“Don’t, Winnie,” I pled. “We have no right to peep.”
Winnie hesitated.
“I told you so,” Cynthia said provokingly. “She dares not look. It is only a lumber room. The noise was probably made by some cat chasing a rat around.”
“It would take a whole army of cats to make the noises I have heard,” Winnie replied hotly, at the same time rolling Adelaide’s great Saratoga trunk in front of the door.
“There it goes again!” and as a loud hammering re-echoed through the adjoining room, she sprang upon the trunk. The transom was still too high for her to reach. “Quick, girls, something else,” she exclaimed, and Milly dragged the “Commissary Department” from its retirement under my bed.
The “commissary” was a small, old-fashioned trunk, which had belonged to my great-grandmother. It was covered with cow-skin, the hair only partially worn off, and studded with brass-headed nails which formed the initials of my ancestors. It was lined with newspapers bearing the date 1790, and was altogether a very quaint and curious relic. Its chief interest to us, however, lay in the fact that it had come to us from my home filled with all the good things that a farm can produce and a mistakenly soft-hearted mother send. There were mince pies and pickles, a great wedge of cheese, a box of honey, pounds of maple-sugar, tiny sausages, a great fruitcake, jars of pickled peaches, ginger snaps, walnuts and chestnuts, pop-corn and molasses candy, and what Milly called the interstixes were filled in with delicious doughnuts. It was a treasure house of richness upon which we revelled in the night after the gas was turned out and we all met in our nightgowns, and formed a semicircle sitting on the floor around the register, while Winnie told the most deliciously frightful ghost and robber stories.
Then, it was that the “commissary” yielded up its contraband stores and we ate, and shivered, partly with cold and partly with delightful terror inspired by the rehearsal of legends for which Winnie ransacked, during the day, the pages of the detective Vidocq and Poe’s prose tales.
Then if a mouse did but squeak in the deserted hospital ward, or the shuffle of Miss Noakes’s slippers was heard in the corridor outside, we all scuttled incontinently to our beds, and Winnie snored loudly, while Milly buried her head beneath the blankets. Miss Noakes occupied a large room opposite the hospital. She was a disagreeable, prowling teacher and we had nicknamed her Snooks.
The “commissary” being now carefully poised upon the curved top of Adelaide’s trunk, Winnie mounted upon it, and found that it was exactly what was needed, as it brought her face just on a level with the transom.
“O girls!” she exclaimed, “the trunks are all gone, and they are making the room over into a studio. And that handsome man that sat at Madame’s table yesterday at dinner is in there hanging pictures. I wonder if he is an artist and is going to teach us. My! he is looking this way,” and Winnie crouched suddenly. The movement was a careless one, and the commissary slid down the sloping cover of the trunk upon which it rested, striking the door with its end like a battering-ram, and with such force that the rusted lock yielded, and the commissary, with Winnie seated upon it, swept forward, like a toboggan, far into the center of the hospital.