Читать книгу Gloria at Boarding School - Lilian Garis - Страница 6

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“What was that?”

“What?”

“I heard something. I felt the door open.”

“You’re dreaming. It isn’t daylight yet. Turn over and try the other side.”

“Honest, Trixy,” Gloria raised her voice a trifle, “I did hear something. I am going to get up and look around.”

She did. It was daylight but not yet very bright, as the late fall morning was tardy in asserting itself.

“The door is open!” exclaimed Gloria. “I am sure I shut it.”

“I have always told you to lock it,” Trixy reminded her.

“But I hate bolted doors. They make me feel I’m being locked in a jail.” Gloria shut the door almost noiselessly, and then turned on the light.

“Nothing missing, that I can see——”

“Then, please, go back to bed,” begged Trixy from the other side of the curtains. “I do hate to lose the last half hour.”

“Sorry,” Gloria went to the window and looked out at the early lights and shadows. Then she quietly stole back to turn off the light that hung over her dresser.

As she raised her hand her eye fell upon a strange object. There was something, a small, white paper packet on the pin tray.

“Trix!” she exclaimed excitedly. “There’s something here——”

“What?”

“Get up. Let’s look. It has been slipped in the door and left on the tray.”

There was no mistaking the seriousness of her voice. Gloria meant what she was saying, so Trixy tumbled out of bed and joined her before the dresser.

“It’s heavy,” she said.

“Open it. You’re not afraid of it?”

“Of course not, but I am surprised. I hope it’s no more blood stones——”

“Just that. From the Pirate’s Daughter, I’ll bet! Hurry and let’s see! I’m quivering with——”

“Come over on the bed and spread out something,” suggested Gloria. “I don’t want the jools to roll under the rug this time.”

They both sat under a carefully spread pink coverlet, and then, very gingerly, Gloria opened the little package.

“Maybe some trick,” she guessed, still delaying inspection. “I hate to spoil our fun by finding some pop-corn, maybe.”

“Oh, do give it to me,” begged Trixy impatiently. “If it’s pop-corn I’m not going to waste any more time over it.”

“A’w right,” agreed Gloria affably. “Half the responsibility is yours, don’t forget that.”

The white tissue paper was carefully unfolded, and then there was disclosed a little necklace, made of some dark, queer beads.

“Oh-oo-ho!” squealed Gloria. “More queer stones! And look! Here’s a note!”

Eagerly scanning what was written in back-hand on a piece of plain white note paper, the girls found this:

“To Gloria: I beg you to accept this trinket. That which was found was very precious to me. Won’t you be generous enough to accept this without question?

In Cog.”

They read it again. Gloria coiled the necklace around on the palm of her hand until it looked like a little black snake. Then she gave it to Trixy.

Held up to the light Trixy thought it looked like agate. Her father, she said, had a ring, his grandfather gave every boy in the family a moss agate stone each cut from the parent specimen, and this little necklace had one stone at least that looked like agate.

“But these,” pointed out Gloria, “they just look like Egyptian beads I bought at our fair. Don’t you know those you always liked? Black pearls, or some imitation?”

“But these are each different?”

“Yes. Sort of home-made affair. Who ever could have wished it on me?”

Both girls sat there thinking. Each turned her head, this way and that, cocking ears up as if some myth in the air might explain the mystery, the necklace was passed back and forth automatically, but neither offered to try it on. It was about big enough to slip over the head, and the more they scrutinized it the better they liked it.

“It’s so odd,” conceded Gloria.

“Not as odd as its circumstances,” said Trixy. “Why in the world would a girl want to be so mysterious? Seems to me sort of sensational.”

“And so wounds your social soul,” teased Gloria. “Never mind, dearie, when I drag in the Pirate’s Daughter from her den, it may be in the attic here, you know, and when I tame her so that she’ll eat out of my hands, I fix it up to include you in our trip to her father’s cave. He must be richer than old Captain Kidd to raise such a crop of gems or illuminated spangles, as I glimpsed in that trunk. Now, why couldn’t In Cog have sent me a little jewelled apron or a bedizened girdle to wear to the dingus? You know we are invited?”

“Yes.” The “dingus” or regular social affair exclusively for the pupils of Altmount, did not, at the moment, offer distraction.

“It seems to me we ought to detect a queer girl, easily. She is queer, of course, or she couldn’t think this way. She had to follow her own line of reasoning, and you’ve got to admit that’s queer,” said Trixy, philosophically. “Therefore she must be queer. Now, who is the queerest?”

“Impossible to select,” joked Gloria, “they’re all so queer. Pat’s funny, Jack’s funny, Jean’s snippy, little Helen is just the kind of girl to get an awful crush on one. She goes about with her eyes and mouth at half mast, ready to weep or laugh at the crack of a whip; but even at that she’d never have sense enough to plan all this. Well, Ixy-love, you may wear my jools whenever thou wisheth, and be sure to note the effect. They may give you chills or you might get a fever, or even that black, squarish little stone may exert a beneficent influence on the snippy Jean and make her perlite, for once in her sour life,” Gloria’s manner is not transferable to words but it was flippantly funny. “Perhaps we better start a new diary, the diary of the hoodooed necklace,” she suggested, and would have turned a somersault right then and there, had not Trixy grabbed her left leg ‘on the wing.’

“And I guess we may as well crawl out and get into a shower,” she continued, “before the infants rub their sleepy little eyes into the early sunlight. Though it looks like rain. I couldn’t say anything pretty without sunlight. There’s the seven-thirty bell. Would you ever believe it was more than five A. M.?”

The necklace lay on the pink coverlet while the two girls locked arms and swung back and forth like a pair of solemn Arabs. Anent nothing, they embraced always in that fashion, and the signal to halt was usually the realization of urgent duty. It was now time to dress.

“Scrum-bunctuous, anyhow,” decided Gloria. “Just think of all that’s happened a-ready. I cracked open a trunk, had a precious stone hid under my rug for nearly a month, returned it by way of a moldy old vase, got a note from an In Cog and was the recipient of a coal miner’s souvenir, the last strike settlement maybe; all this and nothing more at Altmount, quoth the raven. Never-more! There! When it’s first worn by either of us I fully expect a sensation.”

“Why don’t you put it right on and go down to breakfast? If a girl should notice it you might have just cause for suspicion.”

“You put it on, if you want to,” retorted Gloria. “This isn’t my day for necklaces. I have already decided to wear the ugly and uncomfortable sailor’s noose, prescribed.”

But all the day and for sometime thereafter both girls were ever on the alert to detect a clue to the original owner of the little talisman. Many strings of beads were significantly fingered and admired, but without provoking a tell-tale flush of admission, and as often as the opportunity could be made, Gloria or Trixy talked about foreign stones, especially dark ones with little light streaks running through. But at the end of a week both girls were forced to admit “no progress.”

“Tell you what we’ll do,” proposed Gloria. “Just let’s forget it. Put it away and wait. Some day the culprit will betray herself. Then, if we are not parties to some dark plot that includes hiding the queen’s jools, we’ll be lucky kids.”

“Just as you say,” agreed Trixy. “But don’t forget to-night is the night we are supposed to celebrate. I hope you can express a note of interest in this here Altmount without straining your conscience. Me—I’m beginning to like it.”

“It is picking up,” admitted Gloria. Both were assuming facetiousness.

There was, however, plenty of interest, “without straining consciences” at the dance. The fine old assembly room was gay with colors of many classes no longer otherwise represented, there was a very creditable orchestra composed of seniors and girls in the finishing classes, but more than these mere details, the personalities of all those present came out for the “acid test” according to Trixy.

Friends paired off, and groups assembled. Pretty gowns were praised with wordless glances of approval, new dances were demonstrated and various local peculiarities shown, even Pat declaring that the new position was quite like the “old fashioned way her mother had always insisted was the only correct way,” and so on passed a happy evening, at the boy-less dance, after which, like the spreading of a map, the personalities of students stood revealed.

No silly stunts nor traditional initiations were countenanced at Altmount, not since that rather disastrous event, still talked of, but no longer risked. It was the night one girl got locked in a closet and another climbed from the third floor window on a rope of bed sheets. Both were “laid up for repairs,” and a stringent rule against all rough play or initiations was the outcome.

But there were even now some secret affairs held in junior or soph quarters, usually followed the next day by pronounced fits of absentmindedness in class. Neither Gloria nor Trixy had been invited to any of these. First years usually were not, quite contrary to the regulation college customs.

“That’s because they want a chance to find out Who’s Who before taking one into their exclusive circles, I suppose,” Gloria remarked to Trixy, after listening for the best part of an hour to a report given by Janice. She had been asked by Jean’s contingent. She had the advantage of belonging to a family whose ancestral trees were knotted by colonial ties.

“But so far as I could gather,” scoffed Gloria, “it was an amateur fudge party, and the fudge got badly scorched, so I guess we didn’t miss much.”

“And, whereas it is against the rules to light little stoves in rooms, and the perpetrators are apt to be censured, I guess we are well out of it,” also scoffed Trixy.

“But they have to break rules, that’s the main idea,” Gloria explained. “Yet, it must have been pathetic to see the dear things trying to get fun out of the wicked pastime of making fudge on pin trays. I’d love to have had a view from a convenient distance.”

“We’ll see if we can’t hire the real kitchen, some evening,” suggested Trixy. “We’ll ask the faculty, invite them, I mean.”

“And all the kitchen staff,” added Gloria. “That would be fun. And the fudge will run a far greater chance of being fit to eat.”

This was held to be a brilliant idea and worth working out. So it happened that the domestic science class took on a new group of pupils unawares, and not only did Gloria and Trixy hold a fudge party in the kitchen a few afternoons later, as their part in the new year’s activity but the idea spread, until pop-corn drills and taffy pulls in the kitchen became almost common. Then it was that entertaining afterwards, in rooms, while despoiled of the precious rule breaking, offered real opportunities, and as a hostess Trixy became decidedly popular, while Gloria and Pat achieved marked success as floaters.

But such ordinary school happenings were mere calendar incidents, and like the calendar, interesting only to those who mark the days.