Part 1 (1/2)
A harum-scarum schoolgirl.
by Angela Brazil.
CHAPTER I
A Pixie Girl
”If I'd known!” groaned Winifred Cranston, otherwise Wendy, with a note of utter tragedy in her usually cheerful voice. ”If I'd only known!
D'you think I'd have come trotting back here with my baggage? Not a bit of it! Nothing in this wide world should have dragged me. I'd have turned up my hair--yes, it's _quite_ long enough to turn up, Jess Paget, so you needn't look at it so scornfully; it's as nice as yours, and nicer! Well, I tell you I'd have turned up my hair, and run away and joined the 'Waacs' or the 'Wrens', or have driven a motor wagon or conducted a tramcar, or scrubbed floors at a hospital, or done anything--_anything_, I say!--rather than stay at the Abbey without Mrs.
Gifford.”
”It's pretty stiff, certainly, for the Head to go whisking away like this,” agreed Magsie Wingfield, sitting on the other shaft of the wheelbarrow. ”And without any notice either! It leaves one gasping!”
”Stiff? It's the limit! Why didn't she give us decent warning, instead of springing it on to us in this sudden fas.h.i.+on? I feel weak!”
”There wasn't time,” explained Sadie Sanderson, who, with Violet Gorton and Tattie Clegg, occupied, in a tight fit, the interior of the wheelbarrow. ”It was all done at a day's notice. Geraldine's been telling me the whole history.”
”Well?”
”Mr. Gifford got suddenly exempted, and was made Governor of some outlandish place with an unp.r.o.nounceable name in Burma. He telegraphed to Mrs. Gifford to join him at Ma.r.s.eilles, and go out with him. So she went--that's the long and the short of it!”
”Went and left her school behind her,” echoed Vi.
”I call it simply running away,” commented Wendy. ”Why couldn't she have stopped to arrange things--say till Christmas--and then followed him?”
”It's some tiresome red-tape business at the War Office. They'd give her a pa.s.sport to travel out _with_ him, but not to join him afterwards, so she thought she'd better take the opportunity and go out with him while she could. It must have been a terrific scramble for her to get off. I believe she just bundled her things together and bolted, and left the school to Miss Todd.”
”Will she ever come back?”
”I shouldn't think it's likely now.”
”Then we're left for evermore to the tender mercies of Toddlekins?”
”That's just about the size of it. Toddlekins has taken the whole thing over.”
”She's been longing and yearning to seize the reins and drive the coach ever since she came,” commented Tattie.
”Well, she's got her chance now.”
”And she'll use it, too! You bet there'll be changes!”
”Changes! There are changes already, although Mrs. Gifford can hardly have reached Ma.r.s.eilles yet.”
”It's going to be a queer term,” grunted Wendy.
The five girls were sitting in a retired corner of the garden at Pendlemere Abbey. On one side, above the tops of the rhododendron bushes, they could see the tall, twisted chimneys and flagged stone roof of the old house; on the other side, below the lawn and across the paddock, gleamed the silver waters of the lake, with its banks of rushes and alders, and beyond lay a range of grey hills that seemed to melt away into more distant peaks that merged into the mists on the horizon.
It was a beautiful view, and on this hazy September afternoon, with the hidden sun sending long shafts of light from behind radiant ma.s.ses of cloud, it formed a prospect that should have afforded keen aesthetic satisfaction to anybody who cared to look at it. Usually the girls appreciated its changeful glories, but to-day--this first day of a new term--they were too much taken up with their own grievances to think about scenery. In fact, they sat huddled together in the wheelbarrow with their backs towards the view.
It had certainly been a considerable shock to the girls to find, on arriving after the holidays, that their popular Princ.i.p.al had deserted them in so sudden a fas.h.i.+on. It was not indeed the first surprise which she had given them. Two years before she had been Miss Housman, with a purely educational outlook in life, and a horizon bounded by her school; but Cupid, who plays strange pranks even with head mistresses, brought her fate along in the shape of a major from the temporary camp by the lake, and shot his arrows with such deadly aim that the whole romantic business--courts.h.i.+p, engagement, and war wedding--took place in the course of a few weeks, almost under the very noses of her interested pupils. They had gone home for their Easter holidays much thrilled about her engagement ring, and had returned to school to find her a war bride, with her husband already in the trenches. When the excitement of choosing her a wedding present was over, matters seemed to settle down pretty much as before. Except in an increased anxiety for news from the front, Mrs. Gifford had differed in no degree from Miss Housman. To the school the Major was a mere abstraction; his leave had always occurred during the holidays, and up to this time his existence--apart from the element of romance with which it invested their head mistress--had not affected the atmosphere of Pendlemere in the least. It had occasionally occurred to some of the girls to question what would happen when the war was over, but they generally ended by deciding: ”He'll have to come and live here, I suppose, and turn the junior room into a smoke-room”. Some of the more imaginative had even ventured the suggestion that he might teach drilling and Latin. It never struck any of them that instead of settling down at the school he would want to whisk away his bride to the other side of the world. The unexpected had happened, however. Pretty Mrs. Gifford had decided that the claims of matrimony outweighed all consideration for her pupils, and had gone without even a good-bye, leaving Miss Todd to reign in her stead.
There was no doubt that Miss Todd was admirably fitted to fill the post.