HEAPS OF TROUBLE
Nancy wept as she had never wept since coming to Pinewood Hall. But she was weeping as much for rage as for sorrow. Cora’s insulting words, and her cruelty, had lashed Nancy’s indignation to the boiling point.
She could spoil all their fun on this evening. She knew where all the goodies were hidden. Most of them were in her closet, and in Cora’s. And her money had paid for every scrap that had been smuggled in from the Clintondale caterer’s and from the delicatessen store and grocery.
She could not only stop the girls from having the spread in Number 30; but she could stop their having it at all.
However, the heat of her passion was soon over. She bathed her eyes and flushed face and went down to supper without seeing Cora again.
She did not sit near the Montgomery clique at table, anyway; but she heard them talking and laughing during the meal, and afterward some of them passed where Nancy sat and looked at her oddly.
None of them spoke to her. All of a sudden they had dropped her again and she was just as friendless as she had been before Cora Rathmore suggested the secret supper.
When she went back to Number 30, however, Cora followed her.
“Now, I want to know just what you mean to do, Miss?” she said, standing inside the door and scowling at Nancy.
“What about?”
“About the supper to-night.”
“You certainly don’t need me at the supper,” observed Nancy, quietly.
“I should hope not! But we don’t propose to have you run to the teachers and give our secrets away.”
Nancy started up from her chair and advanced a step toward her tormentor. She really had it in her mind to box Cora’s ears—and the black-eyed girl knew it.
“Don’t you dare touch me!” she cried, shrinking back.
“Then don’t you dare suggest that I’d be a telltale,” warned Nancy. “I leave that to you.”
“Oh, you do!”
Nancy was silent, and Cora calmed down.
“Then you’ll go out for the evening?” she asked, at last.
“Gladly,” said Nancy.
“Mabel and Hilary say you can stay in 38.”
“Very well.”
“And of course you are not going to be mean about your share of the goodies?” asked Cora, slily.
Nancy wanted to say that it seemed to her all the goodies were hers. But she only tossed Cora the key of her closet.
“I hope you’ll have a good time,” she said, in a low voice. “But if I were you, Cora, and had treated anybody as meanly as you have me, I could never have a good time.”
“Pooh!” replied Cora, insolently. Such considerations made no impression on her. She only thought that Nancy was “too easy for anything,” and laughed and joked about her to Grace Montgomery.
Nancy would not cry before her roommate. She spent the evening as usual in apparently close application to the lessons for the next day; scarcely a word was said in Number 30 until curfew at nine. The other girls kept entirely away from the room that evening. Going back and forth might have drawn the suspicion of Miss Maybrick to that particular dormitory.
At bedtime the two girls occupying Number 30 undressed and got into bed as usual. The electric lights went out on that floor. The corridors were lighted only by caged gas jets, turned low. In each room was a candle in an ample stick. The girls had to use these if they needed to move about in the night, and all the after-hour spreads were illuminated by candles, each girl participating bringing her own taper to the feast.
The hour between nine and ten dragged by drearily enough. Especially was this so for Nancy. She lay wide awake, with swollen, feverish eyes, and waited for the ten o’clock gong.
At that hour the lights on the upper floors were out and, a little later, Miss Maybrick’s soft footfall sounded in the corridor. Occasionally the teacher turned a knob and looked into a study. The draperies between studies and bedrooms had to be left open so that the teacher could cast the ray of her electric hand-lamp right in upon the pillows of the two beds.
And if there was not the proper number of heads on those pillows, an investigation was sure to follow!
Miss Maybrick was known to be a sound sleeper, however. It was pretty safe for the girls to have their “orgies” on the nights this particular instructor was on duty.
Miss Maybrick went past and, in a moment, Cora slipped out of bed and to the door. In the moonlight Nancy saw her crouched beside the door, reach up and turn the knob, open the portal a little way, and listen.
The rustle of the teacher’s skirts was lost in the distance. She had already been upon the upper floors; and now her inspection was over. The soft closing of her own door, which was right at the head of the stairway, came to the ears of the listening girls.
Almost immediately there was a rustling and whispering in the corridor. Cora threw the door of Number 30 open. Somebody giggled.
“Come on!” whispered Cora, sharply.
Nancy, feeling that it was all wrong and that no good would come of it, slid out of bed, sought her slippers with her bare toes, wriggled her feet into them, and seized her gray robe.
She darted out of Number 30 before any of the visitors arrived, and went to the nearest bathroom. There she waited until she was pretty sure the twenty girls had gathered to enjoy their stolen fun.
Number 38 was just across in the other short corridor. Nancy ran there, sobbing quietly to herself. Just before she opened the door somebody grabbed her arm.
Oh! how frightened she was for the moment. She was sure a lurking teacher had found her out of her room.
“Hush! don’t be a dunce! It’s only me,” said a kind, if sharp, voice.
“Jennie Bruce!”
“Of course it is. Who did you think I was—your grandmother’s ghost?” giggled Jennie, pinching her.
“Oh, oh!” panted Nancy.
“You’re scared to death. What’s the matter?”
“You were going into Number 38?”
“Yes,” admitted Nancy.
“Well, come into my room. It’s Number 40. I’m chummed with a girl who has gone to that party.”
“You—you know about it, then?” stammered Nancy.
“I should say I did.”
“And your roommate was invited—and not you?”
“Grace and her crowd aren’t in love with me,” remarked Jennie.
“Oh!”
“And I reckon they are not overpoweringly fond of you?” suggested Jennie.
Nancy could not speak then. Jennie put her arm over her shoulder.
“Come on into my bed, Nancy,” she said. “Sally will wake us up when she comes back from the spread. I think Cora and that Montgomery girl have treated you just as meanly as they could.”
Nancy still sobbed. Jennie opened the door of Number 40 and drew her inside.
“Don’t you let them see that you care,” commanded Jennie.
“I—I don’t care a—about them,” sobbed Nancy. “It’s—it’s because I haven’t a friend in the world.”
“Oh, don’t say that, honey,” urged the other girl, still holding Nancy in her arms after they had discarded their robes and crept between the sheets.
“It—it is so,” sobbed Nancy.
“You mean you haven’t made friends here at Pinewood?”
“I haven’t made friends anywhere,” said Nancy.
“Why—why—Surely you have some folks—some relatives——?”
Nancy’s naturally frank nature overpowered her caution here. Jennie Bruce was the first girl who had ever seemed to care about Nancy’s troubles. She did not seem curious—only kind. The lonely girl did the very thing which her caution all the time had warned her would be disastrous.
She opened her heart to Jennie Bruce.
“Do you know who I am?” she demanded of the surprised Jennie.
“Why—what do you mean? Of course you are Nancy Nelson.”
“I don’t even know if I have a right to that name.”
“Mercy!”
“It’s the only name I know. It seems to be the only name anybody who knows about me, knows.”
“Then it’s yours.”
“How do I know that?” queried Nancy, bitterly. “I’m just a little Miss Nobody.”
“Goodness me! but that does sound romantic,” whispered Jennie.
“Romantic!” cried Nancy, with scorn. “It’s nothing of the kind. You’re as bad as Scorch.”
“As bad as who?”
“Scorch O’Brien,” replied Nancy.
“Well, for goodness sake! if that doesn’t sound interesting,” cried Jenny. “Who is Scorch O’Brien? What a perfectly ridiculous name! Why ‘Scorch?’”
“He’s red-headed,” explained Nancy, doubtful now. She saw that she had got herself to a point where she must tell it all—every bit of her story—if she wished to keep Jennie’s friendship.
“Bully! Scorch O’Brien is fine,” laughed Jennie. “Let’s hear all about you, Nancy Nelson. I bet you’ve got lots of the queerest friends, only you don’t know it. I—I’ve got nothing but brothers, and sisters, and cousins, and all that sort of trash. The Bruces hold most all the political offices in the town where I come from. You couldn’t throw a stone anywhere in Hollyburg without hitting one of the family.
“But just think! You’ve got no folks to bother you. There are no teasing cousins. You haven’t got to ‘be nice’ to relatives that you fairly can’t help hating!
“Oh, I believe you’ve got it good, Nancy Nelson; only you don’t know it!”
So, thus encouraged, and lying in Jennie’s warm embrace, Nancy whispered the full and particular account of the little, unknown girl who had been brought to Higbee School, far away in Malden, nearly ten years before.
She told Jennie about Miss Prentice and about the long, tedious vacations with Miss Trigg, even down to the last one when she had helped save Bob Endress—then a perfect stranger to her—from the millpond.
“And he knew you right away on the ice to-day? I saw him! Good for you! He’s the most popular boy in Clinton Academy,” declared Jennie with conviction.
“But I don’t care anything about that,” said Nancy, honestly. “I want the girls to like me. And I know if they learn that I am just a nobody——”
“What nonsense! You may be a great heiress. Why! maybe you belong to royalty——”
“In America!” ejaculated Nancy, the practical.
“Well! they could have brought you over the ocean.”
“I haven’t heard of any of the royal families of Europe advertising for a lost princess,” Nancy said, in better humor now. “And I know I don’t look like the Turks, or the Chinese, or Hindoos, or anything like that. I guess I’m an American, all right.”
“But you must have somebody very rich belonging to you,” cried Jennie.
“I don’t know.”
“Then that Mr. Gordon must know more about you than he will tell.”
“I—I am almost tempted to believe so,” admitted Nancy.
“I believe it!”
“Scorch says so.”
“That boy is all right,” declared Jennie. “I’d like to know him.”
“But I don’t see how Mr. Gordon is to be made to tell what he knows—if he does know more than he has admitted about me,” sighed Nancy.
“Neither do I—yet,” said Jennie. “But we’ll think about it. Maybe that Scorch will find out something.”
“But—really—Mr. Gordon is very kind to me. See how much money he gives me.”
“And perhaps that is only a tithe of what he steals from you.”
“You’re as bad as Scorch,” declared Nancy.
“Well—of course—maybe he is telling the truth, too,” said Jennie. “And twenty dollars at one clip I—Whew!”
Nancy did not tell her that the twenty dollars had paid for the supper Grace and Cora and their friends were enjoying in Number 30 at that very moment.
“But I tell you what,” said Jennie, after a bit, and speaking reflectively.
“Yes?”
“Just give Bob Endress the tip to say nothing to the other girls about how he first met you.”
“Oh!”
“Don’t you see? If Cora and Grace find out where you lived before you came to Pinewood Hall, they’ll maybe learn all about you. And perhaps, that would be bad,” said Jennie, slowly.
“Then you see it too?” asked Nancy, sadly. “They’ll be very sure I am a nobody then.”
“It’s a shame how girls will talk,” admitted Jennie Bruce. “Especially that kind of girls.”
“I wish I had you for a friend, Jennie,” said Nancy, in a whisper.
“Why! you have!” cried the other. “I’ve always wanted to know you better. But the girls think you are offish.”
“I don’t mean to be.”
“No, I see,” returned Jennie. “But I understand you now. I wish you were in this room instead of Sally.”
“And if you only were in Number 30, instead of Cora,” spoke Nancy, out loud.
And upon the very echo of these words, a clear voice demanded:
“And will you tell me, Miss Nelson, how it is that you are not in Number 30—your proper dormitory—at this hour of the night?”
Both girls sat up in bed as though worked with the same spring. They could not speak. Madame Schakael stood in the doorway.