A BOARDING-SCHOOL ROMANCE.
BY ELLA RODMAN.
Miss DRUMMOND was very much agitated.
So much so, indeed, that she had quite broken the symmetry of the procession on which she prided herself, and advanced hastily from the rear to the middle of the line, dragging by the hand her youngest boarding-pupil, pretty little Minnie Somerville, aged five, whose father died before she was born, whose mother married again, and then died, whose step-father took to himself a second wife; and the poor baby, who now belonged to no one in particular, was consigned to the tender mercies of Miss Drummond, proprietress of Southbrook Seminary.
Dragging this infant with her, and quite unmindful of the lovely calm of a June morning, and the beautiful service in which she had just been engaged, the wary maiden, who had spied danger ahead, made at once for what she considered the weakest portion of her forces, or the portion most liable to attack; gazing, with eyes full of thunder and lightning, at the two daring men-creatures so comfortably propped against a tree, and evidently attitudinizing for the express benefit of these miserable girls—the miserable girls seeming, by some force of attraction, to turn toward them as they walked, very much as heliotropes turn to the sun.
It was quite a picture: the pretty stone-church in the distance, from which Miss Drummond never allowed her flock to emerge until the congregation had all departed; the long, winding walk of elms, clothed with tender June greenness; the ‘rose-bud garden of girls,” two and two, like the animals in Noah’s Ark—quite an old rose-bud in front, as old as twenty, who was talking and smiling assiduously to her companion, a stout girl with large feet, and eyes that saw nothing but the two gentlemen; then came a hatchet-faced girl in a huge sombrero, and a plain-featured one in a trying turban; and, just about the center, where she made the most show, and attracted the most attention, that dangerous Miss, Berks, called by her intimates, "Pansy.”
She was one of those girls who are always in the center, place them where you will; and now, as Miss Drummond tried to see her with the eyes of the two young men, the troubled spinster found her most inconveniently lovely, from the bewitching straw hat, with its wreath of pansies and veil of floating gossamer, to the beautifully-slippered foot, which the minx was just lifting the skirt of her white dress to display. She had mistrusted those great, half-closed eyes, that looked for all the world like two soft, dark pansies, as soon as she saw them— they seemed to speak of breakers ahead; but these pretty, stylish girls were very ornamental, and the sum per annum for Miss Berks’ tuition was not to be despised.
There was a sort of mystery in her arrival— her coming had evidently been very hurried, and the lady who accompanied her, and called herself her aunt, was so agitated as to seem scarcely conscious of what she was saying. What if the young lady had been turned out to pasture in this quiet New England village, because she had proved quite unmanageable to her friends at home?
The idea was not pleasant to Miss Drummond, as she contemplated the two attractive-looking youths who stared persistently at the fair procession, and seemed to be saying, each in his own mind,
“Come one, come all! this tree shall fly
From its firm base as soon as I!”
Dogs, too! the wretches were, doubtless, staying at the hotel, and, perhaps, meant to make a summer of it.
This was a fine state of things! when she had purposely selected this quietest of all country villages as a desirable field for educational purposes because of its very dullness, in addition to its beauty—Southwood being one of those remarkable places that progress backward instead of forward; and all who came to enjoy the shade of its elms, were regaled with stories of former gayeties when there had been a law-school and a boys’ academy in the place, both of which institutions were now defunct. Especially was this hard on Miss Drummond’s young ladies, who frequently wished that their sojourn at Southbrook happened thirty or forty years ago.
People in predicaments of all sorts think with the rapidity of drowning men; and those, and many more ideas had ebbed and flowed in Miss Drummond’s brain, while she was walking through the avenue of elms as close as possible to Miss Pansy Berks.
