CHAPTER XXIII.
THE LETTER IN CIPHER.
sang Lily, with mock pathos, as the stage, with its lively load of girls, drove up to the front door, where Mrs. Abbott and Elfie smiled a cordial welcome.
“There’s not a word of truth in that lament, Mrs. Abbott, my dear,” said Lily, as she folded her teacher in a fervent hug, “for I’m awfully, awful glad to get back.”
“So am I,” said Katie.
“And you, dear?” said Mrs. Abbott, smiling at Marion, who could not easily release herself from Elfie’s embrace of joyful welcome.
“It is coming home to me,” answered Marion, with glowing face.
“Have you had a pleasant visit?”
“O, so delightful! May I come to your room to-night and tell you about it?”
“Indeed you may.”
“May I hear the history too?” said Mr. Eaton, just appearing from the library.
The girls pounced upon him then, dragging him into the school-room and asking a flood of questions and begging hard for the promise of a story after tea. He gave the promise readily, but it was not fulfilled, for an hour later a telegram summoned him away upon business that could not be delayed.
“I don’t understand why every body has to be in the dumps just because Mr. Eaton had to go away,” said Edna, discontentedly, that evening.
“Because he’s a joy forever,” said Lily, “and with him here the next two or three days of settling down to work would be just fun. Now they’ll be deeply, darkly, beautifully blue; wont they, Kit?”
“Yes; the first days are generally poky,” said Katie, preparing to record her arrival in her new diary.
“We can have fun enough,” said Edna, “if Mrs. Abbott wont be too strait-laced and antiquated to let us.”
“How, for instance?”
“There’s a circus coming. I saw the bills posted up at the station,” replied Edna—“lions and bears, and a four-armed man, and a man with no arms at all who takes your picture with his toes, and lots of jolly things.”
“They wont do us any good,” said Bell Burgoyne, “for, you know, Mrs. Abbott disapproves of circuses.”
“Well, they are low,” said Edna, “but I think it would be fun to go to one of the side-shows, as they call them, and have our fortunes told by the Egyptian sphinx.”
“O, I’ve seen a picture of that kind of being. It’s just a young woman with an elaborately frizzed head and a handsome face, and nothing else except a small section of throat,” explained Lily. “She perches lightly on a wash-stand and answers questions, I believe.”
“But how can she talk without any arms and legs?” said Louie Field, skeptically.
“Unless she uses the sign language of the deaf and dumb, I think limbs and members would be less indispensable than lungs,” said Lily. “But I don’t understand, so I can’t explain.”
“It’s some kind of clap-trap,” said Edna. “I’ve read how it’s done. There’s looking-glass fronts and curtains and things, you know.”
“What a beautifully clear explanation!” said Lily.
“I’d just love to have my fortune told,” said Katie.
“You couldn’t understand her. Probably she’s a real, genuine, imported sphinx. Speaks no English—nothing but Pyramid,” Lily said, mockingly.
“There’s no such language as Pyramid, is there?” asked Katie, rather doubtfully.
“Well, then, she’d speak the tongue of the Ptolemies, whatever that was, and you couldn’t understand it. But, no matter what she speaks, you are not likely to see her.”
The matter was dropped then, but the next morning when Mrs. Abbott took her seat to open school she found a yard-long pictorial advertisement of the circus laid conspicuously on the desk. On its margin was written, “Please take us,” on reading which she shook her head gravely.
“I have had such requests before,” she said, severely, “and all but the latest comers know how thoroughly I disapprove of circuses and all such exhibitions.”
She looked grave and displeased, and the girls, discussing the matter afterward, were very indignant at Edna, who had put the play-bill on the desk without their knowledge. She defended herself rather crossly, and a quarrel seemed inevitable; but Elfie, coming in with a book for Katie, made a diversion.
“Is you most crying ’cause you can’t go to see the efalumps and the big, big bears?” she asked, looking at Edna curiously.
“No, indeed,” replied Edna, loftily; “but I should like to have my fortune told by the sphinx.”
“Auntie Abbott says the spazinx in that picture isn’t a real spazinx,” said Elfie, consolingly.
They all laughed so at her remarkable pronunciation that her small head was tossed up with much dignity, and she said, with some asperity:
“It is not a bit ladified for folks to laugh at other folks’s pronouncements. My Marion never laughs when I says my words wrong.”
Edna repressed the sneering remark she was ready to utter, for no one was allowed to say one word in dispraise of Marion before Elfie, who had been more than ever her champion since the affair of the poem. And Edna, to do her justice, was really very fond of Elfie, and immediately tried to propitiate her by making a boat out of writing-paper, which the happy child carried off to sail in her basin. There she left it, with a freight of small paper dolls, when Candace called her to go out for a walk, and Marion, whose early training made tidiness a habit, carefully threw away the water, wiped out the basin, put the paper boat in the window to dry, and, picking up a work-basket, sat down with it in her lap and began to darn a stocking of Elfie’s as a pleasant surprise for Candace.
As she worked, saying over a list of Roman emperors to make sure she had them at her tongue’s end, some of the blurred characters in the little boat caught her attention, and she carefully unfolded it, finding, as she suspected, that it was a note written in cipher. Having had permission to read all she could, she amused herself by deciphering the curious words and writing them down on a bit of paper.
A part of the note was torn, but enough was left to make Marion very uncomfortable. It was written to Edna by Addie Mason, a rather delicate girl who lived in the village, and who came in to school every day for only two or three studies. She had become very popular with the S. C.’s and had been frequently invited to their secret meetings, and the mysterious cipher had been explained to her. She was immensely flattered by all this privilege, although she knew her admittance to fellowship was owing to her usefulness in bringing purchases of maple-sugar, candy, crackers, and raisins, and other such commodities as could be purchased at the country store, which the girls were not allowed to visit except by especial permission, and that was rarely accorded.
The cipher letter, after Marion copied it upon a fresh piece of paper, read thus:
“Drdn: mdmbltt syssh wllnt cmt thbck gtnlss ywll brnglf tsh syssh cnfnd smbrd mnyby pttngdvnng rdn blndchlds hndtht swht shs wntdfr. gthr wyfrm mrnnd cndcnd brnghr lngn nwll vrknw.
“Ddmsn.”
It was not a difficult cipher to read when you knew how—simply a leaving out of all the vowels and writing every consecutive pair of words together. But, as some of the girls who had tried to read specimens of it said, “it looked too heathenish for United States folks to read.” Abolishing capitals also added to its obscurity.
The translation, after Marion had puzzled it out and written it down in legible English, was:
“Dear Edna: Madame Belotti says she will not come to the back gate unless you will bring Elfie too. She says she can find some buried money by putting a divining-rod in a blonde child’s hand. That is what she is wanted for. Get her away from Marion and Candace and bring her along; no one will ever know.
“Addie Mason.”
“That’s what you get for meddling, miss,” Marion said to herself, as, having made the copies and torn them up, she refolded the boat and applied herself again to the stockings and the Roman emperors.
“Caligula, Claudius, Nero,” she continued, not conscious she was speaking aloud. “I do hope she wont do it. Galba, Otho, Vitellius. O, dear, I do hope she wont.”
“Wont what, you funny old thing?” asked Lily, looking in at the door.
For a moment Marion was tempted to tell her about the note she had read and beg her to prevent Edna’s taking Elfie outside of the gate, but she knew her interference might be resented, and Lily was so intolerant of tale-telling that she did not want to seem guilty of it; so she parried the question and begged her to take the list she had copied from her history and see if she could say the Roman emperors correctly.
“Perfect,” said Lily, when she had done; “but you always do say every thing perfectly. And now tell me what is bothering you, Molly Ann. You looked when I came in as though you had the weight of the world on your shoulders.”
But no coaxing would persuade the girl to tell, although she longed to talk about her discovery with some one. Of course she could not tell Mrs. Abbott. The school-girls’ code of honor forbade that; but she resolved to watch Elfie closely and prevent her, if possible, from being taken out of the gate, and if she could not do that to follow her herself, no matter how much her doing so might offend the girls.