wildly to put it straight. Oh, she had got herself into trouble now with a vengeance! To have impudently fallen asleep on such a young lady’s chair! She would be turned out of doors without wages.
She made a sound like a big breathless sob.
“Oh, miss! Oh, miss!” she stuttered. “I arst yer pardon, miss! Oh, I do, miss!”
Sara jumped down, and came quite close to her.
“Don’t be frightened,” she said, quite as if she had been speaking to a little girl like herself. “It doesn’t matter the least bit.”
“I didn’t go to do it, miss,” protested Becky. “It was the warm fire—an’ me bein’ so tired. It—it wasn’t impertience!”
Sara broke into a friendly little laugh, and put her hand on her shoulder.
“You were tired,” she said; “you could not help it. You are not really awake yet.”
How poor Becky stared at her! In fact, she had never heard such a nice, friendly sound in anyone’s voice before. She was used to being ordered about and scolded, and having her ears boxed. And this one—in her rose-colored dancing afternoon splendor—was looking at her as if she were not a culprit at all—as if she had a right to be tired—even to fall asleep! The touch of the soft, slim little paw on her shoulder was the most amazing thing she had ever known.
“Ain’t—ain’t yer angry, miss?” she gasped. “Ain’t yer goin’ to tell the missus?”
“No,” cried out Sara. “Of course I’m not.”
The woeful fright in the coal-smutted face made her suddenly so sorry that she could scarcely bear it. One of her queer thoughts rushed into her mind. She put her hand against Becky’s cheek.
“Why,” she said, “we are just the same—I am only a little girl like you. It’s just an accident that I am not you, and you are not me!”
Becky did not understand in the least. Her mind could not grasp such amazing thoughts, and “an accident” meant to her a calamity in which some one was run over or fell off a ladder and was carried to “the ‘orspital.”
“A’ accident, miss,” she fluttered respectfully. “Is it?”
“Yes,” Sara answered, and she looked at her dreamily for a moment. But the next she spoke in a different tone. She realized that Becky did not know what she meant.
“Have you done your work?” she asked. “Dare you stay here a few minutes?”
Becky lost her breath again.
“Here, miss? Me?”
Sara ran to the door, opened it, and looked out and listened.
“No one is anywhere about,” she explained. “If your bedrooms are finished, perhaps you might stay a tiny while. I thought— perhaps—you might like a piece of cake.”
The next ten minutes seemed to Becky like a sort of delirium. Sara opened a cupboard, and gave her a thick slice of cake. She seemed to rejoice when it was devoured in hungry bites. She talked and asked questions, and laughed until Becky’s fears actually began to calm themselves, and she once or twice gathered boldness enough to ask a question or so herself, daring as she felt it to be.
“Is that—” she ventured, looking longingly at the rose-colored frock. And she asked it almost in a whisper. “Is that there your best?”
“It is one of my dancing-frocks,” answered Sara. “I like it, don’t you?”
For a few seconds Becky was almost speechless with admiration. Then she said in an awed voice, “Onct I see a princess. I was standin’ in the street with the crowd outside Covin’ Garden, watchin’ the swells go inter the operer. An’ there was one everyone stared at most. They ses to each other, `That’s the princess.’ She was a growed-up young lady, but she was pink all over—gownd an’ cloak, an’ flowers an’ all. I called her to mind the minnit I see you, sittin’ there on the table, miss. You looked like her.”
“I’ve often thought,” said Sara, in her reflecting voice, “that I should like to be a princess; I wonder what it feels like. I believe I will begin pretending I am one.”
Becky stared at her admiringly, and, as before, did not understand her in the least. She watched her with a sort of adoration. Very soon Sara left her reflections and turned to her with a new question.
“Becky,” she said, “weren’t you listening to that story?”
“Yes, miss,” confessed Becky, a little alarmed again. “I knowed I hadn’t orter, but it was that beautiful I—I couldn’t help it.”
“I liked you to listen to it,” said Sara. “If you tell stories, you like nothing so much as to tell them to people who want to listen. I don’t know why it is. Would you like to hear the rest?”
Becky lost her breath again.
“Me hear it?” she cried. “Like as if I was a pupil, miss! All about the Prince—and the little white Mer-babies swimming about laughing—with stars in their hair?”
Sara nodded.
“You haven’t time to hear it now, I’m afraid,” she said; “but if you will tell me just what time you come to do my rooms, I will try to be here and tell you a bit of it every day until it is finished. It’s a lovely long one—and I’m always putting new bits to it.”
“Then,” breathed Becky, devoutly, “I wouldn’t mind how heavy the coal boxes was—or what the cook done to me, if—if I might have that to think of.”
“You may,” said Sara. “I’ll tell it all to you.”
When Becky went downstairs, she was not the same Becky who had staggered up, loaded down by the weight of the coal scuttle. She had an extra piece of cake in her pocket, and she had been fed and warmed, but not only by cake and fire. Something else had warmed and fed her, and the something else was Sara.
When she was gone Sara sat on her favorite perch on the end of her table. Her feet were on a chair, her elbows on her knees, and her chin in her hands.
“If I was a princess—a real princess,” she murmured, “I could scatter largess to the populace. But even if I am only a pretend princess, I can invent little things to do for people. Things like this. She was just as happy as if it was largess. I’ll pretend that to do things people like is scattering largess. I’ve scattered largess.”

Chapter 5: Becky

Not very long after this a very exciting thing happened. Not only Sara, but the entire school, found it exciting, and made it the chief subject of conversation for weeks after it occurred. In one of his letters Captain Crewe told a most interesting story. A friend who had been at school with him when he was a boy had unexpectedly come to see him in India. He was the owner of a large tract of land upon which diamonds had been found, and he was engaged in developing the mines. If all went as was confidently expected, he would become possessed of such wealth as it made one dizzy to think of; and because he was fond of the friend of his school days, he had given him an opportunity to share in this enormous fortune by becoming a partner in his scheme. This, at least, was what Sara gathered from his letters. It is true that any other business scheme, however magnificent, would have had but small attraction for her or for the schoolroom; but “diamond mines” sounded so like the Arabian Nights that no one could be indifferent. Sara thought them enchanting, and painted pictures, for Ermengarde and Lottie, of labyrinthine passages in the bowels of the earth, where sparkling stones studded the walls and roofs and ceilings, and strange, dark men dug them out with heavy picks. Ermengarde delighted in the story, and Lottie insisted on its being retold to her every evening. Lavinia was very spiteful about it, and told Jessie that she didn’t believe such things as diamond mines existed.
“My mamma has a diamond ring which cost forty pounds,” she said. “And it is not a big one, either. If there were mines full of diamonds, people would be so rich it would be ridiculous.”
“Perhaps Sara will be so rich that she will be ridiculous,” giggled Jessie.
“She’s ridiculous without being rich,” Lavinia sniffed.
“I believe you hate her,” said Jessie.
“No, I don’t,” snapped Lavinia. “But I don’t believe in mines full of diamonds.”
“Well, people have to get them from somewhere,” said Jessie. “Lavinia,” with a new giggle, “what do you think Gertrude says?”
“I don’t know, I’m sure; and I don’t care if it’s something more about that everlasting Sara.”
“Well, it is. One of her `pretends’ is that she is a princess. She plays it all the time—even in school. She says it makes her learn her lessons better. She wants Ermengarde to be one, too, but Ermengarde says she is too fat.”
“She is too fat,” said Lavinia. “And Sara is too thin.”
Naturally, Jessie giggled again.
“She says it has nothing to do with what you look like, or what you have. It has only to do with what you think of, and what you do.” “I suppose she thinks she could be a princess if she was a beggar,” said Lavinia. “Let us begin to call her Your Royal Highness.”
Lessons for the day were over, and they were sitting before the schoolroom fire, enjoying the time they liked best. It was the time when Miss Minchin and Miss Amelia were taking their tea in the sitting room sacred to themselves. At this hour a great deal of talking was done, and a great many secrets changed hands, particularly if the younger pupils behaved themselves well, and did not squabble or run about noisily, which it must be confessed they usually did. When they made an uproar the older girls usually interfered with scolding and shakes. They were expected to keep order, and there was danger that if they did not, Miss Minchin or Miss Amelia would appear and put an end to festivities. Even as Lavinia spoke the door opened and Sara entered with Lottie, whose habit was to trot everywhere after her like a little dog.
“There she is, with that horrid child!” exclaimed Lavinia in a whisper. “If she’s so fond of her, why doesn’t she keep her in her own room? She will begin howling about something in five minutes.”
It happened that Lottie had been seized with a sudden desire to play in the schoolroom, and had begged her adopted parent to come with her. She joined a group of little ones who were playing in a corner. Sara curled herself up in the window-seat, opened a book, and began to read. It was a book about the French Revolution, and she was soon lost in a harrowing picture of the prisoners in the Bastille—men who had spent so many years in dungeons that when they were dragged out by those who rescued them, their long, gray hair and beards almost hid their faces, and they had forgotten that an outside world existed at all, and were like beings in a dream.
She was so far away from the schoolroom that it was not agreeable to be dragged back suddenly by a howl from Lottie. Never did she find anything so difficult as to keep herself from losing her temper when she was suddenly disturbed while absorbed in a book. People who are fond of books know the feeling of irritation which sweeps over them at such a moment. The temptation to be unreasonable and snappish is one not easy to manage.
“It makes me feel as if someone had hit me,” Sara had told Ermengarde once in confidence. “And as if I want to hit back. I have to remember things quickly to keep from saying something ill- tempered.”
She had to remember things quickly when she laid her book on the window-seat and jumped down from her comfortable corner.
Lottie had been sliding across the schoolroom floor, and, having first irritated Lavinia and Jessie by making a noise, had ended by falling down and hurting her fat knee. She was screaming and dancing up and down in the midst of a group of friends and enemies, who were alternately coaxing and scolding her.
“Stop this minute, you cry-baby! Stop this minute!” Lavinia commanded.
“I’m not a cry-baby . . . I’m not!” wailed Lottle. “Sara, Sa— ra!”
“If she doesn’t stop, Miss Minchin will hear her,” cried Jessie. “Lottie darling, I’ll give you a penny!”
“I don’t want your penny,” sobbed Lottie; and she looked down at the fat knee, and, seeing a drop of blood on it, burst forth again.
Sara flew across the room and, kneeling down, put her arms round her.
“Now, Lottie,” she said. “Now, Lottie, you promised Sara.”
“She said I was a cry-baby,” wept Lottie.
Sara patted her, but spoke in the steady voice Lottie knew.
“But if you cry, you will be one, Lottie pet. You promised.” Lottle remembered that she had promised, but she preferred to lift up her voice.
“I haven’t any mamma,” she proclaimed. “I haven’t—a bit—of mamma.”
“Yes, you have,” said Sara, cheerfully. “Have you forgotten? Don’t you know that Sara is your mamma? Don’t you want Sara for your mamma?”
Lottie cuddled up to her with a consoled sniff.
“Come and sit in the window-seat with me,” Sara went on, “and I’ll whisper a story to you.”
“Will you?” whimpered Lottie. “Will you—tell me—about the diamond mines?”
“The diamond mines?” broke out Lavinia. “Nasty, little spoiled thing, I should like to slap her!”
Sara got up quickly on her feet. It must be remembered that she had been very deeply absorbed in the book about the Bastille, and she had had to recall several things rapidly when she realized that she must go and take care of her adopted child. She was not an angel, and she was not fond of Lavinia.
“Well,” she said, with some fire, “I should like to slap you— but I don’t want to slap you!” restraining herself. “At least I both want to slap you—and I should like to slap you—but I won’t slap you. We are not little gutter children. We are both old enough to know better.”
Here was Lavinia’s opportunity.
“Ah, yes, your royal highness,” she said. “We are princesses, I believe. At least one of us is. The school ought to be very fashionable now Miss Minchin has a princess for a pupil.”
Sara started toward her. She looked as if she were going to box her ears. Perhaps she was. Her trick of pretending things was the joy of her life. She never spoke of it to girls she was not fond of. Her new “pretend” about being a princess was very near to her heart, and she was shy and sensitive about it. She had meant it to be rather a secret, and here was Lavinia deriding it before nearly all the school. She felt the blood rush up into her face and tingle in her ears. She only just saved herself. If you were a princess, you did not fly into rages. Her hand dropped, and she stood quite still a moment. When she spoke it was in a quiet, steady voice; she held her head up, and everybody listened to her.
“It’s true,” she said. “Sometimes I do pretend I am a princess. I pretend I am a princess, so that I can try and behave like one.”
Lavinia could not think of exactly the right thing to say. Several times she had found that she could not think of a satisfactory reply when she was dealing with Sara. The reason for this was that, somehow, the rest always seemed to be vaguely in sympathy with her opponent. She saw now that they were pricking up their ears interestedly. The truth was, they liked princesses, and they all hoped they might hear something more definite about this one, and drew nearer Sara accordingly.
Lavinia could only invent one remark, and it fell rather flat.
“Dear me,” she said, “I hope, when you ascend the throne, you won’t forget us!”
“I won’t,” said Sara, and she did not utter another word, but stood quite still, and stared at her steadily as she saw her take Jessie’s arm and turn away.
After this, the girls who were jealous of her used to speak of her as “Princess Sara” whenever they wished to be particularly disdainful, and those who were fond of her gave her the name among themselves as a term of affection. No one called her “princess” instead of “Sara,” but her adorers were much pleased with the picturesqueness and grandeur of the title, and Miss Minchin, hearing of it, mentioned it more than once to visiting parents, feeling that it rather suggested a sort of royal boarding school.
To Becky it seemed the most appropriate thing in the world. The acquaintance begun on the foggy afternoon when she had jumped up terrified from her sleep in the comfortable chair, had ripened and grown, though it must be confessed that Miss Minchin and Miss Amelia knew very little about it. They were aware that Sara was “kind” to the scullery maid, but they knew nothing of certain delightful moments snatched perilously when, the upstairs rooms being set in order with lightning rapidity, Sara’s sitting room was reached, and the heavy coal box set down with a sigh of joy. At such times stories were told by installments, things of a satisfying nature were either produced and eaten or hastily tucked into pockets to be disposed of at night, when Becky went upstairs to her attic to bed.
“But I has to eat ‘em careful, miss,” she said once; ”’cos if I leaves crumbs the rats come out to get ‘em.”
“Rats!” exclaimed Sara, in horror. “Are there rats there?”
“Lots of ‘em, miss,” Becky answered in quite a matter-of-fact manner. “There mostly is rats an’ mice in attics. You gets used to the noise they makes scuttling about. I’ve got so I don’t mind ‘em s’ long as they don’t run over my piller.”
“Ugh!” said Sara.
“You gets used to anythin’ after a bit,” said Becky. “You have to, miss, if you’re born a scullery maid. I’d rather have rats than cockroaches.”
“So would I,” said Sara; “I suppose you might make friends with a rat in time, but I don’t believe I should like to make friends with a cockroach.”
Sometimes Becky did not dare to spend more than a few minutes in the bright, warm room, and when this was the case perhaps only a few words could be exchanged, and a small purchase slipped into the old-fashioned pocket Becky carried under her dress skirt, tied round her waist with a band of tape. The search for and discovery of satisfying things to eat which could be packed into small compass, added a new interest to Sara’s existence. When she drove or walked out, she used to look into shop windows eagerly. The first time it occurred to her to bring home two or three little meat pies, she felt that she had hit upon a discovery. When she exhibited them, Becky’s eyes quite sparkled.
“Oh, miss!” she murmured. “Them will be nice an’ fillin.’ It’s fillin’ness that’s best. Sponge cake’s a ‘evenly thing, but it melts away like—if you understand, miss. These’ll just stay in yer stummick.”
“Well,” hesitated Sara, “I don’t think it would be good if they stayed always, but I do believe they will be satisfying.”
They were satisfying—and so were beef sandwiches, bought at a cook-shop—and so were rolls and Bologna sausage. In time, Becky began to lose her hungry, tired feeling, and the coal box did not seem so unbearably heavy.
However heavy it was, and whatsoever the temper of the cook, and the hardness of the work heaped upon her shoulders, she had always the chance of the afternoon to look forward to—the chance that Miss Sara would be able to be in her sitting room. In fact, the mere seeing of Miss Sara would have been enough without meat pies. If there was time only for a few words, they were always friendly, merry words that put heart into one; and if there was time for more, then there was an installment of a story to be told, or some other thing one remembered afterward and sometimes lay awake in one’s bed in the attic to think over. Sara—who was only doing what she unconsciously liked better than anything else, Nature having made her for a giver—had not the least idea what she meant to poor Becky, and how wonderful a benefactor she seemed. If Nature has made you for a giver, your hands are born open, and so is your heart; and though there may be times when your hands are empty, your heart is always full, and you can give things out of that—warm things, kind things, sweet things—help and comfort and laughter—and sometimes gay, kind laughter is the best help of all.
Becky had scarcely known what laughter was through all her poor, little hard-driven life. Sara made her laugh, and laughed with her; and, though neither of them quite knew it, the laughter was as “fillin’” as the meat pies.
A few weeks before Sara’s eleventh birthday a letter came to her from her father, which did not seem to be written in such boyish high spirits as usual. He was not very well, and was evidently overweighted by the business connected with the diamond mines.
“You see, little Sara,” he wrote, “your daddy is not a businessman at all, and figures and documents bother him. He does not really understand them, and all this seems so enormous. Perhaps, if I was not feverish I should not be awake, tossing about, one half of the night and spend the other half in troublesome dreams. If my little missus were here, I dare say she would give me some solemn, good advice. You would, wouldn’t you, Little Missus?”
One of his many jokes had been to call her his “little missus” because she had such an old-fashioned air.
He had made wonderful preparations for her birthday. Among other things, a new doll had been ordered in Paris, and her wardrobe was to be, indeed, a marvel of splendid perfection. When she had replied to the letter asking her if the doll would be an acceptable present, Sara had been very quaint.
“I am getting very old,” she wrote; “you see, I shall never live to have another doll given me. This will be my last doll. There is something solemn about it. If I could write poetry, I am sure a poem about `A Last Doll’ would be very nice. But I cannot write poetry. I have tried, and it made me laugh. It did not sound like Watts or Coleridge or Shakespeare at all. No one could ever take Emily’s place, but I should respect the Last Doll very much; and I am sure the school would love it. They all like dolls, though some of the big ones—the almost fifteen ones— pretend they are too grown up.”
Captain Crewe had a splitting headache when he read this letter in his bungalow in India. The table before him was heaped with papers and letters which were alarming him and filling him with anxious dread, but he laughed as he had not laughed for weeks.
“Oh,” he said, “she’s better fun every year she lives. God grant this business may right itself and leave me free to run home and see her. What wouldn’t I give to have her little arms round my neck this minute! What wouldn’t I give!”
The birthday was to be celebrated by great festivities. The schoolroom was to be decorated, and there was to be a party. The boxes containing the presents were to be opened with great ceremony, and there was to be a glittering feast spread in Miss Minchin’s sacred room. When the day arrived the whole house was in a whirl of excitement. How the morning passed nobody quite knew, because there seemed such preparations to be made. The schoolroom was being decked with garlands of holly; the desks had been moved away, and red covers had been put on the forms which were arrayed round the room against the wall.
When Sara went into her sitting room in the morning, she found on the table a small, dumpy package, tied up in a piece of brown paper. She knew it was a present, and she thought she could guess whom it came from. She opened it quite tenderly. It was a square pincushion, made of not quite clean red flannel, and black pins had been stuck carefully into it to form the words, “Menny hapy returns.”
“Oh!” cried Sara, with a warm feeling in her heart. “What pains she has taken! I like it so, it—it makes me feel sorrowful.”
But the next moment she was mystified. On the under side of the pincushion was secured a card, bearing in neat letters the name “Miss Amelia Minchin.”
Sara turned it over and over.
“Miss Amelia!” she said to herself “How can it be!”
And just at that very moment she heard the door being cautiously pushed open and saw Becky peeping round it.
There was an affectionate, happy grin on her face, and she shuffled forward and stood nervously pulling at her fingers.
“Do yer like it, Miss Sara?” she said. “Do yer?”
“Like it?” cried Sara. “You darling Becky, you made it all yourself.”
Becky gave a hysteric but joyful sniff, and her eyes looked quite moist with delight.
“It ain’t nothin’ but flannin, an’ the flannin ain’t new; but I wanted to give yer somethin’ an’ I made it of nights. I knew yer could pretend it was satin with diamond pins in. I tried to when I was makin’ it. The card, miss,” rather doubtfully; ”’t warn’t wrong of me to pick it up out o’ the dust-bin, was it? Miss ‘Meliar had throwed it away. I hadn’t no card o’ my own, an’ I knowed it wouldn’t be a proper presink if I didn’t pin a card on— so I pinned Miss ‘Meliar’s.”
Sara flew at her and hugged her. She could not have told herself or anyone else why there was a lump in her throat.
“Oh, Becky!” she cried out, with a queer little laugh, “I love you, Becky—I do, I do!”
“Oh, miss!” breathed Becky. “Thank yer, miss, kindly; it ain’t good enough for that. The—the flannin wasn’t new.”

Chapter 6: The Diamond Mines

Chapter 7: The Diamond Mines Again

The first night she spent in her attic was a thing Sara never forgot. During its passing she lived through a wild, unchildlike woe of which she never spoke to anyone about her. There was no one who would have understood. It was, indeed, well for her that as she lay awake in the darkness her mind was forcibly distracted, now and then, by the strangeness of her surroundings. It was, perhaps, well for her that she was reminded by her small body of material things. If this had not been so, the anguish of her young mind might have been too great for a child to bear. But, really, while the night was passing she scarcely knew that she had a body at all or remembered any other thing than one.
“My papa is dead!” she kept whispering to herself. “My papa is dead!”
It was not until long afterward that she realized that her bed had been so hard that she turned over and over in it to find a place to rest, that the darkness seemed more intense than any she had ever known, and that the wind howled over the roof among the chimneys like something which wailed aloud. Then there was something worse. This was certain scufflings and scratchings and squeakings in the walls and behind the skirting boards. She knew what they meant, because Becky had described them. They meant rats and mice who were either fighting with each other or playing together. Once or twice she even heard sharp-toed feet scurrying across the floor, and she remembered in those after days, when she recalled things, that when first she heard them she started up in bed and sat trembling, and when she lay down again covered her head with the bedclothes.
The change in her life did not come about gradually, but was made all at once.
“She must begin as she is to go on,” Miss Minchin said to Miss Amelia. “She must be taught at once what she is to expect.”
Mariette had left the house the next morning. The glimpse Sara caught of her sitting room, as she passed its open door, showed her that everything had been changed. Her ornaments and luxuries had been removed, and a bed had been placed in a corner to transform it into a new pupil’s bedroom.
When she went down to breakfast she saw that her seat at Miss Minchin’s side was occupied by Lavinia, and Miss Minchin spoke to her coldly.
“You will begin your new duties, Sara,” she said, “by taking your seat with the younger children at a smaller table. You must keep them quiet, and see that they behave well and do not waste their food. You ought to have been down earlier. Lottie has already upset her tea.”
That was the beginning, and from day to day the duties given to her were added to. She taught the younger children French and heard their other lessons, and these were the least of her labors. It was found that she could be made use of in numberless directions. She could be sent on errands at any time and in all weathers. She could be told to do things other people neglected. The cook and the housemaids took their tone from Miss Minchin, and rather enjoyed ordering about the “young one” who had been made so much fuss over for so long. They were not servants of the best class, and had neither good manners nor good tempers, and it was frequently convenient to have at hand someone on whom blame could be laid.
During the first month or two, Sara thought that her willingness to do things as well as she could, and her silence under reproof, might soften those who drove her so hard. In her proud little heart she wanted them to see that she was trying to earn her living and not accepting charity. But the time came when she saw that no one was softened at all; and the more willing she was to do as she was told, the more domineering and exacting careless housemaids became, and the more ready a scolding cook was to blame her.
If she had been older, Miss Minchin would have given her the bigger girls to teach and saved money by dismissing an instructress; but while she remained and looked like a child, she could be made more useful as a sort of little superior errand girl and maid of all work. An ordinary errand boy would not have been so clever and reliable. Sara could be trusted with difficult commissions and complicated messages. She could even go and pay bills, and she combined with this the ability to dust a room well and to set things in order.
Her own lessons became things of the past. She was taught nothing, and only after long and busy days spent in running here and there at everybody’s orders was she grudgingly allowed to go into the deserted schoolroom, with a pile of old books, and study alone at night.
“If I do not remind myself of the things I have learned, perhaps I may forget them,” she said to herself. “I am almost a scullery maid, and if I am a scullery maid who knows nothing, I shall be like poor Becky. I wonder if I could quite forget and begin to drop my H’S and not remember that Henry the Eighth had six wives.”
One of the most curious things in her new existence was her changed position among the pupils. Instead of being a sort of small royal personage among them, she no longer seemed to be one of their number at all. She was kept so constantly at work that she scarcely ever had an opportunity of speaking to any of them, and she could not avoid seeing that Miss Minchin preferred that she should live a life apart from that of the occupants of the schoolroom.
“I will not have her forming intimacies and talking to the other children,” that lady said. “Girls like a grievance, and if she begins to tell romantic stories about herself, she will become an ill-used heroine, and parents will be given a wrong impression. It is better that she should live a separate life—one suited to her circumstances. I am giving her a home, and that is more than she has any right to expect from me.”
Sara did not expect much, and was far too proud to try to continue to be intimate with girls who evidently felt rather awkward and uncertain about her. The fact was that Miss Minchin’s pupils were a set of dull, matter-of-fact young people. They were accustomed to being rich and comfortable, and as Sara’s frocks grew shorter and shabbier and queerer-looking, and it became an established fact that she wore shoes with holes in them and was sent out to buy groceries and carry them through the streets in a basket on her arm when the cook wanted them in a hurry, they felt rather as if, when they spoke to her, they were addressing an under servant.
“To think that she was the girl with the diamond mines, Lavinia commented. “She does look an object. And she’s queerer than ever. I never liked her much, but I can’t bear that way she has now of looking at people without speaking—just as if she was finding them out.”
“I am,” said Sara, promptly, when she heard of this. “That’s what I look at some people for. I like to know about them. I think them over afterward.”
The truth was that she had saved herself annoyance several times by keeping her eye on Lavinia, who was quite ready to make mischief, and would have been rather pleased to have made it for the ex-show pupil.
Sara never made any mischief herself, or interfered with anyone. She worked like a drudge; she tramped through the wet streets, carrying parcels and baskets; she labored with the childish inattention of the little ones’ French lessons; as she became shabbier and more forlorn-looking, she was told that she had better take her meals downstairs; she was treated as if she was nobody’s concern, and her heart grew proud and sore, but she never told anyone what she felt.
“Soldiers don’t complain,” she would say between her small, shut teeth, “I am not going to do it; I will pretend this is part of a war.”
But there were hours when her child heart might almost have broken with loneliness but for three people.
The first, it must be owned, was Becky—just Becky. Throughout all that first night spent in the garret, she had felt a vague comfort in knowing that on the other side of the wall in which the rats scuffled and squeaked there was another young human creature. And during the nights that followed the sense of comfort grew. They had little chance to speak to each other during the day. Each had her own tasks to perform, and any attempt at conversation would have been regarded as a tendency to loiter and lose time. “Don’t mind me, miss,” Becky whispered during the first morning, “if I don’t say nothin’ polite. Some un’d be down on us if I did. I means `please’ an’ `thank you’ an’ `beg pardon,’ but I dassn’t to take time to say it.”
But before daybreak she used to slip into Sara’s attic and button her dress and give her such help as she required before she went downstairs to light the kitchen fire. And when night came Sara always heard the humble knock at her door which meant that her handmaid was ready to help her again if she was needed. During the first weeks of her grief Sara felt as if she were too stupefied to talk, so it happened that some time passed before they saw each other much or exchanged visits. Becky’s heart told her that it was best that people in trouble should be left alone.
The second of the trio of comforters was Ermengarde, but odd things happened before Ermengarde found her place.
When Sara’s mind seemed to awaken again to the life about her, she realized that she had forgotten that an Ermengarde lived in the world. The two had always been friends, but Sara had felt as if she were years the older. It could not be contested that Ermengarde was as dull as she was affectionate. She clung to Sara in a simple, helpless way; she brought her lessons to her that she might be helped; she listened to her every word and besieged her with requests for stories. But she had nothing interesting to say herself, and she loathed books of every description. She was, in fact, not a person one would remember when one was caught in the storm of a great trouble, and Sara forgot her.
It had been all the easier to forget her because she had been suddenly called home for a few weeks. When she came back she did not see Sara for a day or two, and when she met her for the first time she encountered her coming down a corridor with her arms full of garments which were to be taken downstairs to be mended. Sara herself had already been taught to mend them. She looked pale and unlike herself, and she was attired in the queer, outgrown frock whose shortness showed so much thin black leg.
Ermengarde was too slow a girl to be equal to such a situation. She could not think of anything to say. She knew what had happened, but, somehow, she had never imagined Sara could look like this—so odd and poor and almost like a servant. It made her quite miserable, and she could do nothing but break into a short hysterical laugh and exclaim—aimlessly and as if without any meaning, “Oh, Sara, is that you?”
“Yes,” answered Sara, and suddenly a strange thought passed through her mind and made her face flush. She held the pile of garments in her arms, and her chin rested upon the top of it to keep it steady. Something in the look of her straight-gazing eyes made Ermengarde lose her wits still more. She felt as if Sara had changed into a new kind of girl, and she had never known her before. Perhaps it was because she had suddenly grown poor and had to mend things and work like Becky.
“Oh,” she stammered. “How—how are you?”
“I don’t know,” Sara replied. “How are you?”
“I’m—I’m quite well,” said Ermengarde, overwhelmed with shyness. Then spasmodically she thought of something to say which seemed more intimate. “Are you—are you very unhappy?” she said in a rush.
Then Sara was guilty of an injustice. Just at that moment her torn heart swelled within her, and she felt that if anyone was as stupid as that, one had better get away from her.
“What do you think?” she said. “Do you think I am very happy?” And she marched past her without another word.
In course of time she realized that if her wretchedness had not made her forget things, she would have known that poor, dull Ermengarde was not to be blamed for her unready, awkward ways. She was always awkward, and the more she felt, the more stupid she was given to being.
But the sudden thought which had flashed upon her had made her over-sensitive.
“She is like the others,” she had thought. “She does not really want to talk to me. She knows no one does.”
So for several weeks a barrier stood between them. When they met by chance Sara looked the other way, and Ermengarde felt too stiff and embarrassed to speak. Sometimes they nodded to each other in passing, but there were times when they did not even exchange a greeting.
“If she would rather not talk to me,” Sara thought, “I will keep out of her way. Miss Minchin makes that easy enough.”
Miss Minchin made it so easy that at last they scarcely saw each other at all. At that time it was noticed that Ermengarde was more stupid than ever, and that she looked listless and unhappy. She used to sit in the window-seat, huddled in a heap, and stare out of the window without speaking. Once Jessie, who was passing, stopped to look at her curiously.
“What are you crying for, Ermengarde?” she asked.
“I’m not crying,” answered Ermengarde, in a muffled, unsteady voice.
“You are,” said Jessie. “A great big tear just rolled down the bridge of your nose and dropped off at the end of it. And there goes another.”
“Well,” said Ermengarde, “I’m miserable—and no one need interfere.” And she turned her plump back and took out her handkerchief and boldly hid her face in it.
That night, when Sara went to her attic, she was later than usual. She had been kept at work until after the hour at which the pupils went to bed, and after that she had gone to her lessons in the lonely schoolroom. When she reached the top of the stairs, she was surprised to see a glimmer of light coming from under the attic door.
“Nobody goes there but myself,” she thought quickly, “but someone has lighted a candle.”
Someone had, indeed, lighted a candle, and it was not burning in the kitchen candlestick she was expected to use, but in one of those belonging to the pupils’ bedrooms. The someone was sitting upon the battered footstool, and was dressed in her nightgown and wrapped up in a red shawl. It was Ermengarde.
“Ermengarde!” cried Sara. She was so startled that she was almost frightened. “You will get into trouble.”
Ermengarde stumbled up from her footstool. She shuffled across the attic in her bedroom slippers, which were too large for her. Her eyes and nose were pink with crying.
“I know I shall—if I’m found out.” she said. “But I don’t care—I don’t care a bit. Oh, Sara, please tell me. What is the matter? Why don’t you like me any more?”
Something in her voice made the familiar lump rise in Sara’s throat. It was so affectionate and simple—so like the old Ermengarde who had asked her to be “best friends.” It sounded as if she had not meant what she had seemed to mean during these past weeks.
“I do like you,” Sara answered. “I thought—you see, everything is different now. I thought you—were different.
Ermengarde opened her wet eyes wide.
“Why, it was you who were different!” she cried. “You didn’t want to talk to me. I didn’t know what to do. It was you who were different after I came back.”
Sara thought a moment. She saw she had made a mistake.
“I am different,” she explained, “though not in the way you think. Miss Minchin does not want me to talk to the girls. Most of them don’t want to talk to me. I thought—perhaps—you didn’t. So I tried to keep out of your way.”
“Oh, Sara,” Ermengarde almost wailed in her reproachful dismay. And then after one more look they rushed into each other’s arms. It must be confessed that Sara’s small black head lay for some minutes on the shoulder covered by the red shawl. When Ermengarde had seemed to desert her, she had felt horribly lonely.
Afterward they sat down upon the floor together, Sara clasping her knees with her arms, and Ermengarde rolled up in her shawl. Ermengarde looked at the odd, big-eyed little face adoringly.
“I couldn’t bear it any more,” she said. “I dare say you could live without me, Sara; but I couldn’t live without you. I was nearly dead. So tonight, when I was crying under the bedclothes, I thought all at once of creeping up here and just begging you to let us be friends again.”
“You are nicer than I am,” said Sara. “I was too proud to try and make friends. You see, now that trials have come, they have shown that I am not a nice child. I was afraid they would. Perhaps”—wrinkling her forehead wisely—”that is what they were sent for.”
“I don’t see any good in them,” said Ermengarde stoutly.
“Neither do I—to speak the truth,” admitted Sara, frankly. “But I suppose there might be good in things, even if we don’t see it. There might”—doubtfully—”Be good in Miss Minchin.”
Ermengarde looked round the attic with a rather fearsome curiosity.
“Sara,” she said, “do you think you can bear living here?”
Sara looked round also.
“If I pretend it’s quite different, I can,” she answered; “or if I pretend it is a place in a story.”
She spoke slowly. Her imagination was beginning to work for her. It had not worked for her at all since her troubles had come upon her. She had felt as if it had been stunned.
“Other people have lived in worse places. Think of the Count of Monte Cristo in the dungeons of the Chateau d’If. And think of the people in the Bastille!”
“The Bastille,” half whispered Ermengarde, watching her and beginning to be fascinated. She remembered stories of the French Revolution which Sara had been able to fix in her mind by her dramatic relation of them. No one but Sara could have done it.
A well-known glow came into Sara’s eyes.
“Yes,” she said, hugging her knees, “that will be a good place to pretend about. I am a prisoner in the Bastille. I have been here for years and years—and years; and everybody has forgotten about me. Miss Minchin is the jailer—and Becky”—a sudden light adding itself to the glow in her eyes—”Becky is the prisoner in the next cell.”
She turned to Ermengarde, looking quite like the old Sara.
“I shall pretend that,” she said; “and it will be a great comfort.”
Ermengarde was at once enraptured and awed.
“And will you tell me all about it?” she said. “May I creep up here at night, whenever it is safe, and hear the things you have made up in the day? It will seem as if we were more `best friends’ than ever.”
“Yes,” answered Sara, nodding. “Adversity tries people, and mine has tried you and proved how nice you are.”

Chapter 8: In the Attic

Chapter 9: Melchisedec

Chapter 10: The Indian Gentleman

There were fine sunsets even in the square, sometimes. One could only see parts of them, however, between the chimneys and over the roofs. From the kitchen windows one could not see them at all, and could only guess that they were going on because the bricks looked warm and the air rosy or yellow for a while, or perhaps one saw a blazing glow strike a particular pane of glass somewhere. There was, however, one place from which one could see all the splendor of them: the piles of red or gold clouds in the west; or the purple ones edged with dazzling brightness; or the little fleecy, floating ones, tinged with rose-color and looking like flights of pink doves scurrying across the blue in a great hurry if there was a wind. The place where one could see all this, and seem at the same time to breathe a purer air, was, of course, the attic window. When the square suddenly seemed to begin to glow in an enchanted way and look wonderful in spite of its sooty trees and railings, Sara knew something was going on in the sky; and when it was at all possible to leave the kitchen without being missed or called back, she invariably stole away and crept up the flights of stairs, and, climbing on the old table, got her head and body as far out of the window as possible. When she had accomplished this, she always drew a long breath and looked all round her. It used to seem as if she had all the sky and the world to herself. No one else ever looked out of the other attics. Generally the skylights were closed; but even if they were propped open to admit air, no one seemed to come near them. And there Sara would stand, sometimes turning her face upward to the blue which seemed so friendly and near— just like a lovely vaulted ceiling—sometimes watching the west and all the wonderful things that happened there: the clouds melting or drifting or waiting softly to be changed pink or crimson or snow-white or purple or pale dove-gray. Sometimes they made islands or great mountains enclosing lakes of deep turquoise- blue, or liquid amber, or chrysoprase-green; sometimes dark headlands jutted into strange, lost seas; sometimes slender strips of wonderful lands joined other wonderful lands together. There were places where it seemed that one could run or climb or stand and wait to see what next was coming—until, perhaps, as it all melted, one could float away. At least it seemed so to Sara, and nothing had ever been quite so beautiful to her as the things she saw as she stood on the table—her body half out of the skylight—the sparrows twittering with sunset softness on the slates. The sparrows always seemed to her to twitter with a sort of subdued softness just when these marvels were going on.
There was such a sunset as this a few days after the Indian gentleman was brought to his new home; and, as it fortunately happened that the afternoon’s work was done in the kitchen and nobody had ordered her to go anywhere or perform any task, Sara found it easier than usual to slip away and go upstairs.
She mounted her table and stood looking out. It was a wonderful moment. There were floods of molten gold covering the west, as if a glorious tide was sweeping over the world. A deep, rich yellow light filled the air; the birds flying across the tops of the houses showed quite black against it.
“It’s a Splendid one,” said Sara, softly, to herself. “It makes me feel almost afraid—as if something strange was just going to happen. The Splendid ones always make me feel like that.”
She suddenly turned her head because she heard a sound a few yards away from her. It was an odd sound like a queer little squeaky chattering. It came from the window of the next attic. Someone had come to look at the sunset as she had. There was a head and a part of a body emerging from the skylight, but it was not the head or body of a little girl or a housemaid; it was the picturesque white-swathed form and dark-faced, gleaming-eyed, white-turbaned head of a native Indian man-servant—”a Lascar,” Sara said to herself quickly—and the sound she had heard came from a small monkey he held in his arms as if he were fond of it, and which was snuggling and chattering against his breast.
As Sara looked toward him he looked toward her. The first thing she thought was that his dark face looked sorrowful and homesick. She felt absolutely sure he had come up to look at the sun, because he had seen it so seldom in England that he longed for a sight of it. She looked at him interestedly for a second, and then smiled across the slates. She had learned to know how comforting a smile, even from a stranger, may be.
Hers was evidently a pleasure to him. His whole expression altered, and he showed such gleaming white teeth as he smiled back that it was as if a light had been illuminated in his dusky face. The friendly look in Sara’s eyes was always very effective when people felt tired or dull.
It was perhaps in making his salute to her that he loosened his hold on the monkey. He was an impish monkey and always ready for adventure, and it is probable that the sight of a little girl excited him. He suddenly broke loose, jumped on to the slates, ran across them chattering, and actually leaped on to Sara’s shoulder, and from there down into her attic room. It made her laugh and delighted her; but she knew he must be restored to his master—if the Lascar was his master—and she wondered how this was to be done. Would he let her catch him, or would he be naughty and refuse to be caught, and perhaps get away and run off over the roofs and be lost? That would not do at all. Perhaps he belonged to the Indian gentleman, and the poor man was fond of him.
She turned to the Lascar, feeling glad that she remembered still some of the Hindustani she had learned when she lived with her father. She could make the man understand. She spoke to him in the language he knew.
“Will he let me catch him?” she asked.
She thought she had never seen more surprise and delight than the dark face expressed when she spoke in the familiar tongue. The truth was that the poor fellow felt as if his gods had intervened, and the kind little voice came from heaven itself. At once Sara saw that he had been accustomed to European children. He poured forth a flood of respectful thanks. He was the servant of Missee Sahib. The monkey was a good monkey and would not bite; but, unfortunately, he was difficult to catch. He would flee from one spot to another, like the lightning. He was disobedient, though not evil. Ram Dass knew him as if he were his child, and Ram Dass he would sometimes obey, but not always. If Missee Sahib would permit Ram Dass, he himself could cross the roof to her room, enter the windows, and regain the unworthy little animal. But he was evidently afraid Sara might think he was taking a great liberty and perhaps would not let him come.
But Sara gave him leave at once.
“Can you get across?” she inquired.
“In a moment,” he answered her.
“Then come,” she said; “he is flying from side to side of the room as if he was frightened.”
Ram Dass slipped through his attic window and crossed to hers as steadily and lightly as if he had walked on roofs all his life. He slipped through the skylight and dropped upon his feet without a sound. Then he turned to Sara and salaamed again. The monkey saw him and uttered a little scream. Ram Dass hastily took the precaution of shutting the skylight, and then went in chase of him. It was not a very long chase. The monkey prolonged it a few minutes evidently for the mere fun of it, but presently he sprang chattering on to Ram Dass’s shoulder and sat there chattering and clinging to his neck with a weird little skinny arm.
Ram Dass thanked Sara profoundly. She had seen that his quick native eyes had taken in at a glance all the bare shabbiness of the room, but he spoke to her as if he were speaking to the little daughter of a rajah, and pretended that he observed nothing. He did not presume to remain more than a few moments after he had caught the monkey, and those moments were given to further deep and grateful obeisance to her in return for her indulgence. This little evil one, he said, stroking the monkey, was, in truth, not so evil as he seemed, and his master, who was ill, was sometimes amused by him. He would have been made sad if his favorite had run away and been lost. Then he salaamed once more and got through the skylight and across the slates again with as much agility as the monkey himself had displayed.
When he had gone Sara stood in the middle of her attic and thought of many things his face and his manner had brought back to her. The sight of his native costume and the profound reverence of his manner stirred all her past memories. It seemed a strange thing to remember that she—the drudge whom the cook had said insulting things to an hour ago—had only a few years ago been surrounded by people who all treated her as Ram Dass had treated her; who salaamed when she went by, whose foreheads almost touched the ground when she spoke to them, who were her servants and her slaves. It was like a sort of dream. It was all over, and it could never come back. It certainly seemed that there was no way in which any change could take place. She knew what Miss Minchin intended that her future should be. So long as she was too young to be used as a regular teacher, she would be used as an errand girl and servant and yet expected to remember what she had learned and in some mysterious way to learn more. The greater number of her evenings she was supposed to spend at study, and at various indefinite intervals she was examined and knew she would have been severely admonished if she had not advanced as was expected of her. The truth, indeed, was that Miss Minchin knew that she was too anxious to learn to require teachers. Give her books, and she would devour them and end by knowing them by heart. She might be trusted to be equal to teaching a good deal in the course of a few years. This was what would happen: when she was older she would be expected to drudge in the schoolroom as she drudged now in various parts of the house; they would be obliged to give her more respectable clothes, but they would be sure to be plain and ugly and to make her look somehow like a servant. That was all there seemed to be to look forward to, and Sara stood quite still for several minutes and thought it over.
Then a thought came back to her which made the color rise in her cheek and a spark light itself in her eyes. She straightened her thin little body and lifted her head.
“Whatever comes,” she said, “cannot alter one thing. If I am a princess in rags and tatters, I can be a princess inside. It would be easy to be a princess if I were dressed in cloth of gold, but it is a great deal more of a triumph to be one all the time when no one knows it. There was Marie Antoinette when she was in prison and her throne was gone and she had only a black gown on, and her hair was white, and they insulted her and called her Widow Capet. She was a great deal more like a queen then than when she was so gay and everything was so grand. I like her best then. Those howling mobs of people did not frighten her. She was stronger than they were, even when they cut her head off.”
This was not a new thought, but quite an old one, by this time. It had consoled her through many a bitter day, and she had gone about the house with an expression in her face which Miss Minchin could not understand and which was a source of great annoyance to her, as it seemed as if the child were mentally living a life which held her above he rest of the world. It was as if she scarcely heard the rude and acid things said to her; or, if she heard them, did not care for them at all. Sometimes, when she was in the midst of some harsh, domineering speech, Miss Minchin would find the still, unchildish eyes fixed upon her with something like a proud smile in them. At such times she did not know that Sara was saying to herself:
“You don’t know that you are saying these things to a princess, and that if I chose I could wave my hand and order you to execution. I only spare you because I am a princess, and you are a poor, stupid, unkind, vulgar old thing, and don’t know any better.”
This used to interest and amuse her more than anything else; and queer and fanciful as it was, she found comfort in it and it was a good thing for her. While the thought held possession of her, she could not be made rude and malicious by the rudeness and malice of those about her.
“A princess must be polite,” she said to herself.
And so when the servants, taking their tone from their mistress, were insolent and ordered her about, she would hold her head erect and reply to them with a quaint civility which often made them stare at her.
“She’s got more airs and graces than if she come from Buckingham Palace, that young one,” said the cook, chuckling a little sometimes. “I lose my temper with her often enough, but I will say she never forgets her manners. `If you please, cook’; `Will you be so kind, cook?’ `I beg your pardon, cook’; `May I trouble you, cook?’ She drops ‘em about the kitchen as if they was nothing.”
The morning after the interview with Ram Dass and his monkey, Sara was in the schoolroom with her small pupils. Having finished giving them their lessons, she was putting the French exercise-books together and thinking, as she did it, of the various things royal personages in disguise were called upon to do: Alfred the Great, for instance, burning the cakes and getting his ears boxed by the wife of the neat-herd. How frightened she must have been when she found out what she had done. If Miss Minchin should find out that she—Sara, whose toes were almost sticking out of her boots—was a princess—a real one! The look in her eyes was exactly the look which Miss Minchin most disliked. She would not have it; she was quite near her and was so enraged that she actually flew at her and boxed her ears—exactly as the neat-herd’s wife had boxed King Alfred’s. It made Sara start. She wakened from her dream at the shock, and, catching her breath, stood still a second. Then, not knowing she was going to do it, she broke into a little laugh.
“What are you laughing at, you bold, impudent child?” Miss Minchin exclaimed.
It took Sara a few seconds to control herself sufficiently to remember that she was a princess. Her cheeks were red and smarting from the blows she had received.
“I was thinking,” she answered.
“Beg my pardon immediately,” said Miss Minchin.
Sara hesitated a second before she replied.
“I will beg your pardon for laughing, if it was rude,” she said then; “but I won’t beg your pardon for thinking.”
“What were you thinking?” demanded Miss Minchin.
“How dare you think? What were you thinking?”
Jessie tittered, and she and Lavinia nudged each other in unison. All the girls looked up from their books to listen. Really, it always interested them a little when Miss Minchin attacked Sara. Sara always said something queer, and never seemed the least bit frightened. She was not in the least frightened now, though her boxed ears were scarlet and her eyes were as bright as stars.
“I was thinking,” she answered grandly and politely, “that you did not know what you were doing.”
“That I did not know what I was doing?” Miss Minchin fairly gasped.
“Yes,” said Sara, “and I was thinking what would happen if I were a princess and you boxed my ears—what I should do to you. And I was thinking that if I were one, you would never dare to do it, whatever I said or did. And I was thinking how surprised and frightened you would be if you suddenly found out—”
She had the imagined future so clearly before her eyes that she spoke in a manner which had an effect even upon Miss Minchin. It almost seemed for the moment to her narrow, unimaginative mind that there must be some real power hidden behind this candid daring.
“What?” she exclaimed. “Found out what?”
“That I really was a princess,” said Sara, “and could do anything—anything I liked.”
Every pair of eyes in the room widened to its full limit. Lavinia leaned forward on her seat to look.
“Go to your room,” cried Miss Minchin, breathlessly, “this instant! Leave the schoolroom! Attend to your lessons, young ladies!”
Sara made a little bow.
“Excuse me for laughing if it was impolite,” she said, and walked out of the room, leaving Miss Minchin struggling with her rage, and the girls whispering over their books.
“Did you see her? Did you see how queer she looked?” Jessie broke out. “I shouldn’t be at all surprised if she did turn out to be something. Suppose she should!”

Chapter 11: Ram Dass

When one lives in a row of houses, it is interesting to think of the things which are being done and said on the other side of the wall of the very rooms one is living in. Sara was fond of amusing herself by trying to imagine the things hidden by the wall which divided the Select Seminary from the Indian gentleman’s house. She knew that the schoolroom was next to the Indian gentleman’s study, and she hoped that the wall was thick so that the noise made sometimes after lesson hours would not disturb him.
“I am growing quite fond of him,” she said to Ermengarde; “I should not like him to be disturbed. I have adopted him for a friend. You can do that with people you never speak to at all. You can just watch them, and think about them and be sorry for them, until they seem almost like relations. I’m quite anxious sometimes when I see the doctor call twice a day.”
“I have very few relations,” said Ermengarde, reflectively, “and I’m very glad of it. I don’t like those I have. My two aunts are always saying, `Dear me, Ermengarde! You are very fat. You shouldn’t eat sweets,’ and my uncle is always asking me things like, `When did Edward the Third ascend the throne?’ and, `Who died of a surfeit of lampreys?’”
Sara laughed.
“People you never speak to can’t ask you questions like that,” she said; “and I’m sure the Indian gentleman wouldn’t even if he was quite intimate with you. I am fond of him.”
She had become fond of the Large Family because they looked happy; but she had become fond of the Indian gentleman because he looked unhappy. He had evidently not fully recovered from some very severe illness. In the kitchen—where, of course, the servants, through some mysterious means, knew everything—there was much discussion of his case. He was not an Indian gentleman really, but an Englishman who had lived in India. He had met with great misfortunes which had for a time so imperilled his whole fortune that he had thought himself ruined and disgraced forever. The shock had been so great that he had almost died of brain fever; and ever since he had been shattered in health, though his fortunes had changed and all his possessions had been restored to him. His trouble and peril had been connected with mines.
“And mines with diamonds in ‘em!” said the cook. “No savin’s of mine never goes into no mines—particular diamond ones”— with a side glance at Sara. “We all know somethin’ of them.” “He felt as my papa felt,” Sara thought. “He was ill as my papa was; but he did not die.”
So her heart was more drawn to him than before. When she was sent out at night she used sometimes to feel quite glad, because there was always a chance that the curtains of the house next door might not yet be closed and she could look into the warm room and see her adopted friend. When no one was about she used sometimes to stop, and, holding to the iron railings, wish him good night as if he could hear her.
“Perhaps you can feel if you can’t hear,” was her fancy. “Perhaps kind thoughts reach people somehow, even through windows and doors and walls. Perhaps you feel a little warm and comforted, and don’t know why, when I am standing here in the cold and hoping you will get well and happy again. I am so sorry for you,” she would whisper in an intense little voice. “I wish you had a `Little Missus’ who could pet you as I used to pet papa when he had a headache. I should like to be your `Little Missus’ myself, poor dear! Good night—good night. God bless you!”
She would go away, feeling quite comforted and a little warmer herself. Her sympathy was so strong that it seemed as if it must reach him somehow as he sat alone in his armchair by the fire, nearly always in a great dressing gown, and nearly always with his forehead resting in his hand as he gazed hopelessly into the fire. He looked to Sara like a man who had a trouble on his mind still, not merely like one whose troubles lay all in the past.
“He always seems as if he were thinking of something that hurts him now”, she said to herself, “but he has got his money back and he will get over his brain fever in time, so he ought not to look like that. I wonder if there is something else.”
If there was something else—something even servants did not hear of—she could not help believing that the father of the Large Family knew it—the gentleman she called Mr. Montmorency. Mr. Montmorency went to see him often, and Mrs. Montmorency and all the little Montmorencys went, too, though less often. He seemed particularly fond of the two elder little girls—the Janet and Nora who had been so alarmed when their small brother Donald had given Sara his sixpence. He had, in fact, a very tender place in his heart for all children, and particularly for little girls. Janet and Nora were as fond of him as he was of them, and looked forward with the greatest pleasure to the afternoons when they were allowed to cross the square and make their well-behaved little visits to him. They were extremely decorous little visits because he was an invalid.
“He is a poor thing,” said Janet, “and he says we cheer him up. We try to cheer him up very quietly.”
Janet was the head of the family, and kept the rest of it in order. It was she who decided when it was discreet to ask the Indian gentleman to tell stories about India, and it was she who saw when he was tired and it was the time to steal quietly away and tell Ram Dass to go to him. They were very fond of Ram Dass. He could have told any number of stories if he had been able to speak anything but Hindustani. The Indian gentleman’s real name was Mr. Carrisford, and Janet told Mr. Carrisford about the encounter with the little-girl-who-was-not-a-beggar. He was very much interested, and all the more so when he heard from Ram Dass of the adventure of the monkey on the roof. Ram Dass made for him a very clear picture of the attic and its desolateness—of the bare floor and broken plaster, the rusty, empty grate, and the hard, narrow bed.
“Carmichael,” he said to the father of the Large Family, after he had heard this description, “I wonder how many of the attics in this square are like that one, and how many wretched little servant girls sleep on such beds, while I toss on my down pillows, loaded and harassed by wealth that is, most of it—not mine.”
“My dear fellow,” Mr. Carmichael answered cheerily, “the sooner you cease tormenting yourself the better it will be for you. If you possessed all the wealth of all the Indies, you could not set right all the discomforts in the world, and if you began to refurnish all the attics in this square, there would still remain all the attics in all the other squares and streets to put in order. And there you are!”
Mr. Carrisford sat and bit his nails as he looked into the glowing bed of coals in the grate.
“Do you suppose,” he said slowly, after a pause—”do you think it is possible that the other child—the child I never cease thinking of, I believe—could be—could possibly be reduced to any such condition as the poor little soul next door?”
Mr. Carmichael looked at him uneasily. He knew that the worst thing the man could do for himself, for his reason and his health, was to begin to think in the particular way of this particular subject.
“If the child at Madame Pascal’s school in Paris was the one you are in search of,” he answered soothingly, “she would seem to be in the hands of people who can afford to take care of her. They adopted her because she had been the favorite companion of their little daughter who died. They had no other children, and Madame Pascal said that they were extremely well-to-do Russians.”
“And the wretched woman actually did not know where they had taken her!” exclaimed Mr. Carrisford.
Mr. Carmichael shrugged his shoulders.
“She was a shrewd, worldly Frenchwoman, and was evidently only too glad to get the child so comfortably off her hands when the father’s death left her totally unprovided for. Women of her type do not trouble themselves about the futures of children who might prove burdens. The adopted parents apparently disappeared and left no trace.”
“But you say `if the child was the one I am in search of. You say ‘if.’ We are not sure. There was a difference in the name.”
“Madame Pascal pronounced it as if it were Carew instead of Crewe—but that might be merely a matter of pronunciation. The circumstances were curiously similar. An English officer in India had placed his motherless little girl at the school. He had died suddenly after losing his fortune.” Mr. Carmichael paused a moment, as if a new thought had occurred to him. “Are you sure the child was left at a school in Paris? Are you sure it was Paris?”
“My dear fellow,” broke forth Carrisford, with restless bitterness, “I am sure of nothing. I never saw either the child or her mother. Ralph Crewe and I loved each other as boys, but we had not met since our school days, until we met in India. I was absorbed in the magnificent promise of the mines. He became absorbed, too. The whole thing was so huge and glittering that we half lost our heads. When we met we scarcely spoke of anything else. I only knew that the child had been sent to school somewhere. I do not even remember, now, how I knew it.”
He was beginning to be excited. He always became excited when his still weakened brain was stirred by memories of the catastrophes of the past.
Mr. Carmichael watched him anxiously. It was necessary to ask some questions, but they must be put quietly and with caution.
“But you had reason to think the school was in Paris?”
“Yes,” was the answer, “because her mother was a Frenchwoman, and I had heard that she wished her child to be educated in Paris. It seemed only likely that she would be there.”
“Yes,” Mr. Carmichael said, “it seems more than probable.”
The Indian gentleman leaned forward and struck the table with a long, wasted hand.
“Carmichael,” he said, “I must find her. If she is alive, she is somewhere. If she is friendless and penniless, it is through my fault. How is a man to get back his nerve with a thing like that on his mind? This sudden change of luck at the mines has made realities of all our most fantastic dreams, and poor Crewe’s child may be begging in the street!”
“No, no,” said Carmichael. “Try to be calm. Console yourself with the fact that when she is found you have a fortune to hand over to her.”
“Why was I not man enough to stand my ground when things looked black?” Carrisford groaned in petulant misery. “I believe I should have stood my ground if I had not been responsible for other people’s money as well as my own. Poor Crewe had put into the scheme every penny that he owned. He trusted me—he loved me. And he died thinking I had ruined him—I—Tom Carrisford, who played cricket at Eton with him. What a villain he must have thought me!”
“Don’t reproach yourself so bitterly.”
“I don’t reproach myself because the speculation threatened to fail—I reproach myself for losing my courage. I ran away like a swindler and a thief, because I could not face my best friend and tell him I had ruined him and his child.”
The good-hearted father of the Large Family put his hand on his shoulder comfortingly.
“You ran away because your brain had given way under the strain of mental torture,” he said. “You were half delirious already. If you had not been you would have stayed and fought it out. You were in a hospital, strapped down in bed, raving with brain fever, two days after you left the place. Remember that.”
Carrisford dropped his forehead in his hands.
“Good God! Yes,” he said. “I was driven mad with dread and horror. I had not slept for weeks. The night I staggered out of my house all the air seemed full of hideous things mocking and mouthing at me.”
“That is explanation enough in itself,” said Mr. Carmichael. “How could a man on the verge of brain fever judge sanely!”
Carrisford shook his drooping head.
“And when I returned to consciousness poor Crewe was dead—and buried. And I seemed to remember nothing. I did not remember the child for months and months. Even when I began to recall her existence everything seemed in a sort of haze.”
He stopped a moment and rubbed his forehead. “It sometimes seems so now when I try to remember. Surely I must sometime have heard Crewe speak of the school she was sent to. Don’t you think so?”
“He might not have spoken of it definitely. You never seem even to have heard her real name.”
“He used to call her by an odd pet name he had invented. He called her his `Little Missus.’ But the wretched mines drove everything else out of our heads. We talked of nothing else. If he spoke of the school, I forgot—I forgot. And now I shall never remember.”
“Come, come,” said Carmichael. “We shall find her yet. We will continue to search for Madame Pascal’s good-natured Russians. She seemed to have a vague idea that they lived in Moscow. We will take that as a clue. I will go to Moscow.”
“If I were able to travel, I would go with you,” said Carrisford; “but I can only sit here wrapped in furs and stare at the fire. And when I look into it I seem to see Crewe’s gay young face gazing back at me. He looks as if he were asking me a question. Sometimes I dream of him at night, and he always stands before me and asks the same question in words. Can you guess what he says, Carmichael?”
Mr. Carmichael answered him in a rather low voice.
“Not exactly,” he said.
“He always says, `Tom, old man—Tom—where is the Little Missus?’” He caught at Carmichael’s hand and clung to it. “I must be able to answer him—I must!” he said. “Help me to find her. Help me.”
On the other side of the wall Sara was sitting in her garret talking to Melchisedec, who had come out for his evening meal.
“It has been hard to be a princess today, Melchisedec,” she said. “It has been harder than usual. It gets harder as the weather grows colder and the streets get more sloppy. When Lavinia laughed at my muddy skirt as I passed her in the hall, I thought of something to say all in a flash—and I only just stopped myself in time. You can’t sneer back at people like that- -if you are a princess. But you have to bite your tongue to hold yourself in. I bit mine. It was a cold afternoon, Melchisedec. And it’s a cold night.”
Quite suddenly she put her black head down in her arms, as she often did when she was alone.
“Oh, papa,” she whispered, “what a long time it seems since I was your `Little Missus’!”
This was what happened that day on both sides of the wall.

Chapter 12: The Other Side of the Wall

Chapter 13: One of the Populace

On this very afternoon, while Sara was out, a strange thing happened in the attic. Only Melchisedec saw and heard it; and he was so much alarmed and mystified that he scuttled back to his hole and hid there, and really quaked and trembled as he peeped out furtively and with great caution to watch what was going on.
The attic had been very still all the day after Sara had left it in the early morning. The stillness had only been broken by the pattering of the rain upon the slates and the skylight. Melchisedec had, in fact, found it rather dull; and when the rain ceased to patter and perfect silence reigned, he decided to come out and reconnoiter, though experience taught him that Sara would not return for some time. He had been rambling and sniffing about, and had just found a totally unexpected and unexplained crumb left from his last meal, when his attention was attracted by a sound on the roof. He stopped to listen with a palpitating heart. The sound suggested that something was moving on the roof. It was approaching the skylight; it reached the skylight. The skylight was being mysteriously opened. A dark face peered into the attic; then another face appeared behind it, and both looked in with signs of caution and interest. Two men were outside on the roof, and were making silent preparations to enter through the skylight itself. One was Ram Dass and the other was a young man who was the Indian gentleman’s secretary; but of course Melchisedec did not know this. He only knew that the men were invading the silence and privacy of the attic; and as the one with the dark face let himself down through the aperture with such lightness and dexterity that he did not make the slightest sound, Melchisedec turned tail and fled precipitately back to his hole. He was frightened to death. He had ceased to be timid with Sara, and knew she would never throw anything but crumbs, and would never make any sound other than the soft, low, coaxing whistling; but strange men were dangerous things to remain near. He lay close and flat near the entrance of his home, just managing to peep through the crack with a bright, alarmed eye. How much he understood of the talk he heard I am not in the least able to say; but, even if he had understood it all, he would probably have remained greatly mystified.
The secretary, who was light and young, slipped through the skylight as noiselessly as Ram Dass had done; and he caught a last glimpse of Melchisedec’s vanishing tail.
“Was that a rat?” he asked Ram Dass in a whisper.
“Yes; a rat, Sahib,” answered Ram Dass, also whispering. “There are many in the walls.”
“Ugh!” exclaimed the young man. “It is a wonder the child is not terrified of them.”
Ram Dass made a gesture with his hands. He also smiled respectfully. He was in this place as the intimate exponent of Sara, though she had only spoken to him once.
“The child is the little friend of all things, Sahib,” he answered. “She is not as other children. I see her when she does not see me. I slip across the slates and look at her many nights to see that she is safe. I watch her from my window when she does not know I am near. She stands on the table there and looks out at the sky as if it spoke to her. The sparrows come at her call. The rat she has fed and tamed in her loneliness. The poor slave of the house comes to her for comfort. There is a little child who comes to her in secret; there is one older who worships her and would listen to her forever if she might. This I have seen when I have crept across the roof. By the mistress of the house—who is an evil woman—she is treated like a pariah; but she has the bearing of a child who is of the blood of kings!”
“You seem to know a great deal about her,” the secretary said.
“All her life each day I know,” answered Ram Dass. “Her going out I know, and her coming in; her sadness and her poor joys; her coldness and her hunger. I know when she is alone until midnight, learning from her books; I know when her secret friends steal to her and she is happier—as children can be, even in the midst of poverty—because they come and she may laugh and talk with them in whispers. If she were ill I should know, and I would come and serve her if it might be done.”
“You are sure no one comes near this place but herself, and that she will not return and surprise us. She would be frightened if she found us here, and the Sahib Carrisford’s plan would be spoiled.”
Ram Dass crossed noiselessly to the door and stood close to it.
“None mount here but herself, Sahib,” he said. “She has gone out with her basket and may be gone for hours. If I stand here I can hear any step before it reaches the last flight of the stairs.”
The secretary took a pencil and a tablet from his breast pocket.
“Keep your ears open,” he said; and he began to walk slowly and softly round the miserable little room, making rapid notes on his tablet as he looked at things.
First he went to the narrow bed. He pressed his hand upon the mattress and uttered an exclamation.
“As hard as a stone,” he said. “That will have to be altered some day when she is out. A special journey can be made to bring it across. It cannot be done tonight.” He lifted the covering and examined the one thin pillow.
“Coverlet dingy and worn, blanket thin, sheets patched and ragged,” he said. “What a bed for a child to sleep in—and in a house which calls itself respectable! There has not been a fire in that grate for many a day,” glancing at the rusty fireplace.
“Never since I have seen it,” said Ram Dass. “The mistress of the house is not one who remembers that another than herself may be cold.”
The secretary was writing quickly on his tablet. He looked up from it as he tore off a leaf and slipped it into his breast pocket.
“It is a strange way of doing the thing,” he said. “Who planned it?”
Ram Dass made a modestly apologetic obeisance.
“It is true that the first thought was mine, Sahib,” he said; “though it was naught but a fancy. I am fond of this child; we are both lonely. It is her way to relate her visions to her secret friends. Being sad one night, I lay close to the open skylight and listened. The vision she related told what this miserable room might be if it had comforts in it. She seemed to see it as she talked, and she grew cheered and warmed as she spoke. Then she came to this fancy; and the next day, the Sahib being ill and wretched, I told him of the thing to amuse him. It seemed then but a dream, but it pleased the Sahib. To hear of the child’s doings gave him entertainment. He became interested in her and asked questions. At last he began to please himself with the thought of making her visions real things.”
“You think that it can be done while she sleeps? Suppose she awakened,” suggested the secretary; and it was evident that whatsoever the plan referred to was, it had caught and pleased his fancy as well as the Sahib Carrisford’s.
“I can move as if my feet were of velvet,” Ram Dass replied; “and children sleep soundly—even the unhappy ones. I could have entered this room in the night many times, and without causing her to turn upon her pillow. If the other bearer passes to me the things through the window, I can do all and she will not stir. When she awakens she will think a magician has been here.”
He smiled as if his heart warmed under his white robe, and the secretary smiled back at him.
“It will be like a story from the Arabian Nights,” he said. “Only an Oriental could have planned it. It does not belong to London fogs.”
They did not remain very long, to the great relief of Melchisedec, who, as he probably did not comprehend their conversation, felt their movements and whispers ominous. The young secretary seemed interested in everything. He wrote down things about the floor, the fireplace, the broken footstool, the old table, the walls—which last he touched with his hand again and again, seeming much pleased when he found that a number of old nails had been driven in various places.
“You can hang things on them,” he said.
Ram Dass smiled mysteriously.
“Yesterday, when she was out,” he said, “I entered, bringing with me small, sharp nails which can be pressed into the wall without blows from a hammer. I placed many in the plaster where I may need them. They are ready.”
The Indian gentleman’s secretary stood still and looked round him as he thrust his tablets back into his pocket.
“I think I have made notes enough; we can go now,” he said. “The Sahib Carrisford has a warm heart. It is a thousand pities that he has not found the lost child.”
“If he should find her his strength would be restored to him,” said Ram Dass. “His God may lead her to him yet.”
Then they slipped through the skylight as noiselessly as they had entered it. And, after he was quite sure they had gone, Melchisedec was greatly relieved, and in the course of a few minutes felt it safe to emerge from his hole again and scuffle about in the hope that even such alarming human beings as these might have chanced to carry crumbs in their pockets and drop one or two of them.

Chapter 14: What Melchisedec Heard and Saw

Chapter 15: The Magic

Chapter 16: The Visitor

The next afternoon three members of the Large Family sat in the Indian gentleman’s library, doing their best to cheer him up. They had been allowed to come in to perform this office because he had specially invited them. He had been living in a state of suspense for some time, and today he was waiting for a certain event very anxiously. This event was the return of Mr. Carmichael from Moscow. His stay there had been prolonged from week to week. On his first arrival there, he had not been able satisfactorily to trace the family he had gone in search of. When he felt at last sure that he had found them and had gone to their house, he had been told that they were absent on a journey. His efforts to reach them had been unavailing, so he had decided to remain in Moscow until their return. Mr. Carrisford sat in his reclining chair, and Janet sat on the floor beside him. He was very fond of Janet. Nora had found a footstool, and Donald was astride the tiger’s head which ornamented the rug made of the animal’s skin. It must be owned that he was riding it rather violently.
“Don’t chirrup so loud, Donald,” Janet said. “When you come to cheer an ill person up you don’t cheer him up at the top of your voice. Perhaps cheering up is too loud, Mr. Carrisford?” turning to the Indian gentleman.
But he only patted her shoulder.
“No, it isn’t,” he answered. “And it keeps me from thinking too much.”
“I’m going to be quiet,” Donald shouted. “We’ll all be as quiet as mice.”
“Mice don’t make a noise like that,” said Janet.
Donald made a bridle of his handkerchief and bounced up and down on the tiger’s head.
“A whole lot of mice might,” he said cheerfully. “A thousand mice might.”
“I don’t believe fifty thousand mice would,” said Janet, severely; “and we have to be as quiet as one mouse.”
Mr. Carrisford laughed and patted her shoulder again.
“Papa won’t be very long now,” she said. “May we talk about the lost little girl?”
“I don’t think I could talk much about anything else just now,” the Indian gentleman answered, knitting his forehead with a tired look.
“We like her so much,” said Nora. “We call her the little un- fairy princess.”
“Why?” the Indian gentleman inquired, because the fancies of the Large Family always made him forget things a little.
It was Janet who answered.
“It is because, though she is not exactly a fairy, she will be so rich when she is found that she will be like a princess in a fairy tale. We called her the fairy princess at first, but it didn’t quite suit.”
“Is it true,” said Nora, “that her papa gave all his money to a friend to put in a mine that had diamonds in it, and then the friend thought he had lost it all and ran away because he felt as if he was a robber?”
“But he wasn’t really, you know,” put in Janet, hastily.
The Indian gentleman took hold of her hand quickly.
“No, he wasn’t really,” he said.
“I am sorry for the friend,” Janet said; “I can’t help it. He didn’t mean to do it, and it would break his heart. I am sure it would break his heart.”
“You are an understanding little woman, Janet,” the Indian gentleman said, and he held her hand close.
“Did you tell Mr. Carrisford,” Donald shouted again, “about the little-girl-who-isn’t-a-beggar? Did you tell him she has new nice clothes? P’r’aps she’s been found by somebody when she was lost.”
“There’s a cab!” exclaimed Janet. “It’s stopping before the door. It is papa!”
They all ran to the windows to look out.
“Yes, it’s papa,” Donald proclaimed. “But there is no little girl.”
All three of them incontinently fled from the room and tumbled into the hall. It was in this way they always welcomed their father. They were to be heard jumping up and down, clapping their hands, and being caught up and kissed.
Mr. Carrisford made an effort to rise and sank back again.
“It is no use,” he said. “What a wreck I am!”
Mr. Carmichael’s voice approached the door.
“No, children,” he was saying; “you may come in after I have talked to Mr. Carrisford. Go and play with Ram Dass.”
Then the door opened and he came in. He looked rosier than ever, and brought an atmosphere of freshness and health with him; but his eyes were disappointed and anxious as they met the invalid’s look of eager question even as they grasped each other’s hands.
“What news?” Mr. Carrisford asked. “The child the Russian people adopted?”
“She is not the child we are looking for,” was Mr. Carmichael’s answer. “She is much younger than Captain Crewe’s little girl. Her name is Emily Carew. I have seen and talked to her. The Russians were able to give me every detail.”
How wearied and miserable the Indian gentleman looked! His hand dropped from Mr. Carmichael’s.
“Then the search has to be begun over again,” he said. “That is all. Please sit down.”
Mr. Carmichael took a seat. Somehow, he had gradually grown fond of this unhappy man. He was himself so well and happy, and so surrounded by cheerfulness and love, that desolation and broken health seemed pitifully unbearable things. If there had been the sound of just one gay little high-pitched voice in the house, it would have been so much less forlorn. And that a man should be compelled to carry about in his breast the thought that he had seemed to wrong and desert a child was not a thing one could face.
“Come, come,” he said in his cheery voice; “we’ll find her yet.”
“We must begin at once. No time must be lost,” Mr. Carrisford fretted. “Have you any new suggestion to make—any whatsoever?”
Mr. Carmichael felt rather restless, and he rose and began to pace the room with a thoughtful, though uncertain face.
“Well, perhaps,” he said. “I don’t know what it may be worth. The fact is, an idea occurred to me as I was thinking the thing over in the train on the journey from Dover.”
“What was it? If she is alive, she is somewhere.”
“Yes; she is somewhere. We have searched the schools in Paris. Let us give up Paris and begin in London. That was my idea—to search London.”
“There are schools enough in London,” said Mr. Carrisford. Then he slightly started, roused by a recollection. “By the way, there is one next door.”
“Then we will begin there. We cannot begin nearer than next door.”
“No,” said Carrisford. “There is a child there who interests me; but she is not a pupil. And she is a little dark, forlorn creature, as unlike poor Crewe as a child could be.”
Perhaps the Magic was at work again at that very moment—the beautiful Magic. It really seemed as if it might be so. What was it that brought Ram Dass into the room—even as his master spoke—salaaming respectfully, but with a scarcely concealed touch of excitement in his dark, flashing eyes?
“Sahib,” he said, “the child herself has come—the child the sahib felt pity for. She brings back the monkey who had again run away to her attic under the roof. I have asked that she remain. It was my thought that it would please the sahib to see and speak with her.”
“Who is she?” inquired Mr. Carmichael.
“God knows,” Mr. Carrrisford answered. “She is the child I spoke of. A little drudge at the school.” He waved his hand to Ram Dass, and addressed him. “Yes, I should like to see her. Go and bring her in.” Then he turned to Mr. Carmichael. “While you have been away,” he explained, “I have been desperate. The days were so dark and long. Ram Dass told me of this child’s miseries, and together we invented a romantic plan to help her. I suppose it was a childish thing to do; but it gave me something to plan and think of. Without the help of an agile, soft-footed Oriental like Ram Dass, however, it could not have been done.”
Then Sara came into the room. She carried the monkey in her arms, and he evidently did not intend to part from her, if it could be helped. He was clinging to her and chattering, and the interesting excitement of finding herself in the Indian gentleman’s room had brought a flush to Sara’s cheeks.
“Your monkey ran away again,” she said, in her pretty voice. “He came to my garret window last night, and I took him in because it was so cold. I would have brought him back if it had not been so late. I knew you were ill and might not like to be disturbed.”
The Indian gentleman’s hollow eyes dwelt on her with curious interest.
“That was very thoughtful of you,” he said.
Sara looked toward Ram Dass, who stood near the door.
“Shall I give him to the Lascar?” she asked.
“How do you know he is a Lascar?” said the Indian gentleman, smiling a little.
“Oh, I know Lascars,” Sara said, handing over the reluctant monkey. “I was born in India.”
The Indian gentleman sat upright so suddenly, and with such a change of expression, that she was for a moment quite startled.
“You were born in India,” he exclaimed, “were you? Come here.” And he held out his hand.
Sara went to him and laid her hand in his, as he seemed to want to take it. She stood still, and her green-gray eyes met his wonderingly. Something seemed to be the matter with him.
“You live next door?” he demanded.
“Yes; I live at Miss Minchin’s seminary.”
“But you are not one of her pupils?”
A strange little smile hovered about Sara’s mouth. She hesitated a moment.
“I don’t think I know exactly what I am,” she replied.
“Why not?”
“At first I was a pupil, and a parlor boarder; but now—”
“You were a pupil! What are you now?”
The queer little sad smile was on Sara’s lips again.
“I sleep in the attic, next to the scullery maid,” she said. “I run errands for the cook—I do anything she tells me; and I teach the little ones their lessons.”
“Question her, Carmichael,” said Mr. Carrisford, sinking back as if he had lost his strength. “Question her; I cannot.”
The big, kind father of the Large Family knew how to question little girls. Sara realized how much practice he had had when he spoke to her in his nice, encouraging voice.
“What do you mean by `At first,’ my child?” he inquired.
“When I was first taken there by my papa.”
“Where is your papa?”
“He died,” said Sara, very quietly. “He lost all his money and there was none left for me. There was no one to take care of me or to pay Miss Minchin.”
“Carmichael!” the Indian gentleman cried out loudly. “Carmichael!”
“We must not frighten her,” Mr. Carmichael said aside to him in a quick, low voice. And he added aloud to Sara, “So you were sent up into the attic, and made into a little drudge. That was about it, wasn’t it?”
“There was no one to take care of me,” said Sara. “There was no money; I belong to nobody.”
“How did your father lose his money?” the Indian gentleman broke in breathlessly.
“He did not lose it himself,” Sara answered, wondering still more each moment. “He had a friend he was very fond of—he was very fond of him. It was his friend who took his money. He trusted his friend too much.”
The Indian gentleman’s breath came more quickly.
“The friend might have meant to do no harm,” he said. “It might have happened through a mistake.”
Sara did not know how unrelenting her quiet young voice sounded as she answered. If she had known, she would surely have tried to soften it for the Indian gentleman’s sake.
“The suffering was just as bad for my papa,” she said. It killed him.”
“What was your father’s name?” the Indian gentleman said. “Tell me.”
“His name was Ralph Crewe,” Sara answered, feeling startled. “Captain Crewe. He died in India.”
The haggard face contracted, and Ram Dass sprang to his master’s side.
“Carmichael,” the invalid gasped, “it is the child—the child!”
For a moment Sara thought he was going to die. Ram Dass poured out drops from a bottle, and held them to his lips. Sara stood near, trembling a little. She looked in a bewildered way at Mr. Carmichael.
“What child am I?” she faltered.
“He was your father’s friend,” Mr. Carmichael answered her. “Don’t be frightened. We have been looking for you for two years.”
Sara put her hand up to her forehead, and her mouth trembled. She spoke as if she were in a dream.
“And I was at Miss Minchin’s all the while,” she half whispered. “Just on the other side of the wall.”

Chapter 17: “It Is the Child!”

Chapter 18: “I Tried Not to Be”

Never had such joy reigned in the nursery of the Large Family. Never had they dreamed of such delights as resulted from an intimate acquaintance with the little-girl-who-was-not-a-beggar. The mere fact of her sufferings and adventures made her a priceless possession. Everybody wanted to be told over and over again the things which had happened to her. When one was sitting by a warm fire in a big, glowing room, it was quite delightful to hear how cold it could be in an attic. It must be admitted that the attic was rather delighted in, and that its coldness and bareness quite sank into insignificance when Melchisedec was remembered, and one heard about the sparrows and things one could see if one climbed on the table and stuck one’s head and shoulders out of the skylight.
Of course the thing loved best was the story of the banquet and the dream which was true. Sara told it for the first time the day after she had been found. Several members of the Large Family came to take tea with her, and as they sat or curled up on the hearth-rug she told the story in her own way, and the Indian gentleman listened and watched her. When she had finished she looked up at him and put her hand on his knee.
“That is my part,” she said. “Now won’t you tell your part of it, Uncle Tom?” He had asked her to call him always “Uncle Tom.” “I don’t know your part yet, and it must be beautiful.”
So he told them how, when he sat alone, ill and dull and irritable, Ram Dass had tried to distract him by describing the passers by, and there was one child who passed oftener than any one else; he had begun to be interested in her—partly perhaps because he was thinking a great deal of a little girl, and partly because Ram Dass had been able to relate the incident of his visit to the attic in chase of the monkey. He had described its cheerless look, and the bearing of the child, who seemed as if she was not of the class of those who were treated as drudges and servants. Bit by bit, Ram Dass had made discoveries concerning the wretchedness of her life. He had found out how easy a matter it was to climb across the few yards of roof to the skylight, and this fact had been the beginning of all that followed.
“Sahib,” he had said one day, “I could cross the slates and make the child a fire when she is out on some errand. When she returned, wet and cold, to find it blazing, she would think a magician had done it.”
The idea had been so fanciful that Mr. Carrisford’s sad face had lighted with a smile, and Ram Dass had been so filled with rapture that he had enlarged upon it and explained to his master how simple it would be to accomplish numbers of other things. He had shown a childlike pleasure and invention, and the preparations for the carrying out of the plan had filled many a day with interest which would otherwise have dragged wearily. On the night of the frustrated banquet Ram Dass had kept watch, all his packages being in readiness in the attic which was his own; and the person who was to help him had waited with him, as interested as himself in the odd adventure. Ram Dass had been lying flat upon the slates, looking in at the skylight, when the banquet had come to its disastrous conclusion; he had been sure of the profoundness of Sara’s wearied sleep; and then, with a dark lantern, he had crept into the room, while his companion remained outside and handed the things to him. When Sara had stirred ever so faintly, Ram Dass had closed the lantern-slide and lain flat upon the floor. These and many other exciting things the children found out by asking a thousand questions.
“I am so glad,” Sara said. “I am so glad it was you who were my friend!”
There never were such friends as these two became. Somehow, they seemed to suit each other in a wonderful way. The Indian gentleman had never had a companion he liked quite as much as he liked Sara. In a month’s time he was, as Mr. Carmichael had prophesied he would be, a new man. He was always amused and interested, and he began to find an actual pleasure in the possession of the wealth he had imagined that he loathed the burden of. There were so many charming things to plan for Sara. There was a little joke between them that he was a magician, and it was one of his pleasures to invent things to surprise her. She found beautiful new flowers growing in her room, whimsical little gifts tucked under pillows, and once, as they sat together in the evening, they heard the scratch of a heavy paw on the door, and when Sara went to find out what it was, there stood a great dog—a splendid Russian boarhound—with a grand silver and gold collar bearing an inscription. “I am Boris,” it read; “I serve the Princess Sara.”
There was nothing the Indian gentleman loved more than the recollection of the little princess in rags and tatters. The afternoons in which the Large Family, or Ermengarde and Lottie, gathered to rejoice together were very delightful. But the hours when Sara and the Indian gentleman sat alone and read or talked had a special charm of their own. During their passing many interesting things occurred.
One evening, Mr. Carrisford, looking up from his book, noticed that his companion had not stirred for some time, but sat gazing into the fire.
“What are you `supposing,’ Sara?” he asked.
Sara looked up, with a bright color on her cheek.
“I was supposing,” she said; “I was remembering that hungry day, and a child I saw.”
“But there were a great many hungry days,” said the Indian gentleman, with rather a sad tone in his voice. “Which hungry day was it?”
“I forgot you didn’t know,” said Sara. “It was the day the dream came true.”
Then she told him the story of the bun shop, and the fourpence she picked up out of the sloppy mud, and the child who was hungrier than herself. She told it quite simply, and in as few words as possible; but somehow the Indian gentleman found it necessary to shade his eyes with his hand and look down at the carpet.
“And I was supposing a kind of plan,” she said, when she had finished. “I was thinking I should like to do something.”
“What was it?” said Mr. Carrisford, in a low tone. “You may do anything you like to do, princess.”
“I was wondering,” rather hesitated Sara—”you know, you say I have so much money—I was wondering if I could go to see the bun- woman, and tell her that if, when hungry children—particularly on those dreadful days—come and sit on the steps, or look in at the window, she would just call them in and give them something to eat, she might send the bills to me. Could I do that?”
“You shall do it tomorrow morning,” said the Indian gentleman.
“Thank you,” said Sara. “You see, I know what it is to be hungry, and it is very hard when one cannot even pretend it away.”
“Yes, yes, my dear,” said the Indian gentleman. “Yes, yes, it must be. Try to forget it. Come and sit on this footstool near my knee, and only remember you are a princess.”
“Yes,” said Sara, smiling; “and I can give buns and bread to the populace.” And she went and sat on the stool, and the Indian gentleman (he used to like her to call him that, too, sometimes) drew her small dark head down on his knee and stroked her hair.
The next morning, Miss Minchin, in looking out of her window, saw the things she perhaps least enjoyed seeing. The Indian gentleman’s carriage, with its tall horses, drew up before the door of the next house, and its owner and a little figure, warm with soft, rich furs, descended the steps to get into it. The little figure was a familiar one, and reminded Miss Minchin of days in the past. It was followed by another as familiar—the sight of which she found very irritating. It was Becky, who, in the character of delighted attendant, always accompanied her young mistress to her carriage, carrying wraps and belongings. Already Becky had a pink, round face.
A little later the carriage drew up before the door of the baker’s shop, and its occupants got out, oddly enough, just as the bun-woman was putting a tray of smoking-hot buns into the window.
When Sara entered the shop the woman turned and looked at her, and, leaving the buns, came and stood behind the counter. For a moment she looked at Sara very hard indeed, and then her good- natured face lighted up.
“I’m sure that I remember you, miss,” she said. “And yet—”
“Yes,” said Sara; “once you gave me six buns for fourpence, and—”
“And you gave five of ‘em to a beggar child,” the woman broke in on her. “I’ve always remembered it. I couldn’t make it out at first.” She turned round to the Indian gentleman and spoke her next words to him. “I beg your pardon, sir, but there’s not many young people that notices a hungry face in that way; and I’ve thought of it many a time. Excuse the liberty, miss,”—to Sara— “but you look rosier and—well, better than you did that—that—”
“I am better, thank you,” said Sara. “And—I am much happier— and I have come to ask you to do something for me.”
“Me, miss!” exclaimed the bun-woman, smiling cheerfully. “Why, bless you! Yes, miss. What can I do?”
And then Sara, leaning on the counter, made her little proposal concerning the dreadful days and the hungry waifs and the buns.
The woman watched her, and listened with an astonished face.
“Why, bless me!” she said again when she had heard it all; “it’ll be a pleasure to me to do it. I am a working-woman myself and cannot afford to do much on my own account, and there’s sights of trouble on every side; but, if you’ll excuse me, I’m bound to say I’ve given away many a bit of bread since that wet afternoon, just along o’ thinking of you—an’ how wet an’ cold you was, an’ how hungry you looked; an’ yet you gave away your hot buns as if you was a princess.”
The Indian gentleman smiled involuntarily at this, and Sara smiled a little, too, remembering what she had said to herself when she put the buns down on the ravenous child’s ragged lap.
“She looked so hungry,” she said. “She was even hungrier than I was.”
“She was starving,” said the woman. “Many’s the time she’s told me of it since—how she sat there in the wet, and felt as if a wolf was a-tearing at her poor young insides.”
“Oh, have you seen her since then?” exclaimed Sara. “Do you know where she is?”
“Yes, I do,” answered the woman, smiling more good-naturedly than ever. “Why, she’s in that there back room, miss, an’ has been for a month; an’ a decent, well-meanin’ girl she’s goin’ to turn out, an’ such a help to me in the shop an’ in the kitchen as you’d scarce believe, knowin’ how she’s lived.”
She stepped to the door of the little back parlor and spoke; and the next minute a girl came out and followed her behind the counter. And actually it was the beggar-child, clean and neatly clothed, and looking as if she had not been hungry for a long time. She looked shy, but she had a nice face, now that she was no longer a savage, and the wild look had gone from her eyes. She knew Sara in an instant, and stood and looked at her as if she could never look enough.
“You see,” said the woman, “I told her to come when she was hungry, and when she’d come I’d give her odd jobs to do; an’ I found she was willing, and somehow I got to like her; and the end of it was, I’ve given her a place an’ a home, and she helps me, an’ behaves well, an’ is as thankful as a girl can be. Her name’s Anne. She has no other.”
The children stood and looked at each other for a few minutes; and then Sara took her hand out of her muff and held it out across the counter, and Anne took it, and they looked straight into each other’s eyes.
“I am so glad,” Sara said. “And I have just thought of something. Perhaps Mrs. Brown will let you be the one to give the buns and bread to the children. Perhaps you would like to do it because you know what it is to be hungry, too.”
“Yes, miss,” said the girl.
And, somehow, Sara felt as if she understood her, though she said so little, and only stood still and looked and looked after her as she went out of the shop with the Indian gentleman, and they got into the carriage and drove away.