A GREAT DEAL HAPPENS
The Madame’s doll-like figure has been mentioned before in these chronicles. But to Nancy Nelson’s excited imagination the principal of Pinewood Hall at this juncture seemed to swell—expand—develop—and actually fill the doorway of Number 40, West Side, with her unexpected presence!
Nancy couldn’t speak for the moment. Even the lively Jennie Bruce’s gayety was stifled in her throat.
“I hope you are not stricken dumb, Nancy,” suggested the Madame, in the same low voice.
“Oh, Madame! forgive me!” gasped the culprit at last, and slipped out of bed.
“Where are your robe and slippers?”
“Right here, Madame,” answered the frightened freshman, getting into them in a hurry.
“Well! stand there. Tell me why you are in the wrong room?”
“Oh, it isn’t Jennie’s fault—’deed it isn’t, Madame!” gasped Nancy.
“I am not going to eat you, child,” said the principal of the school, with some exasperation. “Having broken a rule, please stand up properly and answer my questions.
“How came you here, Nancy Nelson?”
“Jennie—Jennie found me crying in the hall.”
“What for?”
“I—I felt bad.”
“You were ill?”
“Oh, no, ma’am,” Nancy hastened to say. “I was not ill at all. Only I was—was lonely—and—and sorry—and——”
“Not altogether clear, Nancy,” said the Madame; but her voice was lower and softer. “Tell me why you were crying in the hall?”
But now Nancy had begun to get a grip upon herself. She realized the position she was in. If she obeyed Madame Schakael’s order she must “tell on” the girls then holding their orgie in Number 30.
“Do you hear me, Nancy?” asked Madame Schakael, firmly.
“Yes, Madame,” whispered the girl.
“Can’t you answer me?”
“No—no, Madame.”
“Why not?”
Nancy was silent for fully a minute, the Madame waiting without a sign of irritation.
“That—that, too, I cannot answer,” said the miserable girl, at last.
“Do you realize what such a refusal means, Nancy?”
“You—you will have to punish me.”
“Seriously.”
“Yes, Madame; seriously.”
“And your record to date has been quite the best of any girl of your class.”
Nancy locked her hands together and gazed at the principal. But she could say nothing.
“You say Jennie Bruce is not to blame?” asked Madame Schakael, after another minute of silence.
“Oh, no, Madame!”
“Oh, dear me!” cried the other girl, “You just don’t understand, Madame——”
Nancy made a pleading gesture to stop her newly-made friend. Madame held up her hand, too.
“I believe what Nancy Nelson says, Miss Bruce,” she observed, gravely. “You shall not be punished.”
“I don’t care for that!” cried the impulsive Jennie. “But Nancy ought not to be punished, either.”
“Will you let me be the judge of that, Jennie?” asked the Madame, softly.
“Nancy is out of her room out of hours. That is a fault—a serious fault. You both know that?”
“Yes, Madame,” said the stiff-lipped Nancy, while Jennie began to sob.
“I notice that Jennie’s roommate is not here. When she returns, Nancy, you may go back to your own room. And I shall deal out the same sort of punishment to Sally that I do to you, Nancy.
“And that is,” pursued Madame Schakael, slowly, “that you will be denied recreation, save that which is a part of the school curriculum, until the Christmas recess.”
Nancy said nothing. But she fully understood what it meant. No outdoor runs alone, no skating, nothing save the exercises prescribed by the physical instructor.
“You may wait for Sally’s return. And you are both forbidden to speak of this visit,” the principal said, and withdrew from the room as softly as she had entered it.
“Oh, dear me!” gasped Nancy, “she will catch them all in Number 30.”
“And serve ’em right,” said Jennie.
They waited, expecting to see Jennie’s roommate coming back in a hurry. But there was no disturbance. The clock at the foot of the main staircases had long since struck eleven. Now it tolled midnight.
Soon there were creaking of doors, faint rustlings in the corridors, giggling half-suppressed, and then the door of Number 40 opened again softly.
“Oh, gee!” exclaimed Sally. “Is she here?”
“Yes, she is,” replied Jenny, tartly. “What have you got to say against it?”
“Oh, you needn’t be so short, Jennie Bruce,” said Sally.
She slipped out of her wrapper and into her bed. Nancy got up, kissed Jennie warmly, and left the room silently. When she got back to Number 30 Cora was alone. All traces of the spread were hidden.
Cora said never a word; neither did Nancy. But she wondered much. Madame Schakael, she believed, had not hunted out the mystery of her being with Jennie Bruce. Would she and Sally be the only ones punished for this affair?
Morning came and with it the usual assembly in the hall for prayers after breakfast. From the platform Madame Schakael read, without a word of explanation, the names of every girl who had attended Cora’s spread—save Cora herself—and ordered that they be deprived of recreation, as had Nancy, “for being out of their dormitories after hours.” The blow fell like a thunderclap upon the culprits.
When they filed out of the hall to go to first recitation not one of the girls who had been at Number 30 the night before but scowled deadly hatred at poor Nancy.
It would have been useless for Nancy to point out that she, too, had received the same punishment. Circumstances were against the girl who had practically been turned out of her own room while the party was having a glorious time eating salad, macaroons, ice cream, and various other indigestible combinations of “sweeties.”
Cora Rathmore had escaped. How? Her mates did not stop to investigate that mystery.
If Cora could have explained she did not set about it. Instead, in first recitation, where she sat behind Nancy, she poked her in the back with a needle-like forefinger and hissed:
“You’re a nice one; aren’t you?”
Nancy merely gave her a look, but made no reply.
“Don’t play the innocent. We all know that you went to the Madame and so got square with us.”
“I—did—not!” declared Nancy, sternly.
“Miss Nelson!” exclaimed Miss Maybrick, suddenly.
Nancy whirled around, “eyes front.”
“Demerit—talking in class,” said the teacher.
That was the first time such a thing had happened to Nancy. It did seem as though everything bad was tumbling on top of her at once. She would not look around again when Cora poked her, but kept at her books—or appeared to!
What little joy she had had in school heretofore was all gone now. Lessons dragged; she thought the instructors all looked at her suspiciously.
Just the recreation room in the basement between lessons, or a demure walk with Miss Etching, the physical instructor, over the snowy lawns and wood paths about Pinewood. Extra gym work was denied her, and when the other girls ran with their skates to the river after release from studies, she could only go to Number 30 and mope.
Nancy could not see Bob Endress again. That was something beside a mere provocation of spirit. The girl felt that it was serious.
As Jennie had suggested, she wished to warn Bob to say nothing about where he had met her before. Of course, Grace Montgomery could not see the boy, either. But Cora was free to pump Bob, and Nancy was sure her roommate would worm out of him the whole story of how he had first met Nancy.
“He’s been looking for you,” whispered Jennie to Nancy at supper, the first night following the imposition of the punishment. “I saw him skating with Corinne and some of the other big girls. I don’t know whether he saw Cora, or not.”
“Oh, dear, Jennie!” cried Nancy. “I wish you would warn him.”
“I?” exclaimed the other. “I never was introduced to him.”
“Oh!”
“But that wouldn’t make any difference,” declared the fun-loving girl, with a smile. “I’m not afraid of boys; they don’t bite.”
“He’s a real nice boy, I believe,” said Nancy.
“So they all say.”
“And he’d understand, I am sure,” continued Nancy. “If he was only warned what harm his telling might do me——”
“Leave it to me!” cried Jennie. “I’ll skate with him to-morrow—if he’s on the ice.”
Nancy’s life in the school was made far more miserable now by Cora Rathmore and her friends. All these girls, who had enjoyed the spread bought with Nancy’s money, but who had been punished by the principal, were determined to look upon Nancy as guilty of “telling on them.”
Nor did they give her any chance to answer the charge. Cora would not even speak to her in their room. If any of the other girls came in, Cora said:
“Oh, come over to your room. We can’t talk here, where there is a telltale around.”
This was said at Nancy; but none of them actually addressed her. Besides, Cora began to hint that she knew something against Nancy that she was keeping in reserve.
“Oh, yes! she holds her head up awful proud,” Cora observed in Nancy’s hearing. “But you just wait!”
“Wait for what, Cora?” asked one of the girls.
“Wait till I get a letter. I’ll know all about Miss Telltale soon.”
And after that Nancy’s worst fears were realized by the news that Jennie Bruce brought her. Jennie had managed to see and have a private interview with Bob Endress.
“And of course, he’s managed to do it,” grumbled Jennie.
“Done what? Oh! done what?” cried Nancy, clasping her hands.
“Well, Cora wormed something out of him. He told her how you were the girl who saved him from drowning last summer.”
“Then it’ll all come out!” groaned Nancy.
“That’s according. Cora knows where you lived before you came to Pinewood to school.”
“And she’ll write to Malden. I believe she has done so.”
“But perhaps whoever she knows there won’t know you.”
“But they’ll learn about Higbee School, and then they can trace me to it. I know if anybody wrote to Miss Prentice she’d tell all about me. She’d think it her duty.”
“Mean old thing!” declared Jennie.
“Oh, Jennie! it’s going to be awful hard,” said poor Nancy. “You’d better not be too friendly with me. The girls are all bound to look down on me.”
“Don’t be so foolish! Of course they won’t.”
But Nancy shook her head. She had been all through the same trouble so many times before. With every incoming class of new girls at Higbee School it had been the same. She had been “the girl of mystery.”
“If you could only make that old lawyer tell the truth about you, Nance!” exclaimed Jennie.
“But perhaps he is telling the truth.”
“Not much, he isn’t.”
“Why, you’re as bad as Scorch O’Brien,” declared Nancy, with half a smile.
“That boy’s got some brains, all right,” observed Jennie, quickly. “It does not sound reasonable that, during all these years, Mr. Gordon would not have probed into the matter and learned something about your real antecedents.”
Nancy shook her head, slowly. “It may all be true. Maybe it is just kind-heartedness that has kept him acting as intermediary between the persons who furnish money for my education, and myself.”
“And why does he tip you so generously?”
“Oh—er—Well, I don’t know.”
“Is that out of his own pocket, do you think?” asked the shrewd Jennie.
“Well——”
“Does this ‘Old Gordon,’ as your friend Scorch calls him, really seem like a man given to outbursts of charity, Nance?”
“Why—why, I never saw him but once,” replied Nancy.
“But did he impress you as being of a philanthropic nature?” urged her friend.
“No-oo.”
“I thought not,” observed Jennie. “Just because Scorch reminded him of your existence wasn’t likely to make him send you money. I bet he handles plenty more belonging to you that you never see.”
“But see to what an expensive school he has sent me!” cried Nancy.
“Maybe he was obliged to do so. Perhaps he only does just what he is told to do, after all. There may be somebody behind Mr. Gordon, who is watching both him and you.”
“My goodness! You make it all more mysterious than it was before,” sighed Nancy. “Just the same, if these girls learn all about me they’ll spread it around that I’m just a foundling, and that nobody knows anything about me. It is going to be dreadfully hard.”
“Now, you pluck up your spirit, Nance Nelson!” commanded Jennie Bruce. “Don’t be so milk-and-watery. You’re just as good as they are.”
“I don’t know. At least, my folks may not have been as good as their folks.”
“Well, I’d never let ’em guess it,” cried Jennie. “You’re scared before you are hurt, Nance; that’s what is the matter with you.”