The Princess of the School, Angela Brazil [reading strategies book .TXT] 📗

at all wise. Laurette, after a hot affection lasting three weeks, got tired of Miss Herbert, and suddenly cooled off. Gowan and Carmel, going into the sitting-room one day, found her discussing her former idol with a group of her chums.

"Do you call her pretty? Well, now, I don't!" she was saying emphatically. "She may have been pretty once, but now she's getting decidedly[154] passée. I can't say I admire faded sentimental people!"

"Sentimental?" said Truie. "I shouldn't call her sentimental at all. She's only too horribly practical, in my opinion!"

"You don't know her as I do! My dear! The things she's told me! The love affairs she's been through! I had the whole history of them. And she used to blush, and look most romantic. It was all I could do not to burst out laughing. You'd scream if I were to tell you! First there was a clergyman——"

"Here, stop!" interrupted Gowan, breaking abruptly into the conversation, and turning two blazing blue eyes on Laurette. "Anything Miss Herbert may have told you was certainly in confidence, and to go and blab it over the school seems to me the meanest, sneakiest trick I've ever heard of! You're an absolute blighter, Laurette!"

"Well, I'm sure! What business is it of yours, Gowan Barbour, or of Carmel Ingleton's either? Cheek!"

"It is our business!" flared Carmel, as indignant as Gowan. "It's horribly mean to make friends with any one, and hear all her secrets, and then go and make fun of them!"

"It's playing it low!" added Gowan, determined to speak her mind for once. "And I hope[155] somebody will make fun of you some day just to serve you right! Some day you'll be faded and passée, and people will giggle and say you haven't 'got off' in spite of all your efforts, and they wonder how old you really are, and they remember when you came out, and you can't be a chicken, and they don't like to see 'mutton dressed like lamb,' and all the rest of the kind pleasant things that people of your type find to say. I know! Well, I shan't be in the least sorry for you! It will be a judgment!"

Laurette had made a desperate attempt to interrupt Gowan's flow of words, but she might as well have tried to stop the brook. When Gowan began, she never even paused for breath. Her wrath was like a whirlwind. Laurette's three chums had turned away as if rather ashamed, and began hastily to get out books and writing-materials. They pretended not to notice when Laurette looked at them for support.

"Yes, you needn't think Truie and Hester and Muriel will back you up!" continued Gowan. "Unless they're as mean as you are. There! I've finished now, so you needn't butt in! You know exactly what I think of you. Come along, Carmel!"

The two immediate results of this episode were a bitter feud between Laurette and Gowan, and a sympathetic interest in Miss Herbert by all the[156] members of the Mafia. They felt that her confidence had been betrayed, and they would have liked somehow to make it up to her. They brought so many floral offerings to her bedroom that her vases were almost inconveniently crowded.

Carmel, hearing that she was collecting post cards, sent home for some special ones of Sicily; Dulcie tendered chocolates; Lilias crocheted her a pincushion cover, and Bertha painted her a hair-tidy. She accepted their little kindnesses with mild astonishment, but not a hint of the real reason of their sudden advances flashed across her mind.

"We mustn't let her suspect!" said Dulcie.

"Rather not!" agreed Carmel.

"Not for worlds!" said Gowan emphatically.

chapter xii White Magic

October passed by with flaming crimson and[157] gold on the trees, and orange and mauve toadstools among the moss of the woods, and squirrels scampering up the Scotch pines at the top of the garden, laying by their winter store of nuts; and flocks of migrating birds twittering in the fields, and hosts of glittering red hips and haws in the hedges, and shrouds of fairy gossamer over the blackberry bushes. It was Carmel's first autumn in England, and, though her artistic temperament revelled in the beauty of the tints, the falling leaves filled her with consternation.

"It is so sad to see them all come down," she declared. "Why the trees will soon be quite bare! Nothing but branches left!"

"What else do you expect?" asked Gowan. "They won't keep green all the winter."

"I suppose not. But in Sicily we have so many evergreens and shrubs that flower all the winter. The oranges and lemons begin to get ripe soon after Christmas, and we have agaves and prickly pears everywhere. I can't imagine a landscape without any leaves!"

[158]"Wait till you see the snow! It's prime then!"

"There's generally snow on Etna, but I haven't been up so high. It doesn't fall where we live."

"Girl alive! Have you never made a snowball?"

"Never."

"Then it's a treat in store for you. I sincerely hope we shall have a hard winter."

"We ought to, by the number of berries in the hedges," put in Bertha. "It's an old saying that they foretell frost.

"'Bushes red with hip and haw,
Weeks of frost without a thaw.'

I don't know whether it always comes true, though."

"I'm a believer in superstitions," declared Gowan. "Scotch people generally are, I think. My great-grandmother used to have second sight. By the by; it's Hallowe'en on Friday! I vote we rummage up all the old charms we can, and try them. It would be ever such fun."

"Topping! Only let us keep it to the Mafia, and not let the others know."

"Rather! We don't want Laurette and Co. butting in."

The remaining members of the Mafia, when consulted, received the idea with enthusiasm.[159] There is a vein of superstition at the bottom of the most practical among us, and all of them were well accustomed to practise such rites as throwing spilt salt over the left shoulder, curtseying to the new moon, and turning their money when they heard the cuckoo.

"Not, of course, that it always follows," said Prissie. "On Easter holidays a bird used to come and tap constantly at our drawing-room window at home. It was always doing it. Of course that means 'a death in the family,' but we all kept absolutely hearty and well. Not even a third cousin once removed has died, and it's more than two years ago. Mother says it was probably catching insects on the glass. She laughs at omens!"

"I always double my thumb inside my fist if I walk under a ladder," volunteered Noreen.

"Well, it is unlucky to go under a ladder," declared Phillida. "You may get a pot of paint dropped on your head! I saw that happen once to a poor lady: it simply turned upside down on her, and deluged her hat and face and everything with dark green paint. She had to go into a shop to be wiped. It must have been awful for her, and for her clothes as well. I've never forgotten it."

"What could we do on Hallowe'en?" asked Edith.

[160]"Well, we must try to think it out, and make some plans."

From the recesses of their memories the girls raked up every superstition of which they had ever heard. These had to be divided into the possible and the impossible. There are limits of liberty in a girls' school, and it was manifestly infeasible, as well as very chilly, to attempt to stray out alone at the stroke of twelve, robed merely in a nightgown, and fetch three pails of water to place by one's bedside. Gowan's north country recipe for divination was equally impracticable—to go out at midnight, and "dip your smock in a south-running spring where the lairds' lands meet," then hang it to dry before the fire. They discussed it quite seriously, however, in all its various aspects.

"To begin with, what exactly is a smock?" asked Carmel.

Everybody had a hazy notion, but nobody was quite sure about it.

"Usen't farm laborers to wear them once?" suggested Lilias.

"But Shakespeare says,

"'When shepherds pipe on oaten straws,
And merry larks are ploughmen's clocks,
When ring the woods with rooks and daws,
And maidens bleach their summer smocks,'"

objected Prissie.

[161]"Was it an upper or an under garment?" questioned Noreen.

"I'm sure I don't know. I don't fancy we any of us possess 'smocks'!"

"Then we certainly can't go and soak them in a spring!"

"And there is no 'laird' here, and even if you count an ordinary owner of property as a 'laird,' you don't know where the boundaries are!"

"No, that floors us completely!"

An expedition to the cellar for apples would be an equally hopeless quest, for all the harvest of the orchard had been stored in the loft, and was under lock and key. Some minor experiments, however, might be tried with apple skins, so they determined to pocket their next dessert, and keep it till the magic hour of divination arrived. Hot chestnuts would be a distinct possibility, and a little coaxing at head-quarters would doubtless result in Jones the gardener bringing a bag full for them from Glazebrook.

They felt quite excited when the fateful day arrived. Miss Walters had made no objection to an order for chestnuts, and had even allowed a modicum of toffee to be added to the list. She did not refer to the subject of Hallowe'en, for she had some years ago suppressed the custom of bobbing for apples, finding that the girls invariably[162] got their hair wet, and had colds in their heads in consequence.

The members of the Mafia, well stocked therefore with the apples and chestnuts necessary for divination, remained in their schoolroom after evening preparation, so as to have a gay time all to themselves. To make matters more thrillsome they turned out the light, and sat in the flickering glow of the fire. Gowan, having the largest acquaintance with the occult, not to speak of having possessed a great-grandmother endowed with second sight, was universally acknowledged priestess of the ceremonies.

"Shall we begin with apples or chestnuts?" she asked seriously.

As some said one thing and some another, she held a specimen of each behind her back, and commanded Carmel to choose right hand or left. The lot fell upon chestnuts, and these were placed neatly in pairs along the bars of the grate.

"You name them after yourself and your sweetheart," explained Gowan. "If he pops first, he'll ask you to marry him."

"And suppose the other pops first?" asked Carmel.

"Then you won't marry him!"

"Doesn't it mean that it may be Leap Year, and the girl will 'pop the question'?" asked Dulcie, still giggling.

[163]"No, it doesn't."

"Suppose they neither of them pop?" said Prissie.

"It's a sign that neither cares, but it's not very likely to happen—they nearly always pop."

"I pricked mine with my penknife, though."

"The more goose you! Take them back and try two fresh ones."

It is rather a delicate and finger-scorching process to balance chestnuts on the bars, and as a matter of fact Prissie's tumbled into the fire, and could not be rescued. The party was obliged to watch them burn. They helped her to place another in position, then sat round, keeping careful eyes on their particular representatives. It was forbidden to reveal names, so each kept the identity of her favored swain locked in her breast. It seemed a long time before those chestnuts were ready! Love's delays are notoriously hard to bear. Never were omens watched so anxiously. Slap! Bang! Pop! at last came from Carmel's particular corner, and fragments flew about indiscriminately on to hearth and fire.

"It's 'him'!" cried Gowan ungrammatically. "He's done it most thoroughly too! Carmel, you'll be married the first of any of us! You'll ask us to the wedding, won't you?"

At that moment a chorus of pops came from the grate, causing much rejoicing or dismay from[164] the various owners of the chestnuts, according to the fate meted out to them by the omens. On the whole Cupid was kind, though Lilias and Gowan were left in the lurch.

"I don't care!" said Gowan sturdily. "I've another in my mind, and perhaps I shall get him in the apple-peels."

"And if you don't?"

"I'll meet somebody else later on."

Having eaten more or less charred pieces of chestnut, the girls produced their apples, and once more set to work to try magic. The apple had to be peeled entirely in one long piece, which must then be slung backwards over the left shoulder on to the floor, where it would form the initial of the future lover. It was a matter for skilful manipulation of penknives, not at all easy to manage, so difficult in fact, that Noreen and Dulcie each made a slip, and chopped their precious pieces of peel in the middle, thus rendering them useless for purposes of divination. Lilias, who made the first essay, was completely puzzled by the result, which did not resemble any known letter in the alphabet, though Gowan, anxious to interpret the oracles, construed it into a W. Edith's long thin piece of peel made a plain C, a fact which seemed to cause her much satisfaction, though she