The Leader of the Lower School/Chapter 7
CHAPTER VII
Gipsy takes her Fling
When he novelty of her introduction to Briarcroft had somewhat faded, and the excitement of the Lower School mutiny had subsided, Gipsy began to find the life more than a trifle dull. She had an adventurous temperament, and her roving life had given her a taste for constant change and variety, so the prim regime of the English boarding school seemed to her monotonous in the extreme. She chafed against the confinement and the regularity of the well-ordered arrangements.
"I feel as if I were shut up in a box!" she declared. "How can you all go on every day so contentedly with this 'prunes and prism' business? When I was at school up-country in Australia the mistress used to notice when we got restless, and take us for a day's camp into the bush. The day girls would bring horses for us boarders to use (everybody rides out there), and off we'd go, each with our picnic basket on our saddle, and have the very jolliest good time you could imagine. It worked off our spirits, and we'd come back to lessons as fresh as daisies and as meek as lambs."
"You get hockey here," objected Dilys, who generally stood up for Briarcroft institutions.
"Not enough of it," sighed Gipsy. "I like hockey, but it's nothing to a day's riding."
"Did your headmistress ride too?" enquired Lennie.
"Rather! Miss Yorke was Colonial born, and could have sat a kangaroo, I should think! She was a different article from Poppie, I assure you."
"Can't imagine Poppie controlling a fiery steed," giggled the girls.
"I should like to see you on horseback, Gipsy," said Hetty.
"I'd be only too glad to accommodate you, my dear, if you'd provide the gee-gee. I can tell you I'm just yearning for a canter."
"Nothing but a clothes horse here," remarked Dilys facetiously.
"Or the colt in the meadow beyond the hockey field," said Lennie.
"The colt! Of course I'd forgotten the colt!" exclaimed Gipsy rapturously.
"You'd never sit that wild thing! You'd have to ride him bareback. Even your wonderful cleverness can't do everything, I suppose!" said Gladys sarcastically.
"I can ride bareback," returned Gipsy. "It's nearly as easy as with a saddle."
"I'd like to see you catch him first."
"That's perfectly possible—he wears a halter. Do you dare me to do it? How many chocolates will you give me if I do?"
"A dozen, and a whole boxful if you ride him round the field."
"Then I'll show you a little prairie practice this afternoon. I haven't lived in the Colonies for nothing!"
"Don't, Gipsy, don't! It's too dangerous!" besought Hetty and Lennie.
"She won't really—it's all brag!" sneered Gladys.
"Is it indeed, Miss Gladys Merriman? Just wait till this afternoon, and I'll undeceive you."
"I'll wait to buy the box of chocolates, though," sniggered Gladys.
None of the girls really believed that Gipsy was in earnest, yet they sallied forth to the hockey field that afternoon with a certain amused anticipation. The news had been spread abroad in the Lower School, so the Juniors had assembled ten minutes in advance of their ordinary time on the chance of witnessing what Hetty called "the circus-riding". The hockey ground was divided from the meadow by a strong wooden paling, on the farther side of which the colt, a shaggy, ungroomed, raw-boned specimen of horse-flesh, was feeding.
"It is as frisky as—well, as a colt!" said Mary Parsons. "You'd better not try to catch that creature, Gipsy."
"It'll pretty soon kick her off if she does!" said Alice O'Connor. "Well, Gipsy? Going to turn tail at the last minute? You'd best give in!"
"Rather not!" returned Gipsy. "When I'm dared to do a thing, I do it—or have a good try, at any rate. If I'm not galloping round the field in ten minutes, you may count me done. Hetty, you keep time!" And without stopping to listen to any more remonstrances, she climbed over the palings.
She had brought some bread with her, and she walked very gently towards the colt, holding out her bait, and making a series of chirruping sounds calculated to win its confidence. The rough little creature paused in its task of tearing the grass, and eyed her doubtfully. It had been petted, however, by the boys at the farm to which it belonged (a fact of which Gipsy was well aware when she accepted Gladys's challenge), and had a marked partiality for such dainties as bread, sugar, and carrots. Though Gipsy was a stranger, it evidently considered she was familiar with horse language, and encouraged by her chirrups it advanced cautiously, rolling its eyes a little, and sniffing suspiciously. Gipsy stood still, and without moving a muscle let it come quite near and inspect her. She held the bread on the palm of her left hand; her right hand was ready for action when necessary.
The row of girls leaning over the palings watched in dead silence. Summoning up its courage, the colt stretched out its nose to take the tempting bread. Gipsy let it get the coveted morsel well within its lips, then seized the halter with her left hand and the long chestnut mane with her right, and with a sudden agile bound and scramble flung herself across its back. It was so quickly and neatly done that the bystanders held their breath with admiration. Gipsy's horsemanship was evidently no idle boast, if she could perform so difficult a feat of gymnastics with such comparative ease. Meantime the colt, astonished and enraged at finding a burden on its back, was trying buck-jumping, and Gipsy had to cling to mane and halter to keep her seat. At this critical moment the Seniors and the mistresses arrived on the scene. Miss Poppleton's amazement and horror at finding one of her pupils mounted on the back of an unbroken colt were almost too great for words.
"Stop her! Stop her!" she gasped wildly. "Oh, for pity's sake, somebody stop her!"
But as it was certainly in nobody's power to stop her, Gipsy had to take the consequences of her own foolhardy act. The colt, after an amount of kicking and plunging, stood for an instant stockstill, then, rolling its eyes, set off at a furious gallop round the meadow. That Gipsy managed to stick on to its back even she herself afterwards confessed was almost a miracle, but she kept her seat somehow. Up and down the field fled her steed in furious career, till, tired of galloping, it changed its tactics and stood still and kicked, when Gipsy seized the opportunity of sliding to the ground. She just escaped its hoofs as, relieved of her weight, it scampered off to the farthest limit of the boundary fence. Very dishevelled and rather bruised and shaky, she picked herself up from the muddy spot where she had fallen, and limped back to the palings. The girls cheered. They couldn't help themselves, even though Miss Poppleton was present.
"She's as good as a cowboy!" exclaimed Lennie.
"Or a circus rider!" added Hetty proudly.
"Well done, Gipsy!"
"Bravo!"
Miss Poppleton, however, did not share the popular enthusiasm, and received her adventurous pupil with a scolding instead of congratulations.
"You ought to be ashamed of yourself, Gipsy Latimer," she said sternly. "It's a mercy you were not killed. Understand once for all that I forbid such mad proceedings. If you have hurt your leg you had better go indoors. The sooner you learn that these are not Briarcroft ways, the better. This is a school for young ladies, not young hoydens!"
Slightly abashed, Gipsy beat a retreat to the house, where Miss Edith, who had been an agitated spectator from the linen-room window, bathed the wounded leg, put arnica on the bruises, and comforted the sufferer, while she proffered good advice.
"It was very naughty of you, you know, Gipsy dear!" she said in her kind-hearted, deprecating manner. "I don't know anything about riding, but it looked most dangerous, and of course, if Miss Poppleton said it was wrong, it was wrong. My sister is always right. Please remember that. Why, child, you're all trembling! I'll make you a cup of Bovril, and you must lie down on your bed for an hour. And promise me faithfully you'll never do such a foolish, silly, mad thing again! We want to hand you over to your father in good health when he comes to fetch you, and he'd blame us if you were hurt."
"He knows me only too well," twinkled Gipsy. "But there—I'll promise anything you like, dear Miss Edith! Yes, the bruises feel better now, and the Bovril would be delicious. And you're a darling! Let me give you one hug, and I'll lie down like a monument of patience, though I don't feel the least scrap ill."
While the Seniors, with whom Gipsy was out of favour, viewed her escapade with lofty contempt as a madcap proceeding, the Juniors regarded her as an even greater heroine than before. Gladys Merriman redeemed her promise, and brought the box of chocolates she had offered, and Gipsy with strictest impartiality handed them round the Form till they were finished.
Gipsy had certainly established her record for horse-breaking, and though, according to Miss Poppleton, it was scarcely a lady-like accomplishment, there was hardly anyone in the Lower School who did not admire her prowess.
"You're like the girl in the cinematograph who tracks the villain to his mountain retreat, or finds the hero, bound with cords, lying in the brushwood, and then rides off post-haste to inform the sheriff. She always catches a wild-looking horse, and gallops full speed!" laughed Dilys.
"I wish we'd a cinema camera!" sighed Hetty. "We might have taken some gorgeous records this afternoon for the Photographic Society. No one even got a snapshot."
"Your own faults, not mine! You should have brought your cameras!" returned Gipsy.
"We never thought you'd really do it."
"Is that so? Well, when I allow to do any special thing, I guess I admire to see it through!"
"Oh, you Yankee!" roared the others.
Though the girls laughed at her Americanisms and Colonial ways, and often teased her about them, Gipsy continued as great a favourite as ever, she took all the banter so good-temperedly, and returned it so smartly. There was always a delightful uncertainty also as to what she would do next, and the prospect of an exciting interlude by "Yankee Doodle", as she was nicknamed, was felt decidedly to relieve the monotony of the ordinary Briarcroft atmosphere. Not that Gipsy really ever meant to behave badly; but, accustomed as she was to the free-and-easy conduct of her up-country Colonial schools, she found it almost impossible to realize that what would have been tolerated there with a smile was in her new surroundings counted a heinous crime. The silence rules and the orderly march in step from classroom to lecture hall filled her with dismay. She appeared to expect to be allowed to tear about the passages, talking at top speed, even in school hours, and many were the admonitions she incurred from indignant monitresses.
"A fine model you are for the Lower School!" said Doreen Tristram sarcastically one day. "Can't even walk decently in line, and prance about for all the world like a monkey tied to a barrel piano!"
Doreen had taken the defection of the Juniors much to heart, and could not forgive the leader of the opposition.
"Thanks! I wasn't aware my movements were so original!" retorted Gipsy. "There's method in my madness this time, though. I was trying to dodge Miss White, and dash upstairs to get my Hamlet. I've forgotten the wretched thing, and if I go to class without a book, Poppie—h'm! I mean Miss Poppleton" (as Doreen's eyebrows went up)—"will want to know the reason why."
"I expect she will," returned Doreen dryly. "And serve you right too, for forgetting! No, I shall not allow you to go and fetch it. I'm here to keep order, not to help you out of scrapes."
The Upper Fourth, under Doreen's superintendence, had just filed from its own classroom to attend a Shakespeare lecture by the Principal. The girls were a few minutes early, and in consequence were drawn up like a small regiment in the corridor to wait until a previous class was over and they could enter the lecture hall. Waiting is often dull work, and Gipsy had considered herself a public benefactor in seeking to enliven the tedium of her form mates. Doreen's notions on the subject of discipline did not appeal to her.
"But I can't go to the Shakespeare lesson without my Hamlet," she remonstrated. "Suppose I'm asked to read?"
"You should have thought of that before!" snapped Doreen. "Be quiet, Gipsy Latimer; if you speak another word I shall report you!"
Gipsy refrained from further unavailing speech, but her active brain was by no means silenced. I do not think anybody but herself would have dreamed of doing what followed. The outer door of the corridor was standing open, and when the monitress's back was for the moment turned, Gipsy slipped out into the playground. On the opposite side of the quadrangle stood the open window of her classroom, ten feet or so above the ground. The wall of that part of the house was thickly covered with ivy, and in less time than it takes to tell it she was scrambling up with as much agility as the monkey to which Doreen had unfeelingly compared her. A few girls who happened to be standing near the door and witnessed her achievement gasped audibly, but I verily believe Gipsy would have been back before she was missed, had not Maude Helm officiously chirped out:
"Oh, I say! Look at Yankee Doodle!"
Naturally the monitress did look, and fled into the courtyard in pursuit of the runaway. Her outraged face, upturned from below, greeted Gipsy as that irrepressible damsel reappeared at the window waving her Hamlet in triumph.
"Gipsy Latimer, go back down the stairs!" commanded Doreen.
"No, thanks! It's shorter this way, and saves time," returned Gipsy, dropping her book first, then swinging herself out of the window. She came down the ivy quite easily, picked up her Hamlet, smoothed its cover, which had suffered in the fall, and flitted back to her place in the corridor, just as the lecture room door opened to let out the Third Form and admit the Upper Fourth. Doreen followed grimly.
"You needn't think you're going to play these tricks with impunity," she said. "You'll report yourself to-morrow at the monitresses' meeting at four o'clock. We'll see what the head of the school has to say to you!"
"Delighted, I'm sure! I've got my Hamlet, anyhow," chuckled naughty Gipsy, as she disappeared into the lecture hall.
On this occasion I am afraid she was not altogether innocent of cause of offence, and had taken a distinct pleasure in defying Doreen. Perhaps she thought, on maturer consideration, that she had gone a trifle too far, for she turned up at the monitresses' meeting with a countenance sobered down to the requirements of so solemn a convocation.
"Gipsy Latimer, you are here to report yourself for insubordination," began Helen Roper with dignity. "Do you realize that monitresses are officers in this school, and that their authority is only second to that of the mistresses?"
Gipsy took a clean handkerchief from her pocket, and, unfolding it ostentatiously, blinked hard.
"I realize it now," she answered, with a something in her voice that might have been either laughter or tears; "I'm afraid I was very ignorant before."
Helen glared at her suspiciously. Was that a twinkle in the dark eyes? But no; Gipsy was looking grave in the extreme.
"The monitresses must be obeyed," continued the head of the school. "Every girl at Briarcroft knows that, and anyone who deliberately disobeys incurs the penalty of being reported to Miss Poppleton."
The corners of Gipsy's mouth were drooping; her face had assumed an expression of abject penitence.
"Please don't do that to me!" she pleaded humbly. "Remember how badly I've been brought up! If I'd been at Briarcroft all the time, instead of other schools, and had had the advantage of the monitresses, I might have been different."
"I expect you would," said Helen freezingly. "And you'll please to remember that now you're here, you'll have to conform to our standards."
"I know I'm a heathen. I'll be only too grateful to be taught better," murmured the subdued voice that was so strangely unlike Gipsy's usual sprightly tones.
Lena Morris turned away to hide a smile. She was possessed of a strong sense of humour, and moreover had a sneaking liking for Gipsy.
"Mind you do as you're told next time, then," commanded Helen. "I'll excuse you this once, but if it happens again, I warn you that I shall send you straight to Miss Poppleton. You may think yourself very lucky to be let off so easily. You can go now."
Gipsy's big brown eyes looked like two wells absolutely overflowing with gratitude and humility.
"Thanks so very immensely much! It's far more than I deserve!" she sighed, and, flaunting the clean handkerchief, beat a hasty retreat.
The monitresses would have been edified if they could have seen the war dance she executed in the passage as soon as the door was shut.
"Couldn't have kept my face a moment longer!" she choked to one or two friends who were waiting for her. "Oh, you should have seen me as the penitent! I think I did the thing rather neatly."
"You mad hatter! I wonder Helen didn't see you were shamming," said Hetty.
"No, no! She's been improving my mind and showing me the path I ought to walk in. How would you like me if I turned out a first-class prig?"
"It couldn't be done. Come along, you wild gipsy thing! Do you want the monitresses to come out and catch you? You'll get into a really big scrape some day if you're not careful."
"Some people are born wise and proper, and some are born otherwise. I'm one of the otherwise! It's my misfortune, not my fault," laughed Gipsy, as Lennie and Hetty dragged her forcibly away.
Gipsy's wild spirits were undoubtedly liable to lead her beyond the bounds of propriety, and both mistresses and monitresses were inclined, justly or unjustly, to suspect that she was at the bottom of any mischief that cropped up in the school. One incident, though shrouded in mystery, was generally laid by Miss Poppleton as a sin to her charge. In the upper corridor, not very far from Gipsy's dormitory, hung a long chain which sounded a fire bell. The boarders at Briarcroft were instructed in fire drill, though a night summons was generally only given in summertime, as Miss Poppleton was afraid of the girls catching cold. Gipsy had read the printed card of "Directions in case of Fire", and had examined the chute with intense interest.
"I'd just love to go sliding down it out of our bedroom window," she exclaimed. "It would be almost as much fun as toboganning."
"Rather freezing work on these sharp nights. There was ice on the puddles this morning," said Dilys. "No fire-drill practice for me, thank you! I prefer to stop snug in bed."
"You've no spirit of adventure in you," returned Gipsy.
"I've got sound common sense instead, and that's what you don't possess, Yankee Doodle!"
"All the same, that summons is going to come off, by hook or by crook!" said Gipsy to herself. "It would be a kindness to the school to give it a chance to see whether it's prepared for emergencies. Gipsy Latimer, I guess you'll have to be the philanthropist! But you've no need to flaunt your noble deed. 'Do good by stealth, and blush to find it fame', in fact."
If Gipsy, before she went to bed that night, contrived to tie a long piece of string to the bell chain in the passage, and to secure the other end to her bedpost, she did not blazon the fact abroad, and the string was so neatly laid against the edges of skirting board and under mats that nobody happened to notice it. At 3 a.m., when the whole of Briarcroft was wrapped in deepest slumbers, there suddenly came the great clang-clang of the fire bell, resounding and echoing through the quiet house. Everybody woke in a hurry, and the head of each dormitory at once switched on the electric light and assumed command. The well-trained girls dipped their towels in water and put them over their mouths, threw the red blankets from their beds round their shoulders, and lined up along the corridor. Miss Lindsay was already there, and gave the command to march, and away trooped the boarders downstairs and out of the front door on to the lawn, where they ranged themselves to be counted. The light streaming through the front door revealed a strange sight—all the girls in night gear, with their scarlet blankets trailing on the ground. The juveniles were clasping dolls and other treasures, and some of the others had caught up big sponges in their confusion. The whole exit had only taken about a hundred seconds from the sounding of the bell, and if Gipsy was last, and clutched a roll of string in her hand, nobody remarked the circumstance.
There followed a hurried enquiry among the mistresses as to the whereabouts of the fire, and the discovery that no fire existed. Miss Poppleton hastily gave the order to return, and the boarders trooped back shivering to the dormitories, not a little disconcerted to have been disturbed for nothing on a chilly night in November. The Principal made every enquiry next day as to the source of the alarm, but she could discover nothing. Dilys Fenton was able to assure her that when she had switched on the light in No. 3 Dormitory Gipsy Latimer had been asleep, and she had been obliged to shake her violently to awaken her, so it was quite impossible that Gipsy could be responsible for the practical joke. The occurrence made a great excitement among the boarders. For days they talked of scarcely anything else.
"It was over too soon, and they didn't use the chute after all," said Gipsy disconsolately.
"Gipsy! you never—you couldn't— Oh, surely!"
But Gipsy's brown eyes looked such absolute mirrors of innocence that even Hetty's suspicions were laid to rest.