The Jolliest Term on Record Part 15

"It will be time enough to cheer if we win the tournament," she reminded them. "Remember that other schools are competing, whose play may be better than ours."

"Which is a polite way of saying, 'Don't crow till you're out of the wood!'" laughed Dorrie to Diana. "All the same, I'd back Katrine against anyone I know!"

Carford College was a big day-school, situated about a mile out of the town. The Aireyholme contingent was received by the head mistress, and at once handed on to stewards, who took Katrine and Hilda to the champions' tent, and the rest to the seats which had been reserved for them. The College prided itself on its Games activities; its courts were in excellent condition, and there was every facility for the comfort of spectators. Six other schools besides Aireyholme had been invited to compete, and bring twelve representatives each to witness the combat, so that, with the pupils of the College, there was a crowd of more than two hundred to watch the trial of skill.

Katrine and Hilda, inside the tent, were having a good time. They were regaled with lemonade, and introduced to the other champions. It was interesting to compare notes on sports and schools; if any of the strangers were inclined to be shy, the ice was soon broken, and all were chatting like old friends by the time the tournament began. The College Games Captain, a particularly jolly girl, made an admirable hostess, and put all her guests at their ease; she had herself been entertained in similar circ.u.mstances, so she had experience to guide her. As the train service from Heathwell to Carford was not very convenient, the Aireyholme party had come early; two of the other schools were in like case, and the rest turned up by degrees.

At last all the compet.i.tors had arrived, and the drawing took place.

Aireyholme was not in the first set, rather to Katrine's relief.

"I hate to have to begin," she remarked to Hilda. "It's much more helpful if one can watch other people's play for a while."

The compet.i.tors who opened the tournament were fairly evenly matched.

Oakfield House perhaps excelled in serving, but Summerlea possessed a champion who seemed able to take every ball, in whatsoever awkward spot it alighted; she was a short, freckled, ungainly girl (Katrine had mentally noted her plainness when they met in the tent), but her spread-eagle method of play was highly successful, and her side scored heavily.

"We shall have our work cut out for us if we're put against her,"

grunted Hilda. "Oakfield didn't do badly either, in the beginning, but they couldn't stand against this Doris What's-her-name!"

Pinecroft versus Arden Grange came next on the list, resulting in a narrow victory for the former.

Carford College had an exciting tussle with Windleness. Everybody, except of course the Windleness girls, wanted the College to win. It was felt that it would be too bad if the hostesses of the occasion were out of the finals. By almost superhuman effort Carford managed to score, but Windleness was accorded full honours of war by the spectators.

At last it was the turn of Katrine and Hilda. Aireyholme had been drawn to play Ashley Hall, a school, so it was rumoured, with a reputation.

"I'm horribly nervous! I know we'll never beat them!" whispered Hilda, with scarlet cheeks.

"Now don't work yourself up into a state! For goodness' sake, keep cool!" Katrine besought her. "If you let yourself worry, you'll play badly. Our salvation is to keep our heads. If you get excited, you're done for. Brace up, can't you!"

"I'll do my best," murmured Hilda, setting her teeth.

The Aireyholme girls had sometimes been inclined to sneer at Katrine's calm, imperturbable composure, but to-day it stood the school in good stead. In tournaments the level-headed, cool, self-controlled compet.i.tor generally has an advantage over an excitable, impulsive or nervous rival. The Ashley Hall champions were splendid players, but they were more brilliant than steady; one or two little things put them out; they lost their nerve and made a few bad strokes. Katrine, on the contrary, kept absolute self-possession; she calculated b.a.l.l.s to a nicety, and it was chiefly owing to her all-round preparedness that the set was won.

She and Hilda retired with sighs of relief.

"The foe was worthy of their steel--or rather, rackets," said Gwethyn to Rose Randall. "I'm glad I wasn't chosen champion; I never can keep cool like Kattie. She's always the same--never the least excited, while I'm gyrating all over the place like a lunatic!"

There was now a midday interval for lunch, and the crowd dispersed. Most of the College girls went home for their meal, but the visitors from the other schools were entertained in the big hall with coffee, plates of ham or tongue, buns, and fruit. At half-past one the finals were to begin. It was not desirable to waste too much time, as several of the schools must catch certain return trains.

"You played splendidly, Katrine, and Hilda backed you up no end!"

declared the Aireyholme girls, anxious to congratulate their champions.

"Go on in that style, and you'll do."

"Don't expect too much. The College will probably win a love set when we play them," returned Katrine. "You'd better be bracing your nerves."

"Oh, we're sporting enough to take our luck as it comes, but we pin our faith to you this afternoon!"

If the first sets had been exciting, the finals were doubly so.

Summerlea, after a Homeric contest, vanquished Pinecroft, and was placed against Aireyholme. Katrine had antic.i.p.ated a tussle with Doris Kendrick, their spread-eagle champion, and she had calculated correctly.

Doris's play was magnificent, and Aireyholme only won by the skin of its teeth.

"We must tackle Carford too," whispered Katrine to Hilda. "Don't give in now."

The excitement among the spectators was intense. General sympathy was, perhaps, on the side of the College, but everyone admired Aireyholme's plucky play.

"Katrine is A1!" commented Rose. "Just look at that stroke! I never thought she'd take that ball! Forty-thirty. I believe we'll do it yet.

Well done, Hilda! Good old girl! Keep it up! Keep it up! Oh! I say, it's ours! What a frolicsome joke!"

The College girls were disappointed at the failure of their champions, but they were magnanimous enough to start the cheer for Aireyholme.

Katrine and Hilda were called up by the Princ.i.p.al to receive their prizes--two pretty bangles--and congratulations poured in from all sides. There was not time for much more than to express their thanks, for Miss Andrews was consulting her watch, and announcing that they must rush to the station if they wished to catch their train; so with hasty good-byes to their hostesses they made their exit. Their arrival at Aireyholme was a scene of triumph. Mrs. Franklin was immensely gratified at the good news, and the girls cheered till they were hoa.r.s.e.

"We'll put it down in the school minutes under the heading of 'Victories'," purred Dorrie. "I'd have given up the matric. to be there.

Anybody taken snapshots? You, Rose? Good! We'll develop them to-night, and if they come out decently, we'll paste them in the school alb.u.m. I never thought we should really beat Carford College. It breaks the record. This is a ripping term for Aireyholme!"

"Kattie's scored in more senses than one to-day," whispered Gwethyn to her chum Rose Randall.

CHAPTER X

An Antique Purchase

As the summer came on, bringing the climbing roses out on the cottages, and filling the village gardens with a wealth of flowers, Katrine's artistic soul revelled more and more in the picturesque beauty of Heathwell. Her sketching expeditions were an intense delight; she was improving fast under Miss Aubrey's tuition, and also picked up many hints from Mr. Freeman, who would always stop, if he pa.s.sed their easels, and give her work the benefit of his criticism. Katrine often felt as if she were living in the past at Heathwell. Not only were the cottages antique, but the people also had an old-world atmosphere lingering among them. Many of the women wore sun-bonnets; they baked their bread in brick ovens, made rhubarb wine and cowslip beer, cured their own bacon, and pursued various homely little avocations which are fast going out of date in other parts of the country. Even the Elementary-school children were not aggressively advanced; some of them still bobbed curtsies, and wore clean white pinafores to go to church on Sundays.

Miss Aubrey was a great favourite in the village. Her painting brought her closely into touch with the people, and she had a ready sympathy for them, quite unmixed with patronage--a distinction which they recognized and appreciated. The patriarch in the picturesque weather-stained coat would slowly bring out his reminiscences during the hours she sat sketching him in his garden; the mothers would tell her their troubles; and the children swarmed round her like bees. It was an entirely new phase of life for Katrine, who had had no experience before of our st.u.r.dy English peasantry. She saw the people at first through Miss Aubrey's spectacles; then she learnt to like them on her own account, and acquired quite a number of village friends--the blacksmith who smiled at her from his forge, the crippled wife of the saddler, who waved greetings from her seat at the window, the fussy little spinster in charge of the post office, the six ancient pensioners who generally sat sunning themselves on the bench outside the almshouses, the cobbler who bobbed up his head and smiled as she pa.s.sed his open doorway, the widow who baked the brown bread and the m.u.f.fins, and the elderly dame at the crockery shop.

There were many quaint people in Heathwell--so many that Katrine often declared a list ought to be made of the village worthies and preserved in a local museum. There was Linton, a white-haired, bent old labourer, who supplemented his parish relief by breaking stones on the roadside.

Katrine first made friends with him over a stile. It happened to be rather a high and difficult one, and he was sitting on the top of it, so she paused to allow him to descend. "Come on, missie, come on!" he cried in encouraging tones. "Though it do be a rare awkward stile for faymales. I telled Parson so, when he a-put it up; but says he to I, 'Faymales or no faymales, they'll have to be getten over it!'"

Linton was a character in his way, a self-taught antiquarian, a nature lover, a dormant poet, an incipient artist, and something of a philosopher round it all. Who knows what strange dreams he may have dreamed in his youth, of fame to be won and songs to be uttered? But life's obligations had proved too heavy a burden, and his was still a mute inglorious muse. His delight in Miss Aubrey's sketches was almost pathetic; he would toddle far out of his way to pa.s.s her easel, and take a peep at the progress of some roadside scene or cottage garden. He even volunteered, one evening, to find her a subject, and to please him, she and Katrine allowed him to escort them to the summit of a mound near the river. The place without doubt was an ancient grave, for it was close to Offa's d.y.k.e, the great eighth-century barrier between Saxon and Celt, and though from an artistic point of view it was not paintable, the romance of its situation was palpable.

To Miss Aubrey and Katrine the true subject was the white-haired, rugged old fellow himself, standing outlined against the glowing west, as with outstretched hand he showed where the slain in the forgotten battle-field had been heaped, and the earth piled high above them. His voice rang as he tried to picture the far-off scene, and there shone from his eyes just a gleam of the divine fire.

"Look around you!" he cried. "See where yon river's a-windin' down, and yon hills a-stand back as they did a thousand years agone. Aye! I often comes. .h.i.ther and thinks what a sight it will be for their uprising!"

Of all the quaint village folk perhaps the funniest was Mrs. Stubbs, who kept a little shop at the corner of the High Street. It was nominally a green-grocer's, but it included so many other things as well, that it might fairly claim to be a china store, a second-hand bookseller's, and a repository of antiquities. Though the counter was spread with cabbages and cauliflowers, the floor was covered with crockery, and the small parlour behind was overflowing with old furniture and all kinds of oddments picked up at auctions--eighteenth-century chairs, bow-shaped mirrors, ancient etchings and engravings, Wedgwood plates, Toby jugs, horn lanterns, tortoise-sh.e.l.l tea-caddies, blunderbusses, cases of b.u.t.terflies, clocks, snuff-boxes, medallions, pewter dishes, and a vast number of other articles. Mrs. Stubbs had a genius for a bargain. She was a familiar figure at every sale in the district, where she would bid successfully even against hook-nosed individuals of the Hebrew persuasion, and bear off her spoils in triumph. She knew the marketable value of most of her antiques to the last halfpenny, and carried on a successful little business by disposing of them to London dealers, or to collectors in the neighbourhood, often at double the prices she had originally paid for them.

For Katrine this old curiosity shop held an absolute fascination. She had been brought up to appreciate such things, for her father's chief hobby was the collecting of antiques. Mr. Marsden revelled in carved oak furniture and Worcester china, and had communicated some of his enthusiasm to his daughter. Miss Aubrey sympathized with Katrine's tastes, and would often allow her to pay a visit to the shop, sometimes sending her there on small errands.

For the ostensible purpose of ordering peas for Aireyholme, Katrine entered Mrs. Stubbs's repository one memorable afternoon. The good dame had attended a sale on the preceding day, and her small establishment had received so many additions to its already large collection that it was almost overflowing into the street. She was superintending the rearrangement of some of these articles by Mr. Stubbs, a blear-eyed individual who proved a sad thorn in the flesh to his capable better half, and whose delinquencies formed a topic for much of her conversation.

"He's no more use nor a babe to-day," she confided indignantly, "with his legs that wobbly and his hand that shaky, I daren't let him lay a finger on the china, for fear he'd be dropping it. He took half a crown out of the till when my back was turned, and off he goes with it straight to the 'Dragon'. Well, he was a second-hand article when I married him, and I might 'a known he weren't up to much, if I'd had the experience I've got now."

Mrs. Stubbs spoke with warmth, evidently regarding her husband as a bad investment, which she unfortunately had no opportunity of pa.s.sing on at a profit to anybody else. She hustled him out of the way at present, and telling him to retire to the kitchen, took Katrine into the crowded little parlour to inspect her latest purchases. The sale had been at the house of an old maiden lady who had possessed many antique belongings, including carved ivories and miniatures, as well as Sheraton furniture. These treasures were, of course, far beyond Katrine's pocket, though she regarded them with the covetous eye of a born collector.

"I'm afraid I can't afford anything old," she said at last. "I really came to order three pecks of peas for Mrs. Franklin."