Chapter X: Lost!--The Cup!

Betty was wrought up to a fever of energy.

She and Gerry were gardening; but for once the gardens seemed tame. With the idea at the back of her mind of the tracking expedition to take place in less than a week’s time, the Mascot felt anxious to be up and doing instantly. Gerry had come out for half an hour’s gardening, but Betty was firmly of opinion that the said half-hour could be put to a better use.

“Gerry, do you think we could practise steps in that sandy place--like you said last night?”

“Now?” Gerry looked up from a serious investigation of some small Shirley poppy seedlings. “Oh, I don’t know. We could do that later, perhaps. But Nancy was saying to Eve at breakfast that she had seen three slugs in the pink clump. And these poppies are next door to the pinks. Slugs are awful if they start eating up seedlings, and these poppies are so lovely when they’re out.” Gerry returned to her work.

“But--” Betty strove hard to be patient as she explained--“I do so badly want to practise. Not being allowed to read the blue book yet, you see, I’m not sure, till you explain, exactly how to start.”

“All right, then,” returned Gerry. “We’ll put in ten minutes at the end of my gardening time. But not any more, I’m afraid. You see, there’s the Cup. We don’t want to lose it.”

“Lose the Cup!” cried Betty indignantly. “As though I wasn’t just as awfully anxious as anybody.” For Gerry’s speech seemed to her singularly inopportune. Her request had been uttered just because she felt so tremendously keen, so she told herself, not to shame the Daisies by her ignorance. To please Sybil, and not to disgrace her patrol, she must--even if she were only a raw recruit--have a few ideas in her mind as to how to track and spoor before next Saturday came round.

“Well.” Gerry sat down on her heels and looked at her. “I didn’t mean anything horrid. I meant that we might lose it, you see, if----”

“If what?” asked Betty.

“It’s only ours till Midsummer Day,” said Gerry slowly, growing a little pink. “Then we might easily lose it if--” She spoke rather soberly, but on seeing the perturbed expression on her friend’s face she broke off. “Let’s start the spooring practice now, then,” she said; “and then you can go on practising by yourself, and I’ll come back and do gardening afterwards.” She rose to her feet.

“I’d rather--rather anything happened,” said Betty vigorously, joining her friend as they walked down the grassy slope between the gardens, “than that we should lose the Cup. So why----”

Gerry tried to explain why. “We’ve tried to be the best patrol all this year, and we _are_ likely to keep it,” she said, “unless something dreadful happens. We all know that, and the other patrols know it too. We’re top in badges, you see; and we got top marks at the display last term. And those things count. Miss Carey gives the decision, of course, at the end, though. And even if we _had_ got best marks, and best badges, and best reports, yet we shouldn’t deserve it--at least I’m sure Miss Carey would say so, and it would be true--if----”

“If what?” said Betty for the third time.

“Well, I’m trying to say it. If just because we were near it we got slack about little things like slugs,” finished up Gerry thankfully. “There, that’s what I mean. They’re big things, really, even though they’re little; because they’d mean that we _were_ slack. So----”

Betty nodded. She did see. “Let’s go back and garden, then, instead of tracking,” suggested she resignedly.

“No, I don’t believe Sybil would tell us to. Not a bit. Of course you want to know about spooring. It’s only that it’s sort of fussy and not Benedicky to race off to something else when you’ve got started on a job.” Gerry was rather red as she spoke. “Here’s the sandy patch,” she added with relief, “behind these bushes. A bird’s been walking on it already. See?--the mark of his claws, I mean. Well, we’ll practise our own now, and then you will see the difference.”

The occupation began.

But all the time Gerry was coaching her in the earliest rudiments of spooring, Betty’s face wore an exceptionally solemn look. Her friend had been more “Guidy” than herself, as she expressed it. She was still “helter-skelter,” as Sybil had called her on the first night, and though she was beginning to grasp the true meaning underlying the school motto, and to come under the influence of the quiet, steady atmosphere of St. Benedick’s, yet, in her well-meaning anxiety to be up and doing, Betty seemed sometimes to frustrate her own efforts after all.

It had been like that at home sometimes. She had not yet forgotten the results of a certain day’s zeal, when she had raced busily into her father’s patients’ waiting-room to pacify the screaming baby of a poor woman patient, and had thus brought the germ of scarlet fever upon herself and even upon the luckless twins. Dad had spoken no word of blame; but Ann, the general servant, who had had so many extra duties thrust upon her by the results of Betty’s act of energy, had had her say. Also, as Betty knew, it was “the scarlet fever” which had caused Dad’s appeal to Auntie, who was governessing in India, to come home and help them. There had been other well-meant actions, too, which had come to naught.

Here at school, of course, the whole scheme of things had been so utterly new to Betty until recently that her energies had remained under control. But she _had_ trespassed into Witch’s Wood unthinkingly; and to-day Eve _had_ informed her that her efforts in the gardening direction were too vigorous and forceful, and must be confined within certain limits laid down by the senior Guides. Also, to-day, Gerry had told her not to fuss.

“I tell you what,” continued Gerry, suddenly breaking in on her thoughts--“you know quite enough now to go on alone. Practise running and then walking, and compare the marks you leave. And then think out other things to do for yourself. I’m going back to those slugs now; you don’t mind, do you?”

“No,” said Betty thoughtfully. “And I’ll come back presently myself and do slugs too.”

But when at last, after an interval of about half an hour, Betty did return, it was to find that Gerry’s gardening time was over and her friend gone. The slugs, too, seemed gone, owing to Gerry’s careful search, and Betty, being now restricted by Eve in her activities, found herself with time on her hands and to spare.

“I’d rather do anything than lose the Cup on Midsummer Day,” she said half-aloud, leaning over the fence.

The mere thought of the Cup caused an expedition to look at it through the window of the Oak Room, where, on the first day of term, she had first caught sight of it. She had peeped at it nearly every day since then during prayers in the morning. She had been entrusted with the rubbing-up of the trophy, too, under Sybil’s direction, every Saturday when the older Guides were at definite Guide work, and the rubbing-up of the Cup was perhaps the most cherished of the Mascot’s jobs. As she peered through the Oak Room window a sudden idea struck her.

“I’ll clean it now,” declared Betty. “On Saturday we’ll be tracking at Guide time, and it won’t get done. I saw Sybil look up at it to-day after roll-call as though she was wondering if it looked quite shiny enough. Well, it _shall_ be. I know where the chamois is, and I can do it out here. I cleaned it in the garden last week at Guiding time while the rest were doing First Aid bandaging.”

It seemed a splendid way of using up time and superfluous energy, for the garden seemed in no need of mothering, and Betty’s whole heart was centred just then in the Cup itself. She sat there, lost to the world of everything, on the strip of grass between the gardens, polishing away.

“Sybil said I did it pretty well last time. Well, I’ll do it better now,” remarked she. “I’d not lose you for anything!” She gave it a little motherly pat. “Oh, to _think_ that it only belongs to the Daisies till Midsummer Day, and that then, perhaps, we’ll lose it!” She gave a sigh and surveyed her work from a distance.

“I’ll put you back before the sun takes the glitter off you,” remarked Betty, as though addressing one of the twins. Then she broke off and rose hastily to her feet as, from the house, sounding musically peremptory, came the note of the dinner-gong. Certainly the time was no longer her own.

“_Oh!_” cried Betty in dismay. “Suppose I lose the patrol a mark!”

It took her but a moment, however, to place back the Cup through the open window on the little ledge where its place was. Another moment brought her flying into the school door, and a third brought her, panting and still wiping powder from her hands, to join the end of the line of girls. Only, however, to be sent straight back by Stella--one of the prefects--to finish her toilet below.

“Betty Carlyle, your skirt is covered with some sort of powder. Go back, please, and tidy yourself before you go into the dining-room.”

It was a very flustered Betty who took her seat five minutes later at the window table; and a quick look of surprise from the head of her patrol as she had passed the round table in the middle of the room where the prefects sat seemed the last straw. “And I was only trying--” thought Betty unhappily.

“You’ve lost us a mark; you’ve lost us a mark. At least, if mascots count, you have,” remarked Rene at her side.

Mona’s eyes from the other side of the table seemed to emphasize the statement.

“If mascots counted!” Betty’s cup felt as full as it could hold. She turned to Gerry. But even Gerry had lost her dimples. “I say,” she said in horror, “didn’t you hear first bell? It’s the very first dining-room mark in the patrol, you know.”

“Oh, I almost hope that mascots _don’t_ count!” said Betty, almost in tears.

Mutton and potatoes tasted like nothing on earth; so did the pudding. And hasten slowly time spent under the trees had lost all its charm that afternoon. Instead of sending her thoughts inquiringly over the cottage in the wood, or remembering the fairy piper, or working up stories to tell to the twins next holiday, Betty felt hot at the back of her eyes, and a regular lump of misery at the back of her throat. She had been too helter-skelter again; and just when she’d been so keen to help. She hadn’t “hastened slowly”; she had “snatched” after helping, and so the helping hadn’t been worth anything. And to be the very first one to bring a dining-room mark to the patrol! What would Sybil think of her?--the look in Sybil’s eyes had shamed her badly enough. And she was to have brought the patrol luck! And now-- Betty’s thoughts raced miserably on through the whole long hour.

It was at the end of the hour that the terrible thing happened. Unexpectedly. To the surprise of the juniors still resting under the shade of one of the old trees, it was Sybil herself who left the school doors and crossed the grass to summon them. When she reached the place, although there had been no hurry in her step, and although her tone as she spoke was quiet and unflurried, there was an anxious look in her blue eyes.

“Time,” she said slowly. Then, standing still on the grass facing the group under the trees, she spoke again. “I want to ask you all something,” said Sybil, “before you get up. Has any one of you touched the Guide Cup? It is missing from its stand in the Oak Hall.”