Kitabı oku: «Molly Brown's Junior Days», sayfa 4
CHAPTER VII.
A MIDNIGHT ADVENTURE
Molly and Nance had little to say to each other that night as they undressed for bed. Nance was still filled with hot indignation over Judy’s “falling-off” as she called it, and Molly had no heart for conversation. The door to Judy’s bedroom at the other end of the sitting room was closed and they were not surprised when she did not call “good night” as was her custom. Nobody looked in on them. It was late and the Quadrangle was soon perfectly still.
Under the sheets, her head buried in the pillows, Molly cried a long time, softly and quietly, like a steady downpour of rain. It seemed somehow that her beloved friend, Judy, had died, and that she was grieving for her. At last, worn out, she fell asleep. It was a very heavy sleep. She felt as if her arms were tied and she was sinking down into space and, as is always the case with dreams of falling, she waked with a nervous leap as if her body had hit the bed and rebounded. As she fell she had dreamed that she heard a voice calling. Never mind what it said; already the word, whatever it was, was a mere pin point in her memory. It had flashed through her mind like a shooting star across the sky. It was brilliantly illuminating for the instant. Molly was sure that it meant a great deal. It was an important word, and it had an urgent significance. For the tenth of a second her mind had been wide awake, and now it was quite dark again.
Molly leaped out of bed and began pulling on her clothes.
“Why am I dressing?” she thought. “It is because I must —hurry!”
“Hurry,” that was the word. It came back to her now, quietly and significantly.
Nance wakened and sat up in bed.
“What is it?” she asked.
“I don’t know. I must hurry. Don’t stop me,” answered Molly.
Nance looked at her curiously.
“You’ve had a nightmare, Molly,” she said.
Molly glanced up vaguely as Nance switched on the light.
“Have I? I don’t know, but I must make haste, or I’ll be too late.”
“Too late for what?”
“I don’t know yet.”
“Wake up, Molly. You’re asleep. Nothing is going to happen. You are here, in your own room.”
“Yes, yes. I understand, but I must hurry. Don’t stop me, Nance. You may come if you like, but don’t stop me.”
Nance had often heard that it was dangerous to awaken sleepwalkers too suddenly, and she believed now as she saw Molly slipping on her skirt and sweater that she was certainly asleep.
“Dearest Molly,” she insisted. “This is college. You are in your own room. It’s a quarter to twelve. Don’t go out of the room.”
Molly took no notice. Nance turned on another light and slipped across to Judy’s room. She must have help, and Judy was the nearest person.
“Judy’s not in her room,” she exclaimed suddenly, in a scared voice.
Molly gave a slight shudder.
“It’s Judy who needs me,” she said. “I was trying to remember. I couldn’t make it out at first. Put on your things, Nance. Don’t delay. Put out the light. We must hurry.”
Nance got into a few clothes as fast as she could. She slipped on tennis shoes and an ulster and presently the two girls were standing in the corridor.
“Where are we going, Molly?” asked Nance, now under the spell of the other’s conviction.
“This way,” answered Molly, looking indeed like a sleepwalker as she glided down the hall to the main steps.
If the girls had glanced back they would have noticed a figure creep softly after them.
“But the gate is locked,” objected Nance.
“I know, but we’ll find another way. Come on.”
Down the steps they hastened noiselessly. At the bottom, instead of going straight ahead, Molly turned to the left and led the way to a sitting room for visitors on the ground floor of the tower. The windows of the Tower Room, as it was known, looked out on the campus. They were small, deep-silled, and closed with iron-bound wooden shutters like the doors into the cloisters. Mounting a bench, Molly opened the inside glass casement of one of the windows and drew back the bolt which secured the shutter. Then she hoisted herself onto the sill, crawled through the window, and holding by both hands dropped to the ground. Nance, of a more practical temperament, wondered how they would ever get back into the Tower Room; but blind, unquestioning faith is an infinitely stronger staff to lean upon than uneasy speculation, as Nance was one day to find out.
“When the night watchman makes his rounds, will he see the window open in the tower?” she thought. “And if he does, what will he do? Give the alarm at once or try to find out our names and report us? If he reports us, what then? We may be expelled, or suspended or punished in some awful way.”
So Nance’s thoughts busily shaped out these tragic events as she followed Molly out of the window and dropped to the gravel walk below. The tower clock struck twelve while the two girls flitted across the campus. It was a strange adventure, Nance pondered, and one she would never have undertaken, or even considered, alone. But then her instincts were not like Molly’s. The inner voice which spoke to her sometimes was usually the sharp, reproving voice of a Puritan conscience. It spoke to her now, but she turned a deaf ear to it for once.
It told her how absurd she would appear to other people in this dangerous midnight escapade; what risks she was running. Judy, of course, had spent the night with one of the other girls, it said. It troubled her mind with whispers of doubts and fears; it ridiculed and abused her, but not once did it weaken her determination to follow Molly wherever she intended to go. And presently, when Molly quickened her footsteps into a run, Nance kept right at her elbow like a noonday shadow, foreshortened and broadened.
Molly turned in the direction of the lake. Nance’s heart gave a violent thump. She had believed all along that they were taking a short cut across to the gymnasium, instead of following the gravel walk.
“Molly, you don’t think – ” she began breathlessly.
“Don’t talk now. Hurry,” was Molly’s brief reply.
Across a corner of the golf course they flew, and before Nance could take breath for another dash through a fringe of pine trees she caught sight of the waters, as black as ink. She clutched Molly’s arm.
“Did you hear anything?” she asked, in a frightened whisper.
They waited a moment, straining their ears in the darkness.
From the middle of the lake came the sound of a canoe paddle dipping into the water.
Molly breathed a sigh of relief.
“It’s all right,” she said, and they hastened down to the platform of the boathouse.
In another moment they had launched a small rowboat and were out on the lake.
“Will Judy Kean never learn sense?” Nance thought impatiently. “She’s just like a prairie fire. It only takes a spark to set her going and then she burns up everything in sight.”
Nance had never been able to understand why Judy could not hold her passionate, excitable temperament more in control. She, herself, had learned self-denial at an early age. But that was because she had a selfish mother.
“How did you ever guess she would be here, Molly?” she asked, as the prow of the boat cut softly through the waters of the lake with a musical ripple.
Nance was rowing, and Molly, who had never learned to handle oars, was sitting facing her.
“I don’t know. I can’t explain it. I dreamed that some one said ‘hurry,’ and the lake seemed to be the place to come to.”
Some two hundred feet beyond they now made out the silhouette of a canoe. Judy – of course it was Judy; already they recognized the outline of her slender figure – kneeling in the bottom of the boat, had stopped paddling. She held up her head like a startled animal when it scents danger. It occurred to Nance, watching her over her shoulder as they drew nearer, that there was really something wild and untamed in Judy’s nature. She remembered that, the first morning they had met her at Queen’s, Judy had laughingly announced that she had been born at sea on a stormy night. But it was no joking matter, Nance was thinking, and she fervently wished that Judy would learn to quell her troubled moods.
The next instant the two boats touched prows. The little canoe, the most delicate and sensitive craft that there is, quivered violently with the shock of the collision and sprang back. As it bounded forward again, Molly held out her hand. Instinctively Judy grasped it, and the two boats drew alongside each other.
“Crawl into our boat, Judy, dearest,” said Molly. “It will be easier to pull the canoe to shore if it’s empty.”
Judy prepared silently to obey. But a canoe is not a thing to be reckoned with at critical moments. Just as Judy raised her foot to step into the other boat, the treacherous little craft shot from under her, and over she toppled, headforemost into the waters. Fortunately, she was an excellent swimmer, and the star diver of the gymnasium pool. But the lake was not deep, and when she came up, sputtering and puffing, she found herself standing in water that was only shoulder high.
Nance often thought, in looking back on this painful episode, that nothing they could have said to Judy would have brought her so completely to her senses as this cold ducking. Certainly, if Judy had actually planned to jump into the lake, her wishes were most ludicrously carried out, and the struggle she now made to climb back into the boat showed that she was not anxious to stay any longer than she could help in the icy bath. It was a sight for laughter more than for tears, sensible Nance pondered with a slight feeling of contempt – that of Judy, struggling and kicking to draw herself into the boat. Indeed, she almost managed to upset them, too; but she did tumble in somehow, shivering and wet but extremely contrite.
“How did you know I was out here?” was the first question she put, when, having seized the rope on the prow of the canoe, they headed for shore.
“I didn’t know. I only guessed,” answered Molly.
“She was up and dressed before she even knew you were not in your room,” announced Nance.
“I was a fool,” exclaimed Judy, “and I know now what good friends you are to have come for me. I don’t know exactly what I intended to do out here,” she went on brokenly. “I felt ashamed to face any one, even mamma and papa. I might – ” she broke off, shivering. Rivulets of water were pouring from her wet clothing into the bottom of the boat. She still wore the costume she had worn in the last scene of the play.
“I’ll give you my ulster as soon as we land, Judy,” said Nance, rowing with long rapid strokes which sent the boat skimming over the water.
“I’m just a low-down worthless dog,” went on Judy, taking no notice of Nance’s interruption. “There’s no good trying to apologize, Molly. Words don’t mean anything. But when the chance comes – and the chance always does come if you want it – I’ll be able to show you how sorry I am for what I did, and how much I really love you.”
“You showed me what a real friend you were last winter, Judy,” broke in Molly, “when you gave up your room at Queen’s for my sake. I wasn’t angry about what happened at the gym. I was hurt of course because I’m a sensitive plant, but I knew it would be all right in the end because we are too close to each other now to let a few hasty words come between us. But here we are at the boat landing.”
Having tied the two boats in the boat house, which was never kept locked, they hurried back to college. Nance insisted upon Judy’s putting on her ulster.
“You know I’m never cold,” she said.
“You girls will just kill me with kindness,” exclaimed Judy humbly.
But Nance did not even hear this abject speech. The question of how they were to get back into the Quadrangle was occupying her mind.
“We’re taking an awful risk,” she observed to Molly, in a low voice. “There is no other way but the window, I suppose.”
“I can’t think of any other way,” answered Molly, “unless we ring the bell over the gate and alarm the entire dormitory.”
“Suppose the night watchman has closed the window? What then?” demanded Nance.
“Why, we’ll just have to find some other way, then,” answered her optimistic friend.
But the window in the Tower Room was wide open, just as they had left it.
The doubting Nance still had another theory.
“Suppose the night watchman has left it open on purpose to catch us when we come back?” she suggested.
“I do wish you would stop hunting up troubles, Nance,” ejaculated Molly irritably. “I never found supposing did any good, anyhow.”
Nance, thus rebuked, said nothing more.
Molly, boosted by the other girls, pulled herself onto the window sill and climbed into the room. She looked about her cautiously. But Nance’s fears were groundless so far. The room was perfectly empty.
“Let down a chair,” whispered Judy.
There were no small chairs about, however, and she was obliged to choose a bench.
“How are we to get it back again?” she asked, after Nance had clambered in, and Judy, halfway through, paused to consider this question.
“Hurry, the watchman,” hissed Nance, on the lookout at the door. “He’s coming down the side corridor.”
The next instant Judy had leaped into the room, and the three girls were tearing along the hall and up the steps, Judy leaving a trail of water behind her. The watchman had seen them. They could hear the beat of his steps on the cement floor as he ran. The fugitives reached the upper corridor just as he arrived at the first landing on the stairs.
“Kick off your pumps, Judy, and pick up your skirts. He’ll trace us by the wet trail if you don’t.”
Another dash and they were in their sitting room, the door locked behind them. Oh, blessed relief!
Judy, in her stocking feet, was holding up her skirts with both hands. Nance had seized one of the slippers and she thought that Molly had the other.
But the final excitement of that eventful night was veiled in mystery.
As they had burst into their sitting room, some one ran swiftly across the room, through the passage into Judy’s room and into the corridor. They dared not follow and run the risk of meeting the night watchman, probably standing at that moment at the end of the corridor trying to trace that path of water, which, thanks be to Nance’s prudence, ended there and was lost on the green strip of carpet.
Below in the Tower Room the windows of the casement flapped back and forth in the wind which was rising steadily, and on the path below stood that telltale bench.
“Anyhow,” said Molly, “there’s only one person who knows we were out to-night and, whoever she is, she can’t tell without giving herself away.”
CHAPTER VIII.
COVERING THEIR TRACKS
When the dressing bell rang next morning, three heavy-eyed and extremely weary young women felt obliged to pull themselves together and appear at the breakfast table. Judy had caught cold, and to disguise this condition had plastered pink powder on her nose, and now held her breath almost to suffocation to avoid coughing in public.
“Have you heard the news?” demanded Jessie, hurrying in late and sitting next to Nance.
“Why, no. What is it?” asked Nance calmly.
Molly felt the color rising in her cheeks, and Judy buried her snuffles in a long letter from her mother.
“There’s the greatest tale going around the Quadrangle! Everybody is talking about it,” continued Jessie. “One of the chambermaids started it, I think, because she told it to me just now.”
“What is it?” asked Edith Williams impatiently.
“Some of the Quadrangle girls were out last night gallivanting. They climbed through the Tower Room window, left a bench outside and the window open. I suppose the watchman frightened them before they could hide all traces.”
“That sounds like a wild freak,” commented Katherine. “What do you suppose they were doing?”
“They might have been doing lots of things,” replied Jessie mysteriously. “The maid said the watchman thought they had been driving or motoring with some Exmoor boys.”
“Whew!” ejaculated a sophomore. “I’m sorry for them if they are found out. I happen to know Prexy’s feelings about escapades like that.”
“Why? Were you ever caught?”
“No, of course not. Don’t you see me sitting here at the table? But my older sister was in the class with a girl who was caught. She was a campus girl.”
“What happened to her?” demanded Judy, forgetting her cold in the interest of the story.
“Bounced,” answered the sophomore briefly.
The Williamses and Jessie looked at Judy with mixed feelings of surprise; not because they noticed her cold or regarded it with any suspicion, but because, when they had parted company with her the night before she had been in the throes of a jealous rage and had spoken most insultingly to her best friend. Their glances shifted to Molly. The two girls were seated side by side. Judy was leaning affectionately against Molly’s shoulder while they looked together at a picture post card sent by Mary Stewart from France.
“All bets are off,” whispered Edith to her sister. “They have made it up. Molly is an angel of forgiveness. We were wrong for once.”
“And Margaret was correct.”
“A pound of Mexican kisses and two pounds of mixed chocolates,” said Margaret in Edith’s other ear. “I’ve won my bet, I hope you’ll take notice.”
“We were just taking notice,” answered Edith.
“But there’s some more of the story,” piped out Jessie again. “Don’t you want to hear the most exciting part?”
“Heavens, yes. Did they catch them?” asked several voices.
“No, no, but one of the girls was wet,” announced Jessie impressively. “She left a trail of water after her all the way up the steps.”
“I should think they could have traced her by that,” said Margaret.
“They could have if she had kept on trailing, but she must have remembered and held up her skirt, for it stopped right there.”
“Wise lady,” put in Katherine.
“She must have been canoeing and not driving, then,” observed Margaret. “Else why the significant fact of wet clothes?”
“Nice night to go canoeing in, cold and dark. Strange notion of pleasure,” remarked Edith.
“Well, there’s more still to come,” announced Jessie, when they had finished commenting on this remarkable escapade.
“For heaven’s sake, Jessie, you’re like a serial story of adventure – a thriller in every chapter. What now?”
“Well,” said Jessie, “you may well prepare for a thriller this time. The watchman found something.”
“What? What?” they cried, and Nance, Judy and Molly joined in the chorus with as much excitement as any of the others.
“He found a slipper.”
Judy made an enormous effort to keep her hand from trembling, as she raised her coffee cup to her dry, feverish lips. Molly, as usual under excitement, changed from white to red and red to white. Nance alone seemed perfectly calm.
“I don’t see how they can prove anything by that,” she observed. “There are probably fifty girls or even a hundred who wear the same size shoes here. Molly is the only girl I know of who wears a peculiar size, six and a half triple A.”
“Well, ‘one thing is certain and the rest is lies,’ as old Omar remarked,” said Margaret, rising from the table, “and that is, all juniors can prove an alibi last night. No junior would ever go gallivanting on the night of the junior play.”
“Hardly,” answered Nance, who had risen to the occasion with fine spirit and tact. Molly’s face resumed its normal color and Judy looked relieved.
“The thing they will have to do,” said Edith, “is to find the other slipper. And if the owner of that slipper takes my advice she’ll drop it down the deepest well in Wellington County.”
Molly and Nance and Judy hurried through breakfast and rushed back to their apartment. They locked all the doors carefully and gathered in Judy’s room.
“We have nearly fifteen minutes before chapel,” said Nance, speaking rapidly. “Judy, are your things dry? Get them quickly. They may search our rooms. Miss Walker is pretty determined once she’s roused, I hear.”
Judy gathered up the stiff, rough-dry garments that had been hanging on the heater all night, while Molly found tossed in a corner the mate to the fatal slipper. Judy held up Viola’s dress of old rose velvet.
“It’s ruined,” she exclaimed, “and that’s another complication. Suppose – ”
“Don’t suppose,” interrupted Molly hastily, snatching the dress away from her. “Hurry, Nance, where shall we put them?”
For a temporary safe hiding place they chose the interior of the upright piano. Then they hastily made their beds, set their dressing tables to rights and dashed off to chapel just as the matron appeared on an ostensible tour of inspection.
It was possible that she was not being very vigilant with the juniors, however, that particular morning, knowing that they were one and all engaged in producing a very important play the night before. At any rate, she only glanced casually around, saw nothing incriminating and departed to the next room.
The president looked grave and worried at chapel, but, contrary to expectations, she had nothing to say after the prayer.
“It’s a bad sign,” observed a student. “When Prexy doesn’t say anything, she means business.”
Except for a few moments at lunch, the three girls did not meet in private consultation again until late in the afternoon. There was a busy sign on their study door. Molly smiled knowingly to herself, and gave the masonic tap.
“It’s a good idea,” she thought, “and will keep out inquisitive people until we decide what to do.”
She found Judy stretched on the sofa, feverish and coughing, while Nance was dosing her with a large dose of quinine and an additional dose of sweet spirits of niter.
“You’re going to kill me, Nance,” Judy was grumbling.
“For heaven’s sake, be quiet,” scolded Nance. “You haven’t any voice to waste. Molly, will you make her a hot lemonade? I think we had better get her to bed and cover her up with all the comforts so as to bring on a perspiration.”
“Only one?” inquired Judy.
“Get up from there and go to bed,” ordered Nance. “The inspection is over and there won’t be any chance of another one to-day. You’ll have to miss supper to-night. We’ll say you have one of your sick headaches.”
Judy obediently got out of her things while Molly flew around making hot lemonade, and Nance hung a blanket over the heater and pulled down their three winter comforts off a shelf in the closet.
Judy meekly allowed herself to be smothered under a mountain of covers, while she drank the lemonade with childish enjoyment.
“You always make good ones, Molly, darling, because you put in enough sugar. I’ll probably be melted into a fountain of perspiration like Undine, only she went away in tears,” she complained presently.
“That’s the object of the treatment,” answered Nance sternly. “Whatever is left of you after the melting process is over is quite well of the cold.”
Molly could have laughed if she had not been thinking of something else very hard.
The two girls sat down on the divan and began a subdued and earnest conversation.
“What are we to do with these things, Molly? We can’t leave them in the piano because the moment some one sits down to play we’ll be discovered.”
“Murderers take up the planks in the floor and hide their bloodstained clothing underneath,” observed Molly. “But we can’t do that, of course.”
They took the bundle from its hiding place and looked over the garments.
“I have an idea,” announced Nance, who had many practical notions on the subject of clothes. “Suppose we take the dress to the cleaner’s in the village and have it steamed.”
“Why can’t we steam it ourselves over the tea kettle?” demanded Molly. “We can and we’ll do it right now and press it on the wrong side. If it hadn’t been so much admired, it wouldn’t matter so very much, but some one’s sure to ask to see it or borrow it or something. How about the underclothes? Can’t we smooth them out with a hot iron before they go to the laundry?”
They set to work at once to heat water and irons, and presently were engaged in restoring the old rose velvet to a semblance of its former beauty.
“What are we going to do about that slipper?” demanded Molly, pausing in her labors.
“I’ve made up my mind to that,” replied Nance. “We must bury it.”
