Not so Nan. She tossed about for a long time ere she could find oblivion. Her conscience pricked her, and a prickly conscience is just as unhappy a bedfellow as a porcupine would be.
What would "Momsey" and "Papa Sherwood" say if they heard of this escapade? Nan realized that she had done wrong in yielding to the seductive suggestion of the secret supper. She might have given her girl friends a treat in some way that would not have broken the school rules.
She was sorry, very sorry indeed, that she had done this. More than a few tears wet Nan Sherwood's pillow before she finally dropped asleep.
Nor had she found relief from this feeling of depression the next morning, when she went alone to Dr. Prescott's office.
This was the first time Nan had been sent to interview the principal of Lakeview Hall for any such reason. She had quite fallen in love with Dr.
Beulah Prescott on the evening of her arrival at the school; and Nan Sherwood was of too truly an affectionate disposition to hurt or offend anybody whom she loved.
"Dear, dear, Nancy Sherwood," said the principal, in a worried way. "I never expected to receive such a report about you, of all my new girls.
Leader of a party of girls that steals out of the Hall after bedtime, feasts on contraband eatables--Ahem! where's the list of this 'forbidden fruit'? Here it is! Sandwiches, salad, cake, chocolate and coffee, ice-cream. Dear me! dear me! what will your digestions be like if you keep on in this way?"
"I don't know, Dr. Prescott," Nan said faintly, as the preceptress halted for breath.
"I see no pickles, olives or cheese on the bill-of-fare," said the doctor, lowering her lorgnette. "How is that? A schoolgirl picnic without those delectables?"
"My--my money didn't hold out," confessed Nan, her eyes suddenly dancing. Dr. Prescott was not proving so difficult, after all.
"Mrs. Cupp reports only you for punishment," said the principal, after a momentary smile. "Don't you think the others deserve punishment, too?"
"No, Dr. Prescott," Nan was prompt to say. "It wouldn't have happened, and the other girls would not have been down there at the boathouse, if it hadn't been for me."
"Well, possibly that may be so. That was Mrs. Cupp's opinion, and we will let it rest at that. Also, Mrs. Cupp recommended you to mercy, Nancy."
This surprised Nan a good deal. She had not thought the stern matron was given at all to mercy.
"Nevertheless, we must show our disapproval of such reprehensible actions," continued Dr. Prescott. "You are sentenced to solitary recreation hours for a week. On your honor, remember. No conversation with the other girls, save in study and recitation hours, until a week from to-day. Remember! Not even with Miss Harley. That is all, Nancy."
CHAPTER XXIII
A STRANGE ADVENTURE
It really seemed awfully funny.
Nan went about with sealed lips save when she had to ask a question of a neighbor in study hour or in class. Even in Room Seven, Corridor Four, there was silence. Bess was at first amused, then disgusted, then indignant.
"Why! whoever heard the like?" she cried. "Not to speak? Goodness! Why, I never had so many things to say to you in my life before, and you sit as dumb as one of those Japanese monkeys," and she pointed to the tiny "Hear No Evil, See No Evil, Speak No Evil" group on Nan's bookshelf.
At first Nan only smiled at her chum's impatience. But soon she found it necessary to steal off by herself during recreation time. The temptation to speak was too great.
Nor did Bess try to make it easier for Nan to keep strictly to the line of punishment that had been inflicted upon her by Dr. Beulah Prescott.
Bess began to take a wicked delight in catching her off her guard and getting a word past Nan's lips before she thought.
"Oh bah!" cried the careless Bess. "What does it matter? We're in our own room. Dr. Beulah knows very well you won't stick to the very letter of her command."
Nan felt differently about it. The principal had trusted her to keep her lips sealed during recreation hours; and she tried as much as possible to keep by herself. "Solitary recreation hours for a week." That was Dr.
Prescott's command and Nan did her best to keep away from her fellow-pupils. One afternoon, between her last recitation for the day and suppertime, she went down to Mrs. Cupp with her arms full of summer clothing, for permission to put the frocks away in her trunk.
"Here's your key and the key to the trunk-room. I trust the latter to you, Nancy, because I see you are a girl of honor," Mrs. Cupp said, rather kindly for her. "I see you are trying to obey the doctor's instructions regarding your recreation time. You may stay down there till the supper bell rings, if you like. But remember, if you wish to bring anything up with you from your trunk, you must show it to me."
"Yes Mrs. Cupp," replied Nan, soberly.
This was not the first time she had asked permission to go to her trunk.
And she had always chosen a time when no other girls were around, and she could be alone in the trunk-room. She went down stairs rather thoughtfully now. Mrs. Cupp believed she was a girl of honor. Nan was wondering if, after all, she came up to the requirements for such a person?
"I am not being entirely truthful right now," she thought. "I don't need to go down cellar with these things. I have plenty of room for them in my clothes closet. I am going to my trunk for an entirely different reason.
"I wonder," pursued Nan Sherwood, reflectively, "if all girls are like that? Are we naturally untruthful about little things? Do I know a perfectly frank girl in all this school? Goodness! nobody but poor Amelia Boggs, and she is half-cracked, the other girls say.
"That's why I like Walter," declared Nan, to herself. "I guess that is why I like Cousin Tom--and even Rafe. It's sometimes ugly to speak the brutal truth, I know. But it is never dishonorable. Now am I deliberately acting deceitfully because I did not tell Mrs. Cupp _all_ my reason for coming down here?"
Such abstract questions as this often troubled Nan Sherwood. She never discussed them with her chum, or with anybody else, now. But she often wished she could talk them over with her mother, as she used to do.
"Momsey" always saw everything so clearly, and always knew just the right and wrong of things.
"And it's so hard sometimes," Nan murmured, "to tell what is right and what is wrong!"
She snapped on the electric light nearest to her trunk. The receptacles were in rows, each with a card on which the owner's name was clearly written. Nan's was in a corner at the end of the main building nearest the unfinished part. She had come down a passage from the stairway to get to the trunk-room. This part of the cellar was a long way from the kitchen and scullery.
Some of the girls were afraid to come to the trunk-room alone, although their imagination had not yet peopled this part of the Hall with ghosts.
Nan thought of nothing, when she had raised the lid of her trunk, but one thing. She carefully put aside the empty trays and the layers of clothing hiding the long box at the bottom of the trunk.
It was locked with a little brass padlock. Tom Sherwood had made the box very neatly and nobody could possibly open the receptacle without the key, unless the box were broken. Nan wore the tiny key in a little leather bag, on a chain of fine gold links which had been her mother's when she was a little girl in Memphis.
Nan quickly unlocked the box and raised the cover. A rush of sweet smelling herb-odors burst forth. It was the combined odor of the tamarack swamp of upper Michigan (or so it seemed), where Nan had spent the past summer. She lifted aside the covering of tissue paper, and revealed a great, pink-cheeked, blue-eyed, beautiful doll!
It was as large as a real baby, and it was dressed elegantly. Nan's mother, with her own frail hands, had made all the garments "Beautiful Beulah" wore.
"Beulah, _dear_!" murmured Nan, hugging the doll up tight to her bosom and rocking herself to and fro as she sat upon the floor. "It's just like going home again, to see you. Wouldn't you like to see our dear little room in the 'dwelling in amity'? If only we could fly back there, really! Only for just an hour! And have Momsey and Papa Sherwood at home, too, and all be together again!"
Nan choked up at this and the tears began to flow. But she crowded them back in a moment. "Oh! this will never do--this will never do," she cried, under her breath. "I'll only make you feel bad, too, my dear, darling Beautiful Beulah. And, goodness me!" added Nan Sherwood, suddenly becoming practical, "what would Dr. Beulah think if she heard me? She would perhaps think I had named you after her. I'm not sure that a principal of a great school like this would want to be godmother to a doll.
"I don't care! I guess that's why I love her so much--because she bears the same name as you, my dear. And you'd love her, too, if you could know her. Oh, dear! I wonder if I did wrong in hiding you down here in the bottom of my trunk? Mrs. Cupp certainly wouldn't have taken you away from me. The girls might have made fun, and Bess, I s'pose, would have been difficult. But I'd have felt better to have you up stairs in Number Seven, Corridor Four----"
A step in the passage outside the open trunk-room door! Nan rose up in a panic, clutching Beulah to her breast. Somebody was coming.
There was not time to put the doll back into her nest and successfully hide her. The wall at the end of the cellar was of heavy planking. A pile of empty dry-goods cases stood at hand, a narrow alley having been left between the tiers of boxes and the plank wall.
Nan darted behind this screen of boxes, the doll in her arms. She slipped on something in the dark passage and was flung with considerable force against the plank partition. To her amazement and alarm, a narrow section of the partition moved out, dropping downward and outward from the top, as though it were hinged at the bottom.
This narrow door was weighted, so it could not fall abruptly. Nan was flung sprawling upon it, and lay there with her doll, as the shutter dropped quietly to a horizontal position.
She knew she lay over some deep cistern, or the like, and that the plank door bridged it. It was pitch-dark behind the partition and a sour, damp smell, like the odor of an old brewing cellar, rose to her nostrils. Nan Sherwood, startled as she was, uttered no outcry.