Monitress Merle, Angela Brazil [top rated ebook readers .TXT] 📗

in her own way, and rather affectionate, but nature had not endowed her with tact, and she would go blundering on, never seeing that she was making mistakes. Her very chums soon tired of her and discreetly left her to some one else.

"I sometimes think she's a little bit dotty!" opined Nesta.

"Nonsense! She's as sane as you or I. It's all swank! I've no particular patience with her!" said Merle.

One particularly aggravating feature of Sybil was the way she traded upon rather delicate health. There was really nothing much the matter with her, but she sometimes had slight attacks of faintness, which, the girls declared, always came on when she thought she could be a subject of interest. She liked to extract sympathy from Miss Mitchell, or to arouse Miss Pollard's anxiety. Moreover, it was often a very good excuse for slacking off in her preparation or her practising.

One afternoon Merle, coming back to school, met Miss Mitchell by the gate.

"I was just looking for you!" said the teacher. "I've arranged an extra hockey practice at three, instead of English language. Will you tell the others?"

This was excellent news. The Fifth hated the English Language class, which consisted mostly of learning strings of horrible derivations, and to have it cut out for once in favour of hockey was quite an event. Merle walked up the drive smirking with satisfaction. By the porch she found Sybil, with an English language book in one hand, half-heartedly helping Miss Fanny, who was nailing up creepers. She looked very sorry for herself.

"I wish you'd hold the ladder, Merle!" she sighed, eager to thrust her duties on to a substitute. "I don't feel quite well this afternoon. I get such a faintness. Aren't these derivations too awful for anything?" she added sotto voce. "I don't believe I know one of them."

"Buck up!" whispered Merle with scant sympathy.

"It's all very well to say 'buck up'! You don't know what it is to feel faint. You're as strong as a horse. I'm really not fit to stand about!"

"Shall I ask Miss Fanny to let you go in and lie down?"

"I wish you would! I don't like to ask her myself; it seems making such a fuss."

Merle proffered the request, with which Miss Fanny, rather astonished, complied.

"Certainly, Sybil, if you really are ill! Shall I give you a dose of sal volatile?"

"No, thanks! I shall be all right if I can just rest on my bed," answered the plaintive voice.

"I daresay you'll soon feel better. It's a pity you'll miss the hockey practice," said Merle.

"What hockey practice?"

"Miss Mitchell has just told me to tell everybody. We're to play instead of having English language this afternoon."

Sybil's face was a study. But Miss Fanny's eyes were fixed upon her with such a questioning look that she was obliged to preserve her air of faintness and continue to pose as an invalid. There was nothing for it but to go and lie down. As she turned, however, she managed to whisper to Merle:

"You're the meanest thing on the face of this earth! Why couldn't you tell me sooner about the hockey?"

"Your own fault entirely!" chuckled Merle. "You nailed me straight away to do your job for you. Hope you'll enjoy yourself! Yes, Miss Fanny! I'm coming to hold the ladder! I was only opening the door for Sybil, she still-feels rather faint!"

It was about a week after this episode that Miss Mitchell, who was keen on nature study, took the Fifth form for a botanical ramble. They started punctually at two o'clock, so as to be back as soon as possible after four, on account of Beata Castleton and Fay Macleod, who must not keep Vicary's car waiting. They went off ready for business, all taking note- books and pencils, some carrying tin cases, and some armed with boards with which to press their specimens on the spot. Their exodus was rather characteristic, for Aubrey was chatting sixteen to the dozen, Iva was trying to scoot ahead so as to walk alone with Kitty Trefyre, Muriel was squabbling with Merle as to which should appropriate Miss Mitchell, and Sybil was, as usual, seeking for sympathy.

"I couldn't find my boots! I had to put on my shoes instead, and the heels are worn down and they're not comfortable, and I shall very likely twist my ankle!" she complained. "What would you have done? Ought I to have gone to Miss Pollard and asked her about my boots?"

"And kept everybody waiting? You are the limit!" exclaimed Merle impatiently. "No, I'm not going to hold your case for you while you tie your hair ribbon. You always want to dump your things on to other people."

"You might carry the camera, at any rate!" wailed Sybil.

"Why should I? You insisted on bringing it, though I told you it would be a nuisance."

"It's for your benefit! I'm going to take a group of the whole party."

"Right-o! But don't expect to get the credit and make us carry the camera! You like to do your good deeds so cheaply!"

"Really, Merle!"

"I'm only telling you a few home truths. No, Mavis! I shan't let you load yourself with Sybil's property! You've got quite enough of your own to lug along!"

There was keen competition among the girls as to who could find most specimens. They rooted about in hedgerows, climbed banks, and made excursions into fields. Durracombe was not quite so good a neighbourhood for flowers as Chagmouth; still, they found a fair variety, and were able to chronicle early blooms of such specimens as the greater stitchwort, the ground ivy, and the golden saxifrage. It was a fresh March day, with a wind blowing scudding white clouds across a pale blue sky. Rooks were beginning to build, green foliage showed on the elder trees, and the elms were flowering.

"We shall all be pixie-led if we gather the white stitchwort!" said Mavis. "They're the pixies' flowers, so Mrs. Penruddock told me! It's a very old Devonshire superstition."

"Is that so? I never heard it before," said Miss Mitchell. "I know ever so many of the flowers are supposed to belong to the fairies in various parts of the country. Foxgloves are really 'the good folks' gloves,' and they're called fairies' petticoats in Cheshire, and fairies' hats in Ireland. Wild flax is always fairy flax, and harebells are fairy bells."

"Our old nurse used to call funguses pixie stools," said Edith Carey, "and the hollow ones were pixies' baths. She wouldn't let us pick elder, I can't remember why."

"That's a very old superstition. The 'elder mother' is supposed to live inside the tree, and to be very angry indeed if any harm is done to it. In the good old days, people used to ask her permission before they dared to cut down an elder. They knelt on bended knees and prayed:

 "Lady Elder! Lady Elder!
  Give me some of thy wood.

"There's a story about a man who hadn't the politeness to perform this little ceremony. He made a cradle for his baby out of the elder tree. But the sprite was offended, and she used to come and pull the baby out of the cradle by its legs, and pinch it and make it cry, so that it was quite impossible to leave the poor little thing in the elder cradle, and they had to weave one of basket-work for it instead."

"Tell us some more fairy lore about the plants!" begged the girls.

"Well, the St. John's wort is called 'the fairies' horse.' If you pick it after sunset a fairy horse will rise from the ground and carry you about all night, leaving you in the morning wherever you may chance to be at sunrise. You know if you keep fern-seed in your pockets you'll have the chance of seeing the pixies. The moonwort is supposed to be a very supernatural plant, and to have the power of opening locks if you place a leaf of it in the keyhole. No, I've never tried to burgle with it! I've never found any moonwort. It's an exceedingly rare plant now, and it's not been my luck to come across any. If you're troubled with warts, you ought to go at sunrise to an ash tree, stick a pin into the bark, and say:

 "Ashen tree! Ashen tree!
  I pray thee buy these warts of me!

"Then the ash tree would cure you, that's to say, if you'd repeated the charm properly!"

"I suppose it was always wise to leave a loophole in case the cure didn't come off!" laughed Mavis.

They had been walking by a footpath across the meadows, and found themselves in the little village of Bamberton, a small place with picturesque cottages close to a river. Miss Mitchell, who was an enthusiast upon architecture, marched her party off to view the church, much to the disgust of several of them.

"Don't want to see mouldy old churches! I'd rather be out of doors!" grumbled Merle.

"And there are actually sweet violets growing in a field on the opposite side of the river," said Edith, who knew the neighbourhood.

"Oh, are there? Do let's get some."

"It'll be too late by the time we've been all round the monuments and read the inscriptions and the rest of it!"

"How long will Miss Mitchell stay in the church?"

"A good twenty minutes, I daresay. You can't get her away when she starts talking about architecture. Dad took her round our church one day, and I thought she'd never go. Tea was getting cold, but she went on asking questions about windows and pillars and things!"

"Then why shouldn't we slip out and run and get the violets while she's inside the church with the others?"

It was a naughty thing for a monitress to propose, but even Sybil, who happened to overhear, did not wax moral for the occasion.

"I'll come with you!" she said eagerly. "I'm not at all fond of going round churches, and looking at monuments. It always makes me wonder if I'm going to die young! When Miss Mitchell took us to Templeton Church and read us the epitaphs, I cried afterwards! There was one about a girl exactly my age. 'Sweet flower, nipped off in early bloom,' it said, or something of the sort."

"Don't be so sentimental!" snapped Merle.

"But come with us if you like. Yes, you too, Beata! But for goodness' sake don't tell any one else or they'll all want to come, and if the whole lot try to scoot, it will put a stopper on the thing. We'll wait till the others are inside and then just slide off. Mum's the word, though!"

It was quite easy to loiter among the tombstones pretending to read the inscriptions, but the moment Miss Mitchell and her audience had safely passed through the porch and opened the big nail-studded door, the four confederates turned and fled.

Edith knew a short cut, and took them between rows of graves, regardless of Sybil's protesting shudders, to a tiny stile that led down an alley to the riverside. Here there was a tumbledown wharf, and an old ferryboat which worked on a chain. Years ago a ferryman had had charge of it, but there was so little traffic that it was no longer worth his while, so the boat had been left for passengers to use as they liked. It was lying now at the edge of the wharf. The girls, following Edith, stepped in, and began to wind the boat across the river by pulling the chain. It was rather an amusing means of progression, and they enjoyed their 'Dover- Calais crossing,' as they called it. Arrived at the opposite bank, Edith scrambled out.

"Tie the boat up, somebody!" she called, and set off running over the meadow to the hedge where the violets grew.

Somebody is an exceedingly vague term, and generally means nobody. Merle and Beata went scampering after Edith, and Sybil, who was last, flung the boat chain hastily round a post and followed her friends. The violets were lovely, sweet-scented and blue and modest and everything that orthodox violets ought to be.

The girls gathered delicious, fragrant little bunches, and felt that they were scoring tremendously over those unfortunates who were receiving information about architecture inside the church.

"We mustn't stay too long!" sighed Edith. "It's a pity, but I'm afraid we really ought to go now. They'll be looking for us if we don't."

So they walked back across the meadow to the bank. Here a most unpleasant surprise greeted them. The boat,