Читать книгу The Gypsy Shawl: Mystery Stories for Girls - Roy J. Snell - Страница 3
ОглавлениеCHAPTER I
THE IRON HAT
A strong, broad-shouldered, red-cheeked American girl walked down a dark and narrow road in the hill lands of France. The forest about her was black with approaching night. The shadows of great, deep rolling clouds passed before her. She shuddered from the feeling of darkness and gloom that came upon her. She hesitated to press on. Yet necessity urged her forward. She must find some dry dead branches for their evening campfire. In France, where there are so many poor, it is not easy to find dry wood for the taking, even in the heart of a great forest preserve.
Suddenly the girl, whose name was Florence Huyler, stopped. She stood quite still, listening. Had she caught some strange sound from behind the brush at the right of the road? It seemed to her that she had; yet now as she stood there listening there came to her only the rush of the wind through the tree tops.
There was something quite wild and terrible about the rushing of that wind.
“It seems to murmur and shout,” she told herself. “It seems to tell of days that are gone, and of men whose faces will be seen no more, of boys and men, our boys and men who in the midst of bursting shells and rattling machine gun fire fell face forward on this very sod.”
Once more, haunted by all these thoughts, she started forward. And then again she seemed to catch a sound of movement in the brush.
This time she did not pause. “If it is anyone,” she told herself, “they mean no harm. The poor peasants in this land are the kindliest folk the world has ever known.”
She had gone a hundred paces forward, pausing here and there to pick up a stray bit of dry brush, when a low exclamation escaped her lips. Bending forward, she pushed away the brush that half hid a beautiful cluster of tiny flowers, the first of a belated spring.
“Oh, you beauties!” she cried. “A cluster of stars from Heaven, touched with pink and purple of a sunset. I’ll take you with me.” She put out a hand to pick them. Just in time she noted that only half of the cluster was in bloom.
“I know,” she said. “I’ll take you along, roots and all. I’ll put you in a box and fasten you on the shelf at the back of the cart. There you may nod at scores of smiling faces in the days to come. ‘Full many a flower is born to blush unseen,’” she quoted, “‘and waste its fragrance on the desert air; Full many a pearl—’”
She broke short off. What was this? She had thrust the edge of her hatchet in the earth beside the flowering plant and had struck something that gave forth a dull metallic sound.
Quickly brushing aside the dry leaves, she looked, then caught a tight breath. The thing she had unearthed was an iron hat, or steel helmet, such as American soldier boys wore more than ten years ago in the Great War. It was turned upside down and filled with earth. In this hat the first blossoms of spring had found root and were now blooming.
As she caught sight of the steel helmet the whole nature of that forest seemed to change. The silence that had been there was broken by the crash of shell fire and the boom of cannon. Machine guns sounded their rat-tat-tat and rifle balls sang. In the midst of it all she seemed to see boys, bright-faced American boys, struggling forward, a thin determined line ever pressing onward toward victory or death.
“The boys!” she cried. “Our own American boys! And this hat belonged to one of these.”
The sound of her own voice dispelled the dream. She knew once more that she stood in a silent forest and that wild flowers growing in a steel helmet bloomed before her.
“I will take you with me.” There was a touch of reverence in her tone. “Did ever flower bloom in such a sacred urn?”
Leaving her strange treasure beside the road, she hastily gathered a few dead branches. These she placed with the others in a pile, and binding them together with a piece of small rope, slung them over her shoulder. Then she retraced her steps to the place where the iron hat rested.
“Now,” she sighed. “Now for camp, a cozy fire and a cup of tea with friends. Boo! How cold and cheerless this forest is! What must it have been when the boys in khaki went over the top at zero hour.”
She tried to picture it all. But even the pictures she was able to conjure up were too much for her. So, shaking herself free from gloomy thoughts, she went on her way toward the camp. At a sudden turn in the narrow road she came to a dead halt to stare straight ahead.
There, close beside the road, not twenty paces before her, was a crimson patch.
“It’s a garment,” she told herself, “a dress, a coat or perhaps a shawl. But how could it have come there?”
This indeed was the question. She had met no one on this lonely road. No one had passed her. It certainly had not been there when she passed along half an hour before.
“But now there it is,” she murmured.
Then a thought struck her all of a heap. “That,” she told herself, “is the very place I paused to listen, where I thought I heard a sound in the brush.”
“I wonder,” she said with a sharp intake of breath, “if it could be some sort of a trap, a plot?”
Almost at once the thing seemed absurd. They were but three, two girls and a middle-aged woman, camping by the roadside. They carried almost no money. Their journey was not a long one. They had paid for the things they bought at village shops with travelers’ checks. That had taken about all they had with them. In all France they had not a single enemy, nor for that matter, being strangers, did they have any friends, excepting Madame Strossor.
Curiosity overcoming her fears, she marched boldly forward.
The crimson patch turned out to be a shawl. But such a shawl!
No ordinary shawl was this. Woven of finest wool, and of a pattern such as is rarely seen these days outside a museum, it was a thing to marvel at.
She caught her breath as she touched it, lifted it, turned it over.
“Who can have lost so priceless a thing?” she said to herself in some amazement.
As she continued to examine the unique trophy of other days, her wonder grew. Not one square foot of this ample shawl was like any other.
“Pictures,” she said to herself, looking closely at the design. “That’s what they are, pictures woven in cloth.”
Such exquisite pictures as they were, too! Here a tiny peasant cottage half hidden by apple trees; here a bit of calm sea where two white sails flapped in the breeze; and there a gypsy wagon and the smoke of a campfire curling lazily skyward. Such were the pictures woven in the shawl by a master hand.
“I will take it to our camp,” she said as she folded it carefully. “I will ask Madame what we shall do about it.”
There is little need to say that the remainder of her journey to camp was accomplished in record-breaking time. She had not stolen the shawl, did not intend to keep it. Quite the contrary, she intended to return it to the rightful owner as speedily as possible. For all that, the dark rolling clouds, the falling night, the battlefield and the strange circumstances under which she had come into possession of the shawl, so played upon her nerves that she found herself expecting at any moment to be leaped upon by some strange apparition from out the gloomy shadows.
Florence left the showing of her new found treasures until tea and biscuits with wild honey and boiled rice had been disposed of and the fire was burned down to a gentle glow.
When she brought forward the iron hat filled with blooming flowers, Madame went suddenly silent. She touched the tiny bits of color as if they were tokens offered by a dying hand. Madame had lost her only brother in that great and terrible World War.
But the shawl, that was different.
“Why child!” she cried. “Do you not know? It is possible that you could not know that this is a gypsy shawl? And do you not know that nothing but ill fortune can come to one who so much as touches a single object belonging to the gypsies?”
“But Madame,” Florence remonstrated, “it is such a marvelous shawl. And it has been lost. Else how would it be lying in the road?”
“It does not matter. You should have left it to lie there.” Madame’s mind could not be moved.
She did come to the point at last when she examined and admired some of the figures.
“It is very old, that shawl,” she said. “My mother has told me once of a band of gypsies who were famous weavers by hand. I think that band is all dead now. Anyway, the gypsies weave no more shawls. They make baskets and tell fortunes that are all great lies. They beg bread and steal chickens. Ah yes, mademoiselle, it is not ever good to have anything to do with the gypsies.”
“But we are living like the gypsies,” Florence smiled. “We should have a comradely feeling for them.”
“At least,” said Madame with a fine toss of the head, “we do not beg bread nor steal chickens.”
The end of it all was that Florence folded up the shawl with the firmly formed intention of keeping it until the rightful owner could be found.
She went to bed that night with the precious heirloom lying close beside her. Her last waking thought was of the shawl and its owner.
“I wonder,” she mused dreamily, “if I will ever meet the owner of that shawl.”
Not being able to look into the future, she went to sleep with the question unanswered.
The night was unusually cold. Florence had been sleeping for some time when she awoke and, feeling the chill of the night creeping in about her, put out a hand to tuck in the covers.
The next instant she sat up in the strange bed to peer into the shadows.
“The shawl!” she said in a low, tense whisper. “The gypsy shawl! It is gone!”
There could be no denying the fact. After feeling about over the ample bed, she found no trace of it.
“Who could have taken it?” she asked herself as a chill ran up her spine. “The gypsies? The gypsy girl to whom it belonged? But if she knew I had it, why did she not come and ask for it, instead of prowling about our camp in the night?”
Their camp. She smiled as she thought of it; a square, high-wheeled cart, a burned out campfire and a pony tethered near, that was all.
Yet they had taken great pleasure in their camping through France. It had been a strange fancy of an elderly lady, Mrs. Langford, that had brought them there. Mrs. Langford was rich. She frequently found girls who interested her. If they showed purpose, talent and a genuine interest in others, she helped them to study and travel. In this particular instance she had offered to send Florence and Betty, her pal, on a jaunt through France.
“But you must not see France as many Americans see it,” she had insisted. “A flying train journey here; a cathedral there; a rocketing auto; a walled city; a beach at the south; a day or two in Paris. No! No! That is not the way! France is far too beautiful, too wonderful, her people too interesting for that. No!” She had risen to walk with nervous stride across the great living room of her palatial home. “You must not see France in that way. You must come to know the humble people, the villages, those quaint French villages first. Madame Strossor will accompany you,” she had said. “France was her childhood home. She knows it well. She will find you a home which must be the abiding place of your trunk, little more. From this spot you must travel everywhere in a high, two-wheeled cart, a regular peasant’s cart. And what is more,” she had paused to look the girls squarely in the eyes, “you must be prepared to cook your supper by the roadside and to sleep in your cart beneath the stars. See the land as the gypsy sees it. That, indeed, is the way to see any land.”
“And here we are sleeping in our cart,” Florence told herself as her eyes took in the shadowy blanketed figures of her slim, dark-eyed pal, Betty, and of Madame Strossor.
“Wonder if I should waken them and tell them of the shawl?” she said to herself. “If I do, Madame will remind me that she warned me. And yet,” she mused, “gypsies about. Who wants to sleep here unguarded?”
For some time she sat there undecided. In the end, as the chill night wind crept through her heavy dream robe, she sank back and snuggled deep among the covers.
“Be a shame to waken them,” she thought. “And after all, gypsies are only folks like ourselves. Much that is said of them is not true.”
“Nothing ever truly happens by chance,” she thought dreamily after a time. “Providence cares for all. That shawl came into my possession for a purpose. Wonder what the purpose can be?”
