CHAPTER XXIII

“MAY TIME IS GAY TIME”

May had arrived and with it the first warm spring weather along the Hudson River valley. Now the river was often crowded with sail boats dipping their white and gray canvases toward the sky and toward the water like the wings of a seagull; motor boats chugged along, making more noise than automobiles; while the steam yachts, ever the aristocrats among all water craft, sailing into their own harbors up and down the Hudson shores, ever and anon put forth again as though intending to leave home behind for adventures on the open sea. All the hills beyond and near by the neighborhood of Sleepy Hollow were like mammoth bouquets with their fragrance and beauty upturned to the sun, while within the meadows and fields and gardens were a greater variety of wild-flowers than can be found in many other places in this land.

Now at last the ranch girls understood why Miss Katherine Winthrop’s old home had been called “Primrose Hall” long before ever the school was thought of. For wild primroses blossomed everywhere, although the season was late, until the garden about the old place looked like the famous field of “The Cloth of Gold.”

As much as possible on these bright May days the students at Primrose Hall lived out of doors, but with the school year drawing to a close it was not always easy to desert lessons and the thought of approaching examinations.

One afternoon Jean and Frieda had arranged themselves in a corner of one of the big verandas with a table between them and a screen carefully set up to protect them from interruption. The girls were not talking, indeed an utter silence had reigned between them for the last ten minutes, broken only by the squeak of Frieda’s pen writing its last essay for the present term and by an occasional sigh from Jean from the depth of an oration by Cicero.

Stealing along outside the defensive wall of this screen a short time later mysterious footsteps might be heard, not of one pair of feet but of several, and yet not a single head appeared above it.

Frowning, Jean listened and then went on with her work, determined not to be lured from the strict path of duty.

“Whatever geese are outside the screen,” she thought to herself, “seeing our sign on it, ‘Positively No Admittance, Studying,’ will go away and leave us in peace.”

But when a screen falls to the floor with a bang only a few inches from where one is seated, certainly no degree of devotion to the study of literature and the classics will prevent one from jumping up with a scream. And this Jean and Frieda did at the same instant, and behold, there, with only the prostrate screen dividing them, were Gerry and Margaret, Lucy and Mollie Johnson, besides several other members of their Junior class!

“The city has fallen and the prisoners are ours!” Gerry announced, pointing a pen at Jean’s heart as an improvised dagger.

Jean tried not to look cross. “Look here, girls, what do you want with us?” she demanded. “You know it isn’t fair to come interrupting a fellow at his labors, and Miss Winthrop——”

“Oh, Miss Winthrop be—any old thing,” Gerry answered saucily. “Do you suppose that when school is nearly over that we care half so much for the views and wishes of our lady principal as we do earlier in the year, when we might have to live on under the shadow of her displeasure? However, on this one occasion the fear of that august personage need not darken our young lives, since she has given her consent to what I am now about to propose. Oh, well, since it is Margaret’s party, I suppose I had best let her extend the actual invitation, while I beg you to accept it beforehand.”

Jean put up two protesting hands, but Frieda showed no such moral hesitancy. “Please don’t ask Frieda and me to do anything agreeable this afternoon,” Jean pleaded, “for we simply can’t accept any invitation, and yet if you ask us we may.”

Margaret Belknap laughed. “Of course you will when you hear what it is. You must get your coats and hats at once and come and drive with us for a mile or so to the nearest landing pier and there father and Cecil will be waiting for us in our yacht to take us for a sail.”

“Oh, my goodness gracious me!” exclaimed Frieda ecstatically, gathering her school paraphernalia into her arms, “and to think that I have never been on a yacht or even a sailboat in my whole life!”

Apparently there was to be no further question of their studies this afternoon, for Jean and Frieda now fairly leaped over the overturned screen in their efforts to get up to their room for hats and coats without delay.

However, but two minutes had passed, a not sufficient time for Jean to have made preparations for the trip, when she was seen slowly returning toward her group of friends.

“Margaret, Gerry,” she begged, “if the other girls will please excuse us, I want to speak to you privately for half a minute.”

Jean’s face was flushed and her manner embarrassed. “Please don’t think I am ungrateful for your invitation, Margaret,” she said softly, “but really I don’t believe I had better go with you this afternoon after all. Frieda says she _will_ go,” and unconsciously the speaker put an added emphasis on the verb will.

Margaret, hurt at her friend’s attitude, did not answer at once, particularly as Gerry hardly gave her the opportunity.

“Will you kindly tell us, Jean Bruce, what has happened to make you change your mind in the distance between the veranda and your bedroom door?” she inquired. “You need not tell me that you won’t go for a sail on the Hudson for the first time in your life because you love your Cicero so.”

Jean shook her head, smiling in spite of herself. “Well, not exactly.”

“Oh, Margaret, for heaven’s sake explain to Jean that we have asked Olive too, but that Olive says she positively can’t join us. Of course she is working on that plagued old Shakespeare essay of hers. And to think that once I believed I had a chance at that Shakespeare prize.”

At Gerry’s first words Jean’s face had magically cleared. “Oh, if Margaret wants Olive too, I will make her come along with us, she shall not be such a grind,” she protested. But before she could vanish for the second time Margaret and Gerry both clutched at her skirts.

“Don’t urge Olive to come with us, for you see we don’t really want her, and only asked her because we knew she couldn’t come.” Margaret explained hastily, and then seeing Jean’s face crimson with anger and resentment, she gave her an affectionate shake.

“Oh, for heaven’s sake, child, when will you ranch girls get over being so touchy about one another? You know that now we know Olive better, we like her as much as any girl in our class. To tell you the truth, it is just because we are trying to fix up some plan to show Olive how we feel toward her that we did not want her to come along with us now. It seemed to us this would be our best chance to let you know our idea and to see what you think about it. I suppose I might have told you this at first,” Margaret ended, “only I am not a tactful person, and perhaps put things pretty badly.”

“You certainly did,” Jean laughed, “but now I will hurry and get my belongings, as I am perfectly dying to hear what you have in mind.”

An hour later eight members of the Junior class, Frieda and Mollie and Miss Rebecca Sterne, having arrived at a private landing pier not far from their school, were assisted aboard the steam yacht “Marathon” by Cecil Belknap and his father.

During the first half of the sail there was little real conversation among the girls, only “Ohs” and “Ahs” of delight at the beauty of the river scenery and the wonders of the yacht. But by and by on their return journey when Margaret and her guests were seated around the salon dining table drinking afternoon tea, Gerry, who never could bear putting off things, turned to her hostess.

“Look here, Margaret,” she said in tones loud enough for the entire company to overhear, “if your father and brother will pardon us, I vote that we plunge right into the subject we have come together to discuss this afternoon. I suppose your father and Cecil must both have heard something of Olive’s story by now.”

Margaret nodded. Jean was not so sure that she cared to have Olive’s difficulties at school discussed before Cecil Belknap, whom she did not yet thoroughly like, but as Margaret’s guest she did not like to protest.

Gerry then leaned across the table toward the ranch girls with her teaspoon poised in the air.

“Look here, Jean, Frieda, everybody, it is just like this. You know that when the three ranch girls came to Primrose Hall most of us liked two of the three girls right from the first, after a few of their western peculiarities had rubbed up against our eastern ones. But with the third girl, with Olive—well, it was different. In the first place, Olive was shy and did not look exactly like the rest of us (she is much prettier than I am, for example); in the second place, the story was circulated about among the girls that Olive was part Indian, the daughter of a dreadfully ignorant Indian woman from whom she had run away and that now she was trying to pretend that she was no relation to her own mother. Of course, had any one of us ever looked at Olive very hard we must have known that this story was an untruth, or else only a half truth, which is the worst kind of a lie. But we were too prejudiced and Olive too shy to stand up for herself and—oh, what is the use of my going into this horrid part of my story when I want to come to the fairy tale at the end! After a while some of us girls did begin to see a little further than the end of our noses and to suspect that a girl as clever as Olive in her studies, as lovely in disposition and as refined and gentle in her manner, could hardly be what we had believed her, simply couldn’t. And now I want to say just one thing in excuse for myself. I did know that Olive was a lady and more than a lady, a trump, before I learned that she was not an Indian girl, but a heroine,” and here Gerry paused an instant to sigh and to get her breath in order to continue to express her romantic delight in the change of the stranger girl’s fortune.

Hurriedly, however, Margaret Belknap now seized this moment’s respite.

“I knew that Olive was charming too,” she interposed, “and I did try to be nicer to her before I went away for the Christmas holidays, intending on my return to ask her to overlook the past and be friends. I suppose there were other girls in our class who felt the same way and had this same intention?”

As Margaret paused four or five other voices answered: “There certainly were,” before she went on. “Yes, I know. But after we got back from our holidays it was then too late to make Olive believe in our good intentions, because in that short time things had so changed for her that she had become more interesting than any of the rest of us. You can see, Jean and Frieda, just what we have been up against?” (The well-broughtup Margaret was not conscious of using slang at this moment and only her brother smiled at her.) “If our Junior class had then rushed up at once to Olive and apologized to her, after we had learned of what had befallen her, why we did not believe that she would care very much for such a belated repentance. So for months now we have been trying to think of some pretty and tactful way to show our real feeling toward her and now we hope we have at last hit upon the right plan.”

“Do let me tell the rest, Margaret, you have talked such a long time,” and though a laugh went all around the table at her expense, Gerry again burst forth: “Everybody here knows that we are to have our school finals now in a short time and see the Seniors graduate and the Juniors, who are trying for the Shakespeare prize, give their recitations before the committee specially chosen to pass on them? Then of course we have luncheon and afterwards a dance on the lawn with all our guests at the commencement present. But there is one thing that perhaps you two ranch girls don’t know and that is that we always choose one of the Primrose Hall girls as our Queen for commencement day. Of course she must be selected from among the entire school, not from any one class; but Margaret and some of the other Juniors and I have been talking things over with the Seniors and they say it is our turn to have the Queen and that they are willing to—you know what we want to do, don’t you, Jean and Frieda?”

Jean bowed her head showing that she understood, but Frieda still appeared mystified.

“I think it would be a beautiful thing for you girls to do, if you really wish to do it,” Jean answered a bit huskily, although she was trying not to show any special emotion before Cecil Belknap, who had been watching her pretty closely all afternoon through his same hateful pair of eyeglasses.

“Beautiful to do what?” Frieda now demanded, turning first toward Mollie and then toward Lucy Johnson for the explanation of this everlasting preamble of Gerry’s and Margaret’s.

“Why, choose Olive for our School Queen for commencement day,” Gerry returned, “and as our finals take place in May, I suppose you can call her ‘Queen of the May’ if you like. For you see she does preside over our dances all afternoon, leads any special ones, and we pay her whatever homage we can. Now, please, don’t you, Cecil, or any other human being at this table start reciting: ‘You must wake and call me early, call me early, mother dear’,” she concluded, “for if it were not for that tiresome, weepy poem, I should think the choosing of a May Queen one of the prettiest customs in the world. But I can assure you that at least eleven out of every twelve persons who come to our commencement feel called upon to spout that poem; I suppose because it is so ridiculously easy to remember.”

As soon as the speaker finished Margaret jumped up from the table, her guests immediately following suit. “Then it is all settled,” she exclaimed happily, lifting high her pretty teacup, “so let us drink to Olive as our next queen and to the other ranch girls.”

“I suppose you mean Jack too, even if you don’t know her,” Frieda suggested loyally before joining in the toast. And Gerry’s hearty “Of course,” ended the pretty scene.

For now the entire party of girls, deserting the salon, made their way again out on to the deck of the yacht. Of the group Jean was the last to leave, followed by Cecil Belknap.

“Oh, I say, Miss Bruce, will you go a bit slow?” he asked. “My sister tells me that she has asked you to pay us a visit at our cottage on the Massachusetts coast this summer and I hope you are going to be jolly enough to come, for I should enjoy it most awfully.”

“You wouldn’t really, not a visit from a western ranch girl?” Jean’s eyes danced; “but it is very kind of you to say so,” she ended prettily, extending her hand to the young man.

Cecil was looking out the open door to where the lights were now twinkling forth one by one along the side of the Jersey shore. “No, it is not what I would call good of me,” he replied quietly. “I thought I told you at our house at Christmas that I liked you and that if there wasn’t any fellow out West, I would like to see more of you anyhow. Do say you will make us the visit?”

With a new dignity that a year of Primrose Hall had helped develop in her, Jean now shook her head. “No,” she replied quietly, “I have already explained to Margaret that I shan’t be able to come to her this summer. You see, my cousin, Jack Ralston, whether she is better or not, is to leave the hospital in New York early in June and then we expect to go back to the Rainbow Ranch for the summer time. After that we may go, who knows where?”

The young people went out on deck together as the yacht was now running in toward shore, and beyond the landing pier in the soft, spring dusk the travelers could see the old school carryall and in another carriage Olive and Miss Winthrop waiting to drive the party back to Primrose Hall. But before anybody was allowed to leave the yacht Gerry had solemnly whispered to each one of them. “Remember, please, Olive is not to hear a single, solitary word about our plan. It is to be a secret up to the very last minute.”