Читать книгу The Gypsy Shawl: Mystery Stories for Girls - Roy J. Snell - Страница 4

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The morning following the disappearance of the gypsy shawl dawned bright and fair. Florence had started out for a good hike fifteen minutes before Betty and Madame Strossor were to start with the cart. She found herself alone on a deserted woodland road when, upon rounding a curve, she came for a second time upon that crimson patch which was the gypsy shawl.

This time, instead of lying in the road, the shawl was moving forward on the shoulders of a slender girl who, to all appearances, was about Florence’s own age.

“But she can’t be a gypsy,” Florence told herself with a start. “Her hair is flaxen, almost white. Who ever heard of a blonde gypsy?”

Since the girl, who was walking straight before her, did not look back, Florence had a splendid opportunity for observing her. She found in her many contradictions. She was blonde, yet she wore the bright kerchief of a gypsy knotted over her head. Her dress was beyond question that of a gypsy.

“But she does not walk like a gypsy,” Florence told herself, shaking her head. “The gypsies have a sort of gliding movement all their own. She walks as if her feet were once accustomed to city streets.”

Just then, as if feeling the scrutiny of someone behind her, the girl turned her head and looked Florence over from head to foot. One good, square, scrutinizing look, and she turned to resume her walk, this time with quickening stride.

“She knows I had the shawl and that she had it retrieved without asking leave,” Florence told herself. Of this she could not be sure.

“That girl,” she thought, “has a lovely, rather appealing face. And sad; such a sad face.” She wondered vaguely whether she had ever seen a sad gypsy. She did not think she had.

The blonde girl has passed around a second narrow curve in the road. Florence was thinking seriously of sitting down by the roadside and waiting for Madame and Betty to come up in the cart when she caught some strange sounds from before her in the road.

With one instinctive movement she bounded forward round the bend in the road to find herself face to face with one of life’s tragedies, a weak person struggling gamely but vainly in the clutches of one much older and stronger than herself. The blonde girl was struggling to free herself from a very dark and evil-looking gypsy woman. The reason for the struggle was at once apparent. The woman was attempting to drag the shawl from the girl’s slender shoulders.

Inspired alone by those school-day impulses that in her childhood had resulted so often in bruised shins and tangled hair, Florence entered the combat. She did not think “This is my duty,” or “This is none of my affair.” She did not think at all. She sprang at the dark gypsy and seizing her by the shoulder, spun her squarely about.

For a matter of ten seconds the woman stood staring at her in blank astonishment. Then, as the purple mounted to her very ears, she launched herself at Florence, teeth, claws and nails.

Florence was large, but she was quick. She leaped aside. The charging woman stumbled forward, clawing the bushes.

There followed another ten seconds of inaction in which the blonde girl and the crimson shawl disappeared into the brush.

Once more the gypsy woman, who had been bending down, stood up to turn upon Florence. This time her hands were held high, as if for a blow.

Florence stood her ground. She did not fear fists. Teeth and claws were new to her. Not so new as the weapon she now faced. Too late, in sheer horror she saw clasped in the woman’s hand a long-bladed knife.

Chilled to the spine, frozen to her very heart, the girl stood there motionless. The time, which seemed eternity, must have been less than two seconds. Then the unexpected happened. Some large object came hurtling through the air. It struck the gypsy squarely on the wrist. The woman screamed. The knife went spinning harmlessly through the air. The knife and woman disappeared into the wood.

Too astonished to move or speak, Florence stood there motionless until someone, a man, spoke.

“If you please, Miss,” he was saying, “you might hand me my crutch. It’s a bit awkward getting about on one leg without so much as a stick.”

Florence found herself staring at a short, broad-shouldered man of middle age who sat, or rather lay sprawling by the roadside. A one legged man, he had indeed much need of a crutch.

“I—I beg your pardon.” She saw in a trice what had happened. The man had witnessed the fight, and had at last had a part in it. At the crucial moment he had hurled his crutch. That crutch it had been that had knocked the murderous knife from the gypsy woman’s hand.

“Probably saved my life,” Florence told herself as a lump came into her throat.

“I—I hope you don’t think me a needless brawler,” she said as she handed him his crutch.

“Indeed not, Miss,” said the stranger. “I saw enough to know you were in the right of it. That blonde girl has been wearin’ the shawl for a long spell. It’s hers beyond a doubt.

“Only,” he added as an afterthought, “I wouldn’t have nothing to do with gypsies. Not nothing at all. They are a bad and treacherous lot. They’d sooner knife you in the back than fight fair. Mind what I’m tellin’ you, you’ll hear more of this later.”

“Now where’d that knife go?” He beat the brush with his crutch. “There you are, my beauty.” He picked it up. “And a better blade you’ll never win. Take it.” He offered it to Florence, hilt first. “It’s yours by right of conquest.”

“No! No!” The girl shuddered. “I wouldn’t touch it.”

“Well enough. I’ll keep it. Next war we enlist in, you and I,” he chuckled, “at least one of us will be better armed.” Again he sat down by the roadside.

For a moment Florence stood there collecting her thoughts. At the end of that time she stole a glance at the stranger. He seemed a clean and decent sort of person, rough but honest. His clothes were neat. The color in his cheeks was good.

“It’s early,” she told herself. “Probably hasn’t had his breakfast. And Madame planned to stop about here for a cup of coffee brewed on the primus stove. I owe him something—a whole lot, in fact.”

“Have you had your morning coffee?” she said.

“No, Miss.”

“There’ll be some coming down the road presently,” she smiled. “Coffee and hot biscuits. Will you wait with me?”

“Coffee and hot biscuits comin’ down the road?” he chuckled. “Do they walk on two good legs like you, or on one leg and a crutch, like me? Sure I’ll wait with you, a good long while.”

“The coffee comes in a high two-wheeled cart and the biscuits are keeping hot in a fireless cooker,” she said, dropping to a grassy mound. “You won’t have to wait long. I think I hear the cart now.”

“So do I,” said he. “Name’s Patrick O’Farrel, if there’s need for an introduction,” he added.

“Please don’t do that,” said Florence a moment later. Patrick was shaving the tender twigs off the top of a bush with the gypsy knife. It was sharp as a razor blade.

* * * * * * * *

“That’s a strange flowerpot,” said Patrick O’Farrel, half an hour later. The cart had arrived. He had marveled at their strange mode of travel and had reveled in Madame Strossor’s hot biscuits and coffee. He had been walking round the cart when his eyes fell upon the iron hat, filled with the flaming flowers, which Florence had found in the dark forest.

“Strange use for an iron hat,” was his next comment. “Still, it’s good it can be used for other purposes than war. It’s American,” he said, examining it more closely. “I’m American myself, and Irish. I fought as an American. A man never fought for a better land. I gave my leg and nearly my life for America—for America and France.”

“The flowers were not planted in the iron hat,” said Florence. “They grew there quite naturally in the forest. I gathered them, hat and all.”

“They did? And where did you find it?”

Florence described the place.

“You found it there?” He bent over as if to examine the bottom of the flowerpot which had once been the top of an iron hat. Then, as if thinking better of it, he straightened up.

“That,” he said without emotion, “must be the neighborhood in which I lost my leg. I’ve never been quite sure about it, for I lost my iron hat at the same time and with the hat I lost all knowledge of anything at all for a long time after. An aged peasant couple,” he said, sitting down, “dragged me off the field of battle into a cellar and saved my life. The woman is living still. That’s why I’m still in France. I draw a pension. She’s eighty years old. They lost all in the war. I—I’ve sort of tried to be a son to her. And I succeeded, tolerable,” he added, “except when the fit seizes me to wander. The war made me restless. And you know,” he added as if talking to himself, “I’m always looking for that dugout.”

“What dugout?” Florence asked in surprise.

In answering this question the one-legged soldier related a strange tale.

“It was toward the last of the war,” he said leaning forward impressively. “We had been driving the enemy steadily backward. Hard fighting it was. We came to a hill in the woods, and there they resisted us with all the powers in them.

“Little wonder at that, for in the sides of that hill, once we took it, we found the finest, safest, most comfortable dugouts we had ever seen. And it was in one of those very dugouts that I saw it.” He closed his eyes as if in a vain effort to recall. “Where was it? Ah well!” His voice changed. “We were an exhausted fighting unit. Being relieved, we were put to rest in the dugouts.

“Twenty-four hours we slept like dead men. Then, bein’ awake and quite human, we started explorin’ the dugout. And there, far back in a chamber not before opened, I found it, the supreme surprise.

“Where was it?” Once more the look on his face became tense as he closed his eyes in a vain attempt to recall.

“Such an art treasure,” he began again quite abruptly, “as was never before packed in so narrow a space. Statuary, small things done in marble and bronze, small but natural, like life. Ugly grinning faces there were. And angels that seemed alive. There was little bronze imps, and priests also in bronze. And there was peasants at their labors, diggin’, plowin’, hoein’, watchin’ their cows.

“But most wonderful of all,” his voice grew deep with emotion, “most marvelous was the statue of Joan of Arc. Three feet tall it was. Standin’ there in glitterin’ armour she was, with sword in hand. And it was done in solid gold. Solid gold!” His voice died to a whisper.

“I thought it was gold then,” he went on after a time. “I have made sure of that since. All pure gold.

“And it’s all buried,” he added, a note of sadness creeping into his voice. “Buried by shell fire, somewhere in these hills of France. And I can’t find it, can’t recall the place, though I’ve tried these long years.”

He sat for a time staring at the ground. Florence wanted to ask him to tell more, how he knew the statue was of pure gold, whence had come the treasure and how he had learned of it, but something seemed to whisper to her that enough had been told for this day and that at some other time the rest of the story would be told.

So, in a few moments they parted, he to continue his search for buried treasure, they to revel in the beauty of the uplands of France.

Five days later the little party of three, Madame, Florence and Betty, were jogging down a well kept road. They were some distance from the one time war-ridden portion of France. As they looked about them they saw small clusters of homes that were farm villages; for the people of France, being a sociable folk and fond of company in long evenings, do not live in lonely homes built at isolated road crossings but cluster their cottages and journey out to till their land during the day.

They were plowing now. Odd beasts of toil they had too. Here a single ox, there a donkey, and here an ox and a horse hitched together. On the sloping hillside a full-grown girl sat knitting as she watched three grazing cows. A little further on a boy drove in a flock of geese from their feeding.

“So peaceful,” said Florence. “There can be no trouble anywhere in the world.”

“And yet,” said Madame, “we must not forget that these very people were once wakened morning after morning by the rumble of cannon, to wonder whether that day or the next would bring news of the death of a father or a brother. War is a terrible thing!”

Florence did not forget. She had not forgotten Patrick O’Farrel’s story, nor had she forgotten her struggle of a few days back, nor the possibility that the feud she had started with the gypsy woman might be renewed at any time.

The camp of the gypsies was nearer than she knew at this very moment.

That evening they halted their cart by the roadside before a ruined chateau, at the edge of a large village. After they had eaten, Florence went for a stroll around the abandoned chateau. It had, she concluded, been wrecked by air bombs during the war.

In this she was right. She was not, however, prepared for the signs of simple magnificence that lingered about the place. The high ceilinged living room had once boasted a broad fireplace encircled with tinted tiles that dated back a century. The tiles were all cracked or gone. The fireplace, where once a happy circle sat by the rosy gleam of blazing logs, was a black and dismal thing. The kitchen, too, had been panelled and tiled. The huge beams of the ceiling, from which had once hung suspended polished pots of copper and black iron, were still intact, but the place was silent, deserted.

Silent? Not quite. As the girl stood there sadly contemplating the ruins of a once magnificent home, she caught the sound of quiet sobbing.

Tiptoeing to the ruined doorway, she saw lying upon the broken stone steps a blonde-haired girl. Instantly she recognized her. She was the girl she had come to think of as the “blonde gypsy.”

“But where is the crimson shawl?” was her next thought.

Suddenly, as if sensing that someone was about, the girl sprang to her feet and disappeared into the shadows.

“Here,” thought Florence, “is fresh mystery. Why should a gypsy be weeping upon the steps of a ruined home? Gypsies have no home save their wagons. I wonder if she is truly a gypsy girl after all?”

She was to wonder about this many times in the future.