Chapter 40 A World of Girls: The Story of a School by L. T. Meade
A Gipsy Maid
In a few moments everyone in Lavender House was made acquainted with Susan’s story. At such a time ceremony was laid aside, dinner forgotten, teachers, pupils, servants all congregated in the grounds, all rushed to the spot where Nan’s withered daisies still lay, all peered through the underwood, and all, alas! looked, in vain for the tall dark woman and the little child. Little Nan, the baby of the school, had been stolen – there were loud and terrified lamentations. Nan’s nurse was almost tearing her hair, was rushing frantically here, there, and everywhere. No one blamed the nurse for leaving her little charge in apparent safety for a few moments, but the poor woman’s own distress was pitiable to see. Mrs Willis took Hester’s hand, and told the poor stunned girl that she was sending to Sefton immediately for two or three policemen, and that in the meantime every man on the place should commence the search for the woman and child.
“Without any doubt,” Mrs Willis added, “we shall soon have our little Nan back again; it is quite impossible that the woman, whoever she is, can have taken her so far away in so short a time.”
In the meantime, Annie in her bedroom heard the fuss and the noise. She leaned out of her window and saw Phyllis in the distance; she called to her. Phyllis ran up, the tears streaming down her cheeks.
“Oh, something so dreadful!” she gasped; “a wicked, wicked woman has stolen little Nan Thornton. She ran off with her just where the undergrowth is so thick at the end of the shady walk. It happened to her half an hour ago, and they are all looking, but they cannot find the woman or little Nan anywhere. Oh, it is so dreadful! Is that you, Mary?”
Phyllis ran off to join her sister, and Annie put her head in again, and looked round her pretty room.
“The gipsy,” she murmured, “the tall, dark gipsy has taken little Nan!”
Her face was very white, her eyes shone, her lips expressed a firm and almost obstinate determination. With all her usual impulsiveness, she decided on a course of action – she snatched up a piece of paper and scribbled a hasty line:
“Dear Mother-friend, – However badly you think of Annie, Annie loves you with all her heart. Forgive me, I must go myself to look for little Nan. That tall, dark woman is a gipsy – I have seen her before; her name is Mother Rachel. Tell Hetty I won’t return until I bring her little sister back. – Your repentant and sorrowful Annie.”
Annie twisted up the note, directed it to Mrs Willis, and left it on her dressing-table.
Then, with a wonderful amount of forethought for her, she emptied the contents of a little purse into a tiny gingham bag, which she fastened inside the front of her dress. She put on her shady hat, and threw a shawl across her arm, and then, slipping softly downstairs, she went out through the deserted kitchens, down the back avenue, and past the laurel-bush, until she came to the stile which led into the wood – she was going straight to the gipsies’ encampment.
Annie, with some of the gipsy’s characteristics in her own blood, had always taken an extraordinary interest in these queer wandering people. Gipsies had a fascination for her, she loved stories about them; if a gipsy encampment was near, she always begged the teachers to walk in that direction. Annie had a very vivid imagination, and in the days when she reigned as favourite in the school she used to make up stories for the express benefit of her companions. These stories, as a rule, always turned upon the gipsies. Many and many a time had the girls of Lavender House almost gasped with horror as Annie described the queer ways of these people. For her, personally, their wildness and their freedom had a certain fascination, and she was heard in her gayest moments to remark that she would rather like to be stolen and adopted by a gipsy tribe.
Whenever Annie had an opportunity she chatted with the gipsy wives, and allowed them to tell her fortune, and listened eagerly to their narratives. When a little child she had once for several months been under the care of a nurse who was a reclaimed gipsy, and this girl had given her all kinds of information about them. Annie often felt that she quite loved these wild people, and Mother Rachel was the first gipsy she cordially shrank from and disliked.
When the little girl started now on her wild-goose chase after Nan she was by no means devoid of a plan of action. The knowledge she had taken so many years to acquire came to her aid, and she determined to use it for Nan’s benefit. She knew that the gipsies, with all their wandering and erratic habits, had a certain attachment, if not for homes, at least for sites; she knew that as a rule they encamped over and over again in the same place; she knew that their wanderings were conducted with method, and their apparently lawless lives governed by strict self-made rules.
Annie made straight now for the encampment, which stood in a little dell at the other side of the fairies’ field. Here for weeks past the gipsies’ tents had been seen; here the gipsy children had played, and the men and women smoked and lain about in the sun.
Anne entered the small field now, but uttered no exclamation of surprise when she found that all the tents, with the exception of one, had been removed, and that this tent also was being rapidly taken down by a man and a girl, while a tall boy stood by, holding a donkey by the bridle.
Annie wasted no time in looking for Nan here. Before the girl and the man could see her, she darted behind a bush, and removing her little bag of money, hid it carefully under some long grass; then she pulled a very bright yellow sash out of her pocket, tied it round her blue cotton dress, and leaving her little shawl also on the ground, tripped gayly up to the tent.
She saw with pleasure that the girl who was helping the man was about her own size. She went up and touched her on the shoulder.
“Look here,” she said, “I want to make such a pretty play by-and-by – I want to play that I’m a gipsy girl. Will you give me your clothes, if I give you mine? See, mine are neat, and this sash is very handsome. Will you have them? Do. I am so anxious to play at being a gipsy.”
The girl turned and stared. Annie’s pretty blue print and gay sash were certainly tempting bait. She glanced at her father.
“The little lady wants to change,” she said in an eager voice.
The man nodded acquiescence, and the girl taking Annie’s hand, ran quickly with her to the bottom of the field.
“You don’t mean it, surely?” she said. “Eh, but I’m uncommon willing.”
“Yes, I certainly mean it,” said Annie. “You are a dear, good, obliging girl, and how nice you will look in my pretty blue cotton! I like that striped petticoat of yours, too, and that gay handkerchief you wear round your shoulders. Thank you so very much. Now, do I look like a real, real gipsy?”
“Your hair ain’t ragged enough, miss.”
“Oh, clip it, then; clip it away. I want to be quite the real thing. Have you got a pair of scissors?”
The girl ran back to the tent, and presently returned to shear poor Annie’s beautiful hair in truly rough fashion.
“Now, miss, you look much more like, only your arms are a bit too white. Stay, we has got some walnut-juice; we was just a-using of it. I’ll touch you up fine, miss.”
So she did, darkening Annie’s brown skin to a real gipsy tone.
“You’re, a dear, good girl,” said Annie, in conclusion; and as the girl’s father called her roughly at this moment, she was obliged to go away, looking ungainly enough in the English child’s neat clothes.