The Leader of the Lower School Part 10

"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," sn.i.g.g.e.red 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 antic.i.p.ation. The news had been spread abroad in the Lower School, so the Juniors had a.s.sembled 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 s.h.a.ggy, 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 gra.s.s, 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 n.o.body'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 sc.r.a.p 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 cla.s.sroom to lecture hall filled her with dismay. She appeared to expect to be allowed to tear about the pa.s.sages, 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 cla.s.s 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 sc.r.a.pes."

The Upper Fourth, under Doreen's superintendence, had just filed from its own cla.s.sroom to attend a Shakespeare lecture by the Princ.i.p.al. 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 cla.s.s 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 cla.s.sroom, 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,"