Chapter I: The First Escapade of the Season

"Girls!" Winnie exclaimed excitedly as we entered our study parlor after recitation, "I am wild with curiosity to know what they are doing in the hospital. All the morning, while I have been trying to study, there has been the greatest thumping and bumping going on in there. I wonder whether they are chaining down an insane patient, or if the ghostly nurses are having a war dance."

"Why didn't you look and see?" Cynthia Vaughn asked, pointing to the transom over a locked door, which formerly opened from our parlor into the hospital ward.

Madame had made abundant provision for sickness in the original arrangement of the school building. A large sky-lighted room had been set apart as an infirmary, and a little suite of rooms in the great tower adjoining as the physician's quarters. But it was rare indeed that any one was ill at Madame's, and when a pupil was taken sick, her parents usually took her home at once. So the doctor, having nothing to do but to hear the recitations in physiology, preferred not to reside in the school building, and the pretty suite of rooms, consisting of a parlor and three bedrooms, was assigned to us, and the hospital proper was used as a trunk room. Winnie always maintained that ghosts of medical students experimented there in the night watches on imaginary cases of vivisection, that corpses were embalmed, and shrieks and howls were to be heard, in the wee small hours, while phantom lights fumed blue on the other side of the transom, and sickly odors of ether and other drugs penetrated through the keyhole. We all laughed at Winnie's phantasms, but there were none of us so brave as to care to visit that room after nightfall. The trunks looked too much like coffins, and there were dresses of Madame's sewed up in bags made of sheets, and suspended from the roof, which had the uncanny look of corpses of people who had hanged themselves.

It was broad daylight now, and we were not at all nervous, and Cynthia remarked scornfully, "Winnie has told us so many of her bug-a-boo stories that she has come to actually believe in them herself. She dare not for her life look through that transom to see what occasions the noise in the hospital."

"You dare me to do it?" Winnie asked, confronting Cynthia with flashing eyes.

"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.

It was strange that Winnie was not hurt, but she was not; and before the astonished artist could quite comprehend what had happened, she had picked herself up, scampered back into our room, and we had closed the door behind her, and were fastening it to the best of our ability by tying the knob to Adelaide's trunk by means of a piece of clothes-line which had formerly served to cord the commissary.

At first we laughed long and merrily over the adventure, but by degrees its serious aspects were appreciated.

In the first place, Milly suggested dolorously that the commissary had fallen into the hands of the enemy, while Cynthia Vaughn drew attention to the fact of the broken lock.

"However you girls will explain that to Madame is more than I know," she remarked maliciously.

"_You_ girls!" Winnie repeated indignantly, "as if you were not as much concerned in it as any of us."

"Indeed," Cynthia exclaimed scornfully, "if I remember rightly, it was Milly who brought the commissary from its retirement, Tib who balanced it so judiciously, and Winnie who dawned so unceremoniously on that strange man in the other room. I had absolutely nothing to do with the affair."

"You were the instigator of it all," I retorted hotly. "If you had not dared Winnie to do it she would never have tried to look in."

"That is like you, Tib," Cynthia replied icily, "to get into a scrape and then lay the blame on some one else."

"I take all the blame," Winnie exclaimed loftily. "If inquisition is ever made into this affair, I and I alone am responsible," and then she uttered a little shriek and scampered into her own bedroom, for some one was knocking at the door, which we had just attempted to fasten.

"Who is there?" I asked, with as much boldness as I could muster; "and what do you want?"

"I am Carrington Waite, the new Professor of Art, and I would like to return property which has been most unexpectedly introduced into my studio, unless it is possible that the articles to which I refer were intended as a donation."

We all laughed at this sally, and made haste to unfasten the door, whereupon Professor Waite handed in the commissary. He had a pleasant face, and there was a merry twinkle in his eye as he said: "I tried to bundle everything in, but the trunk collided with my box of colors, and you may find rose madder in your jam, while the pickle jar actually seemed to explode, and showered pickles all over the studio. I have no doubt I shall find them along the cornice when I hang the pictures on that side of the room. The doughnuts, too, flew in every direction. Some rolled under the cabinets, and a mince pie applied itself like a plaster to the back of my neck. A bottle of tomato catsup was emptied on one of my canvases, and made a fine impressionistic study of a sunset. I am afraid I stepped on the cheese, but I believe everything else is all right."

He looked about him with interest, and asked, "Where is the heroine who performed this astonishing acrobatic feat? I trust she was not hurt. It must have been a thrilling experience. Is it a customary form of exercise with you young ladies?"

We did not deign to reply to these questions, but I opened the commissary and offered the artist some of our choicest dainties. He accepted our largess, and retired with polite invitations for us to be "neighborly" and "to call again."

"Not in just that way," I replied, and I entreated him, if possible, to repair the broken lock. He examined it carefully.

"I am afraid," he said, "that it will require a locksmith to do it thoroughly, but I can make it look all right, and you can screw a little bolt on your side which will fasten the door securely."

We thanked him and he was about to close the door, when Adelaide, who was the only one of our circle who had not had a part in the escapade, entered the room hastily from the corridor. "O girls," she exclaimed--but stopped suddenly as she caught sight of the open door and the young artist. At first her face showed only blank surprise, then, as she told herself that this must be a joke of Winnie's, who was fond of masquerading in costume, she remarked with dignity.

"Really, this is quite too childish; where did you ever get that absurd costume? You look too ridiculous for anything----"

Cynthia Vaughn shrieked with laughter.

The artist bowed, but colored to the roots of his hair and closed the door, while Milly threw her arms around Adelaide, laughing hysterically, Winnie appeared from behind her door also laughing, and I vainly attempted to explain matters.

"What a mortifying situation," Adelaide remarked, when she finally understood the case. "I must apologize for my rudeness, and I am sure I would rather put my hand in boiling water than speak to that man."

"I am sure I only wish that I may never see him again," said Winnie. "Nothing in this world could induce me to join the painting class, and if there is one thing that I am profoundly grateful for, it is that I have no talent for art."