A Fourth Form Friendship Part 12

"We certainly can't stumble over these rocks in the dark," said Aldred.

"Unless there's a moon, we're fixed here until morning."

"I can't remember whether there's a moon or not," sighed Dora. "The sun doesn't rise particularly early either--not until about six, I believe."

"What will they be thinking at the Grange?" said Myfanwy, whose tears were beginning to wander slowly down her cheeks at the misery of the prospect in store.

As to that, no one liked to hazard a guess. In all the annals of the school it had never been recorded that any girls had been lost before; and they knew that Miss Drummond must be in a fever of anxiety on their account. The rain kept on steadily, and the time pa.s.sed by slowly--very slowly; the long hours seemed interminable. It was most forlorn and wretched to sit crouched under the rock, with the dripping rain beating in upon their wet clothes, listening to the sound of the water das.h.i.+ng below them.

[Ill.u.s.tration: FOUR UNHAPPY TRUANTS]

"It's like a horrible nightmare," said Phbe. "I wish I could wake up, and find myself in my own bed in No. 5!"

"It's so much worse now it's dark," groaned Aldred.

She was in a very dejected frame of mind, and would have burst out sobbing like a baby if she had not been too proud. Her friends were also in low spirits, and did not keep up their usual flow of jokes and chatter. All four snuggled as close together as they could, to keep one another warm, and sat silent, listening to the waves and the rain, till kind Mother Nature sent merciful sleep, and for a while at least they were able to forget their troubles.

Aldred had a long and confusing dream. She thought that she saw Mabel in danger of drowning, and that she plunged boldly into the sea, swam easily to her aid, and brought her back to sh.o.r.e amid the cheers of the school; and that Mabel was saying: "I knew you would come to the rescue.

It's not the first time you have done a heroic deed!"

She woke with a start. The words seemed so clear, she could almost believe Mabel had really spoken them. Certainly she had done nothing particularly heroic that day; indeed, her conscience told her that she was mainly responsible for that unpleasant adventure. It was she who had begged the others to leave the post office, and urged them to go down the promenade and along the pier. But for her it would not have occurred to them to break bounds; they would have waited until Blanche and Freda returned, walked straight back to school, and considered that they had had an enjoyable afternoon, without transgressing rules. None of them, however, had accused her of this. They appeared perfectly ready to take the full blame--indeed, they had hinted that, as a new girl, she would probably escape the consequences of the escapade more easily than they.

"After all, it's mostly their fault, for they'd no need to come, even if I asked them," she decided hastily. "I'm not bound to explain everything and get into extra trouble. No one is likely to ask who suggested it."

She tried to stretch her cramped limbs, and felt so stiff that it was pain to move. But it was worse to remain in the same position; so, making an effort, she dragged herself up, and crept out from under the rock. The rain had stopped, and a full moon was s.h.i.+ning outside, so clearly that she was able to consult her watch and ascertain that it was a little after ten o'clock. She roused the others immediately.

"Look--look!" she cried, shaking them eagerly. "It's bright moonlight!

The tide will have gone down. We must try to get on to the sands at once."

Yawning and stretching, the girls emerged from the cave. It was sufficiently light for them to see their way over the rocks, so they set off without further delay in the direction of the sh.o.r.e. They were now able to cross easily at the place where the channel had stretched a few hours earlier, and found themselves, after a considerable amount of scrambling, on the beach at the farther side of the promontory.

It was the queerest walk home that they had ever experienced. Sands are generally a.s.sociated with blue sky and bright suns.h.i.+ne, and those seemed very eerie and weird and strange in the moonlight, with the deep, dark shadows under the cliffs, and the sea gleaming silver in the distance.

With one consent they took each others' arms. Aldred certainly did not feel sufficiently courageous to walk alone; moreover, she was tired, and could contrive to lean upon both Phbe and Myfanwy, who were kind enough to pull her along without remonstrance.

The sands on this part of the sh.o.r.e were not very firm, and the girls'

feet sank with every step, while they stumbled now and then over stones or clumps of seaweed. It took a long time to cover the three miles to Birkwood; the distance seemed twice as far as it would have done by day, and they were thankful when at last they found the path which they knew led up the cliffs to the Grange.

There was a light in the house; they could see it gleaming when they were still quite far off, and it seemed to hold out a promise of food and rest. As they opened the gate, the gardener's wife came running out of the lodge. She gave a shriek at the sight of them, and rushed straight up the drive to tell the news: and the four had barely arrived at the door before Miss Drummond herself came hurrying to meet them.

"Girls! Girls! Where have you been?" she cried, with such a look on her pale face that they realized for the first time what she must have suffered during all the hours of that anxious night.

Freda and Blanche (as the girls had supposed), not finding them at the post office, had imagined that they must have started home, and had returned without them. They had been greatly dismayed, when they arrived at the Grange, to discover that the four had not come back. They reported their absence at once, and a teacher started for Chetbourne, to try to find them. When darkness fell, and they were still missing, Miss Drummond, in the greatest alarm, applied to the police, and bands of searchers were looking for them in various quarters. It had never struck anybody that they could have gone on the steamer to Sandsend, which lay in the opposite direction to Chetbourne.

The four truants were very glad indeed of the hot baths and basins of bread and milk that were waiting for them. They did not equally appreciate doses of camphor, but did not dare to remonstrate, being only too thankful that Miss Drummond had forborne as yet to scold. The Princ.i.p.al's chief object was to get them to bed, and to ward off any risk of colds or rheumatism that might follow their many hours of exposure in wet clothes. Fortunately, her prompt measures had the desired effect, and no evil consequences ensued. The girls were allowed to sleep late the next morning, and when they arrived downstairs seemed quite free from all aches, pains, coughs, sneezes, and other suspicious symptoms. They were in dire disgrace, however, for now that Miss Drummond was rea.s.sured as to their health, she turned her attention to their conduct.

"I'm most dreadfully sorry about it," said Mabel to Aldred that evening.

"You see, Miss Drummond has always trusted us so entirely at the Grange, and this is the first time anybody has ever gone out of bounds. She says it shakes her confidence in us. I'm afraid she'll stop all exeats for the Lower School. Of course, I know it wasn't your fault. You're a new girl, and how could you tell we weren't allowed on the promenade? You only went where the others took you. You'd no idea you were breaking the rules, had you?"

Aldred was brus.h.i.+ng her teeth at the moment, therefore a grunt was her only means of reply. Mabel took it as the required denial.

"I was sure you hadn't," she declared triumphantly. "A girl who can do such splendid things always lives up to them. It was a mean trick to play on Blanche and Freda, when they had invited you all for a walk, but I was certain you weren't capable of it. Naturally, you're ready to take your share of the scolding (I shouldn't have tried to get out of that myself); but I'm so glad that I, at any rate, know you don't really deserve it!"

CHAPTER VII

False Colours

The thunderstorm that had added to the unpleasantness of the girls'

adventure at Sandsend seemed to herald a complete change in the weather.

The beautiful Indian summer, so warm and genial, so full of kindly suns.h.i.+ne, vanished suddenly, and autumn, cold and bleak, appeared in its place. A sharp frost in a single night worked havoc in the garden, blackening the dahlias, withering the nasturtiums, and reducing all the remaining annuals to a state of blighted ruin, so that what had one day been a flowery paradise was the next a scene of desolation. A strong easterly gale, following the frost, cleared the leaves from the trees before they had any chance of turning to crimson or gold, and stripped the last vestige of beauty from the hedgerows.

After this came days of pouring rain. The lawns and the playing-fields were sodden, the roads were deep in sticky mud, the row of bare elms dripped dismally on to the garden seats below, and the neglected sundial no longer told the hour of day, nor formed a centre for the throng of girls who generally haunted its steps.

"Baldur the Sun G.o.d is dead!" said Aldred, looking out of the window one damp afternoon at the cheerless prospect, and recalling Miss Drummond's lesson on Northern Mythology. "Loki has killed him with the piece of mistletoe, and he will never return to Asgard. All the aesir are weeping for him, and the earth will be given up now to the frost giants and the spirits of the winds."

"Won't he ever come back?" said Mabel, falling in with her friend's humour.

"Just for a little while; but he always has to go in the winter, like Proserpine, who was bound to spend half the year with Pluto in Hades. I suppose there's no country, except the lost Atlantis, where it keeps summer all the year round."

"Why, you sound quite melancholy!"

"So I am."

"But why?"

"I don't know, except that it is so sad to see the summer gone."

Aldred could scarcely explain her att.i.tude of mind, though she was conscious that the change in the world without affected her strongly.

She had an extreme love of nature, an intense appreciation of beautiful things. No ancient Greek ever joyed in the suns.h.i.+ne more than she, or took greater pleasure in the scent of the flowers, or the blue of the sea and sky, or the song of the birds in springtime. Her artistic, poetical temperament was highly sensitive to all outward impressions; she was so keenly alive to the great, dramatic human tragedy and comedy that is being enacted around us, so in touch with the wonder and mystery of life, that what would pa.s.s unnoticed by many was to her the very essence of being.

Few people had ever sympathized with this side of her disposition. Her father had not realized it, Keith could not understand it, and Aunt Bertha had repressed it sternly. Modern schoolgirls are certainly not sentimental; they are more p.r.o.ne to laugh at poetic fancies than to admire them: and Aldred knew that on this score she would probably meet with ridicule from her form-mates. In consequence, she confined herself in public to the practical and prosaic, and, with the exception of an occasional private confidence to Mabel, kept her reflections locked in her own bosom.

There was certainly nothing in the atmosphere of the Grange to foster any tendency towards morbidness. The days were so fully occupied as to leave no time for dreaming. Though Aldred was clever, it took her whole energies to secure the place that she wished in the school. She was determined to be head of her Form, and, holding that object in view, toiled with a vigour such as nothing else would have wrung from her, and which would have caused unfeigned amazement to her former governess. It was not all plain sailing, for Ursula Bramley and Agnes Maxwell were also good workers; and even Mabel, though not specially bright, was very plodding and conscientious. Aldred soon found that she had to revise entirely her old method--that a careless German exercise could completely cancel a brilliant score in history, and that she must give equal attention to every subject if she wished to chronicle a record.

The little tricks she had practised on Miss Perkins were not equally successful at Birkwood: she had tried reeling off her lessons very fast, so as to gloss over mistakes, but Miss Bardsley would allow her to finish, and then say: "Yes; now you may repeat it again, slowly. I did not quite catch the second person plural;" and Aldred, to her disgust, would be compelled to reveal her ignorance in a more deliberate fas.h.i.+on, and take the bad mark that ensued. She was at first a venturesome guesser, till her many bad shots drew scathing comments from her teachers and smiles from the rest of the Form.

"Even Lorna Hallam knows that Sir Philip Sidney didn't write the _Faerie Queene_, and she's supposed to be our champion bungler!" observed Ursula Bramley sarcastically, on one occasion. "As for history, you muddle up Thomas Cromwell with Oliver Cromwell! You'd better get an elementary book, and learn a few simple facts."

The girls would not tolerate Aldred's conceit. She quickly discovered that if she wished to be popular, it was unwise to claim too much credit for her achievements. The week after she arrived she had taken her place among the others at a singing lesson. Miss Wright, the mistress, began to teach the cla.s.s the old English ballad, "Should he upbraid"; it was one with which Aldred happened to be familiar, so she at once took the lead and sang away l.u.s.tily, beating time in a rather marked manner, and accomplis.h.i.+ng the many little runs and trills with an air as if she considered herself indispensable. At the close of the lesson, as they were filing out of the room, she could not resist remarking to Ursula Bramley:

"It was a good thing I knew that song so well, wasn't it?"

"Why?" asked Ursula pointedly, looking her straight in the eyes.

Thus cornered, Aldred could hardly say that she thought the cla.s.s would have managed badly without her aid; her tact told her that the remark would be unpalatable and indiscreet, so she quickly changed her ground.

"Oh! only that I find it difficult to learn new things," she replied, in some confusion.