A Popular Schoolgirl by Angela Brazil (ebooks online reader txt) 📕

"I didn't say I knew everything; but I'm certain this is bugle all the same, and I stick to it!"

Bess's usually sweet voice had an obstinate note in it for once. She seemed determined to defend her botanical trenches.

"Go it—hammer and tongs!" laughed Kitty. "I'll back the winner!"

"And I'll take the case into court," said Linda, snatching the flower from her schoolfellow's hand and running on to show it to Miss Strong, who was an authority on the subject.

The mistress paused to let the others overtake her.

"Bugle, certainly," she decided emphatically. "The first bit we've found this year. It's out early. Self-heal? Oh dear no! The two are rather alike and are sometimes mistaken one for another, but no botanist would dream of confusing them. Bugle is a spring and early summer flower, and self-heal blooms much later. Make a note in your nature diaries that you found bugle on 15th April."

Considerably squashed, Ingred had for once to acknowledge her botany to be at fault, and, though Bess did not triumph, Francie gave Kitty a poke and the pair giggled.

"Well, of course, one can't be always right," said Ingred airily.

"So it seems; though some people set themselves up for wiseacres!" sniggered Kitty.

Ingred fell behind with Verity and let the others walk on. It was only a trifling incident, but she was annoyed to notice how openly and instantly the girls had sided with Bess. She felt too glum for speech, and as Verity was tired and disinclined to talk, they tramped along in silence.

They had been winding steadily uphill for some miles and were now on the heath from which Ryton took its name. The ground fell steeply to the west, showing glimpses of a great river in the valley below, where the still-leafless woods had burst here and there into faint tokens of spring. Beyond the river rose the characteristic grey hills of the neighborhood, with their stone walls and sheepfolds and stretches of moorland, looking a little hazy in the afternoon light, but with patches of yellow gorse catching the sunshine. Ryton was a delightful little village. Its cottages, built long ago by local craftsmen, seemed absolutely in harmony with the landscape: walls, dormers, and mullions and long undulating roofs were all of limestone and conveyed an impression of sturdy self-respect. The rain-worn, lichen-covered roofs had weathered to charming irregularities of form and lovely tones of color. Ivy and clematis climbed over the porches and twisted themselves round the low chimneys. The little gardens were bright with daffodils, mezereon, and flowering currant.

To the girls, somewhat tired and decidedly hungry, the main focus of the village was a long iron post which stretched out over the street and supported a rudely-painted sign of a bird, whose species might have been a puzzle to an ornithologist but for the words "Pelican Inn" that appeared beneath it.

In the long-ago days before railroads, the little hostelry had been a stopping-place for stage-coaches, and a wooden board still set forth that it supplied "Posting in all its branches." The landlord would no doubt have been much dismayed if any wag had entered and demanded a chaise and post-horses to drive to Gretna Green, and a shabby motor in his stable-yard showed that he marched with the times.

Miss Strong, on consulting her watch, decided that her party might safely indulge in a halt of half an hour, and ordered tea for nine persons. The inn, built on a type common in the district, was entered by an archway leading straight into a courtyard. A door on the right led to the bar, and a door on the left to the coffee-room. To this latter more aristocratic quarter Miss Strong conducted her pupils. Some of them had never before been in a small village hostelry, and were much amused at the quaint old parlor with its sporting prints, its glass cases of stuffed squirrels and badgers, and its horsehair-seated chairs with crochet antimacassars hung over the backs. The atmosphere was certainly rather redolent of stale beer and tobacco, but a bunch of crimson wall-flowers on the table did their best to spread a pleasant perfume. The tea, when, after much delay, it arrived, was delicious. The Pelican was a farm as well as an inn, and the rosy-faced servant girl carried in cream, fresh butter, and red-currant jam to the coffee-room. She apologized for the absence of cake, but it was an omission that nobody minded. Upland air gives good appetites, and, though Miss Strong reminded her flock that this was only a meal by the way, and that supper was ordered for them at Dropwick, they set to work as if they would taste nothing more till midnight. There was something so delightfully fresh and out of the common in having tea at a wayside inn; they felt true pilgrims of the road, and civilization and school seemed to have faded into a far background. The love of travel is in the blood of both Celt and Anglo-Saxon; our forefathers visited shrines for the joy of the journey as well as for religious motives, and maybe our Bronze Age ancestors, who flocked to the great Sun Festivals at Stonehenge or Avebury Circles, derived pleasure from the change of scene as well as a blessing from the Druids. The Romans, those great pioneers of travel, had opened out the district eighteen centuries ago, and laid a straight, paved road from Wendcester to Pursborough; the remains of their fortified camps and of their villas were still left to mark their era. The foss-way, leading from Ryton-on-the-Heath to Dropwick, was their handiwork, and our pilgrims were to march on the identical track of some old Roman legion.

It must be owned that when tea was finished they were very unwilling pilgrims, and would gladly have spent the night at The Pelican and have slept in the funny, musty, low-ceiled little bedrooms upstairs.

"Couldn't we possibly stop here?" implored Verity.

But Miss Strong, having booked rooms in Dropwick, was adamant.

"Besides which I wouldn't trust the beds here," she remarked. "So early in the year they're almost bound to be damp, and we don't want any of you laid up with rheumatic fever as the result of our trip. I prefer to give a wayside inn a week's notice if I mean to sleep there in April. Nobody has had enough coal during the winter to keep fires going in spare bedrooms. That front room was as chilly as a country church! You won't feel so tired, Verity, when you're on your feet again, and it's all downhill to Dropwick."

The Temperance Hotel, where the girls finally stayed their weary feet, was quite modern and unromantic, though well aired and fairly comfortable. Ingred, whom the fates had placed to sleep with Nora, had a trying night, for her obstreperous bedfellow had a habit of flinging out her arms, and of appropriating the larger half of the clothes, leaving poor Ingred to wake shivering. Also, the bed sloped towards the middle, so that both girls had to poise themselves on a kind of hillside, and were constantly rolling down and colliding. These troubles, however, were only incidental in the Pilgrimage, and certainly might have been worse.

On comparing notes at breakfast nearly everybody had had similar experiences. Miss Strong confessed to a patent mattress with a broken spring jutting up in the center, round which she had been obliged to lie in a curve. Linda and Francie had slept near the water-cistern, which alarmed them with weird noises, and Bess and Kitty, trying to open their window wider, had found it lacked sash-cords, and descended like a guillotine, sending the prop that had upheld it, flying into the street. Though they groused at the time, the girls laughed as they discussed these details over the eggs and bacon. The sun was shining and they felt rested, and quite ready once more to shoulder their kit