A Popular Schoolgirl, Angela Brazil [recommended reading txt] 📗

quoted Hereward from Ruthless Rhymes.

"Look here!" said Quenrede, emerging from the kitchen with a half-packed lunch basket. "We three are taking sandwiches, and going for a good old tramp over the moors. Why not drop your work for once and come with us? You look as if you needed a holiday."

"I've a beast of a headache," admitted Athelstane.

"You want fresh air, not study," decreed Quenrede with sisterly firmness, "and I shall just make some extra sandwiches and put another apple in the basket. With mother out, the orphan will carol all the morning, unless you gag her, so you may as well accept the inevitable."

"Cut and run, in fact!" added Hereward.

"The voice of the siren tempts me to go—to escape the voice of the siren who stays!" wavered Athelstane.

"Oh, come along, old sport!" urged Ingred. "What are a few old bones to Red Ridge Barrow? You can swat to-night to make up, if you want to."

"It's three to one!" said Athelstane, giving way gracefully; "and there mayn't be any more fine Saturdays for walks."

The four young people started forth with the delightful sense of having the day before them. It was fairly early, and a hazy November sun had not yet drawn the moisture from the heather. On the moor the few trees were bare, but the golden autumn leaves still clothed the woods in the sheltered valley that stretched below. Masses of gossamer covered with dew-drops lay among the bracken, like fairies' washing hung out to dry. There was a hint of hoarfrost under the bushes. The air had that delicious invigorating quality when every breath sets the body dancing. It was too late in the year for flowers, though here and there a little gorse lingered, or a few buttercups and hawkweeds. After about an hour of red haziness the sun pierced the bank of mist and shone out gloriously, almost as in summer; the birds, ready to snatch a moment's joy, were flitting about tweeting and calling, a water-wagtail took a bath in a shallow pool of a stream, and a great flock of bramblings, rare visitors in those parts, paused in their migration to hold a chattering conference round an old elder tree.

The Saxons were determined to-day to go farther afield than their walks had hitherto taken them. The local guide-book mentioned some prehistoric menhirs and a chambered barrow on the top of Red Ridge, a distant hill, so they had fixed that as their Mecca.

It was a considerable tramp, but the bracing air helped them on, and they sat down at last to eat their lunch by the side of the path that led to the summit. The boys had wished to mount to the top without calling a halt, but the girls had struck, and insisted on a rest before the final climb.

"Pity Mother isn't here!" said Ingred, voicing the general feeling of the family, which always missed its central pivot.

"Yes, but it would have been too great a trapse for her, poor darling!" qualified Quenrede. "I don't see how we could get her all this way unless we hired a pony."

"Or borrowed an aeroplane. One seems about as possible as the other," grunted Ingred.

"She shall have a photo of the stones at any rate," said Hereward, fingering his camera. "Hurry up and finish, you girls, or the light will be gone!"

"Well, we can't bolt our sandwiches at the rate you do! I wonder you don't choke!"

The old gray stones stood in a circle on the top of the hill, from whence they had possibly seen four thousand summers and winters pass by. Whether their original purpose was temple, astronomical observatory, or both is one of the riddles of antiquarian research, for neolithic man left no record of his doings beyond the weapons buried with him in his barrow. Legend, however, like a busy gossip, had stepped in and supplied points upon which history was silent. Traditions of the neighborhood explained the menhirs as twelve giants turned into stone by the magic powers of good King Arthur, who, in defiance of the claims of the isle of Avalon, was supposed to be buried in a hitherto unexplored chamber of the large green mound that stood near. Sometimes, so the story ran, the giants whispered to one another, and any one who came there alone at daybreak on May morning might glean much useful information regarding the personal appearance of his or her future lover. As it was obviously difficult to reach so out-of-the-way a spot at such a very early hour, the oracles were seldom consulted at the one and only moment when they were supposed to whisper. There were reputed, however, to be other and easier means of gleaning knowledge from them. Ingred, who had been priming herself with local lore, confided details of the occult ceremonial to Quenrede.

"It sounds rather thrillsome!" admitted that damsel doubtfully. "I'd really like to try it, only the boys would tease me to death. You know what they are!"

"They're going over there to photograph the cromlech. You'd have time before they come back."

"Shall I?"

"Go on!"

"Tell me again what to do."

"You let your hair down, and walk bareheaded in and out and in and out round all the circle of stones. Then you put an offering of flowers on that biggest stone—the Giant King, he's called—and throw a pebble into the little pool below. You count the bubbles that come up—one for A, two for B, &c.,—and they'll give you the initial of your future lover. With very great luck, you might see his shadow in the pool, but that does not often happen."

"I don't believe in it, of course, but I'll try for fun! The Giant King won't get much in the way of a bouquet to-day!"

Quenrede, protesting her scepticism, but all the same palpably enjoying the magic experiment, picked an indifferent nosegay of the few buttercups, hawkweeds, and late pieces of scabious which were the only flowers available. Then she removed her hair-pins, and, letting down a shower of flaxen hair, commenced her winding pilgrimage among the old gray stones. There is a vein of superstition in the most modern of minds, and she was probably following a custom that had come down the ages from the days when our primitive ancestresses clothed themselves in skins and twisted their prehistoric locks with pins of mammoth ivory. In and out and in and out, with Ingred, like an attendant priestess, behind her, she performed the necessary itinerary, and laid her floral offering upon what may have been the remains of a neolithic altar. The pool below was dark and boggy and brown with peat. She took a good-sized pebble, and flung it into the middle with a terrific splash. Ingred, giggling nervously, counted the bubbles.

"A, B, C, D, E, F, G, H, I—It's 'I,' Queenie! No, there's another! It's 'J'! It's going to be 'J,' old sport! Aren't you thrilled? Oh, I say! Whoever on earth is that?"

Following the direction of her sister's eyes, Quenrede looked through a veil of wind-blown hair, to see, standing among the stones, a stranger of the opposite sex, garbed in tweed knickers and leather gaiters. One glance was enough. The next second she turned, and beat a hurried and ignominious retreat to the sheltered side of the green mound. Ingred, panting in the rear, followed her to cover.

Quenrede, very pink in the face, sat down on a clump of heather and immediately began to put up her hair.

"I never felt such an idiot in my life!" she confided with energy to her sympathetic audience of one. "Ingred! That man knew what I was doing! I saw the horrid amusement in his face. He was laughing at me for all he was worth. I know he was!"

At eighteen it is an overwhelming matter to be laughed at. Quenrede's newly-developed dignity was decidedly wounded.

"After all, it was a very schoolgirlish thing to do," she remarked, sticking in hair-pins as well as she could without a mirror. "Do you think he's still there? I shall stop here till he marches off."

"I'll go and prospect," said Ingred.

She came back with the bad news that not only was the stranger still there, but he was actually in close and apparently familiar conversation with Athelstane and Hereward, who were calling loudly for their sisters, and to confirm her words came distant jodellings of:

"Ingred!"

"Queenie!"

"Where are you girls?"

There was nothing for it but to come forth from their retreat. It was impossible to stay hidden forever. Quenrede issued as nonchalantly as she could, with her hair tucked under her tam-o'-shanter, and her gloves on. She bowed instead of shaking hands when Athelstane introduced Mr. Broughten, a fellow-student of his college; it seemed a more grown-up and superior attitude to adopt. She thought his eyes twinkled, but she preserved such an air of stand-off dignity that he promptly suppressed any undue inclinations towards mirth, and stood looking the epitome of grave politeness.

"Broughten knows all about the old barrow," Athelstane explained. "He's got a candle with him—we were duds not to bring one ourselves—and he's going to act showman. Come along!"

The entrance into the mound was through a low doorway with lintel and posts of unhewn stone. Inside was a kind of central hall with three rudely-constructed chambers leading out of it. A pile of rough stones in front seemed to point to further chambers.

"That part's never been explored yet," said Mr. Broughten. "Some of us want to tackle it some day, if we can get permission, but it's a big job. You don't want to bring the barrow down on your head, and be buried in the ruins! I never think the roof looks too secure," he added easily, poking at the stones above with his stick.

The girls, aghast at the notion of a possible subsidence, made a hasty exit to the open air, and hovered near the entrance in much agitation of mind till the rest of the party made a safe reappearance. Their conductor, with a side glance at the bunch of flowers—which Quenrede ignored—made some reference to the Giant King stone and his whispering companions: he was evidently well versed in all old traditions, though he refrained from mentioning local practices. He walked part of the way home with the Saxons before he branched off to the place where he had left his bicycle.