NEW DEVELOPMENTS
December 1, 1913. I haven't written a thing in this journal for over a
week, for a number of reasons. In the first place, I'd made up my mind
not to write till I had something worth writing about. In the second
place, we've been having some exams at school that took a lot of work to
prepare for. Third, Thanksgiving holidays came along, and we were all
pretty busy and had a lot of engagements. Altogether, I haven't had a
minute till now--_and_ something has happened that's rather interesting
to write about.
Carol is ever so much better at this journal business than I am. She
writes nearly every other day. But then, she doesn't mind writing about
all the little ordinary occurrences,--the things she does about the
housework and her studies and so on. But I simply can't do it. If I
can't tell about something a little out of the ordinary, I won't write
at all. And as nothing besides the usual ever happens in either one of
our two households (or at school or in the village!), I find myself
turning more and more to Louis and his affairs for interest.
It's strange (I've heard other people speak of the same thing, too) that
when you once get to thinking about a certain thing, all sorts of other
ideas and events connected with it will suddenly begin to appear. I
never gave a thought to Louis and his affairs before I began this
journal. He has always lived here, and we've always known him and never
thought there was anything strange about his folks. But now so many
queer little things have happened and so many strange ideas have come to
us (Carol and myself, I mean) about that house across the Green that it
seems as if there _must_ be some mystery right near our commonplace
lives after all.
Before I tell what happened, however, I must remark that the Imp has
been particularly exasperating lately. She got wind somehow or other
(at first we _couldn't_ think how) that Carol and I are keeping
journals. Later I discovered that it was because Carol had carelessly
left hers on the desk in our den, and had forgotten to padlock the door.
Carol is so thoughtless at times, because she gets to going about with
"her head in the clouds," as her Aunt Agatha says, and doesn't remember
half the things she ought to do. It's generally when she's thinking up
some verses. Carol _does_ compose very pretty verses. Miss Cullingford
has praised them highly. But she's always awfully absent-minded when
she's thinking about them.
Well, the way we learned that the Imp had discovered our journals was by
a large sheet of paper pinned to Carol's barn-door. This was written on
it:
November 29. How these precious autumn days fly by! Each one is
like a polished jewel. I made my bed and dusted my room at eight A.
M. Then I composed a sweet little poem on "Feeding the Pigs." After
that I slept in the hammock on the porch till lunchtime. The days
are all too short for these many duties!
Of course we were furious. Carol confessed to me that she had left her
journal open on the desk in the den, and the last entry was awfully like
what that little wretch had written, only Carol had spoken of composing
a poem on "Feeding the Pigeons." She _had_ slept on the porch all
morning, because it was a lovely mild day and I was away with Mother at
a luncheon in Bridgeton. But she hadn't mentioned this in her journal.
It is perfectly useless to argue with the Imp, or to scold or reason
with her. She can go you one better every single time. We concluded that
the best thing to do was ignore the incident entirely. So we left the
paper hanging on the barn-door till the wind blew it away. A course of
action like that makes the Imp madder than if you got purple in the face
with fury. I've advised Carol not to leave her journal in the den any
more, but to keep it in her room, and she says she will.
All this, however, isn't telling what happened to Louis. He told us
about it this afternoon while we were resting on our veranda after a
hot session of pitching the basketball about. After a while we just had
to sit down and get our breath, and the Imp strolled off by herself
somewhere. It was then that Louis told us the strange thing that
happened yesterday.
It seems that his Aunt Yvonne has gone to New York on a visit for a few
days, and he has been alone with his Uncle John and the servant.
Yesterday afternoon, about five o'clock, a boy rode up from the village
on a bicycle with a telegram for his uncle. The old gentleman opened it,
but couldn't read it because he had mislaid his glasses. So he got Louis
to read it to him. Louis says the thing was a cablegram from some place
in France--he can't remember the name--and that it was the queerest
message. It ran like this:
Time almost ripe. Have you the necessary papers? Sail next month.
When his uncle heard this he became terribly excited and began to walk
up and down the room very fast. But when Louis asked him what it all
meant, all he would say was:
"It is not for you to inquire or for me to explain just yet, Monsieur!"
Louis says his uncle often calls him "monsieur," and he can't understand
why. He thinks it's generally when the old gentleman forgets himself or
is excited. But it makes Louis feel very queer.
After that his uncle wouldn't say anything more, but Louis says he began
to rummage around through all his letters and papers, and looked through
all his books and in all the closets, evidently hunting for something he
couldn't find. And the more he hunted, the more nervous and excitable he
grew. Every once in a while he would exclaim, "Ah, why is not that
Yvonne here?" By bedtime he was pretty well worked up, for it was
evident that he couldn't find what he was searching for. Louis tried and
tried to get him to explain and let him help in the hunt. But the old
gentleman would only mutter, "No, no! That cannot be!" Louis says he
doesn't think his uncle slept all night, because he heard him rummaging
about in all sorts of places till nearly morning. To-day he seems
terribly used up. He just sits in his chair by the window, staring out
and watching for his daughter to come. Louis says he had to go down to
the village at eight o'clock last night with a telegram, telling his
Aunt Yvonne to come home at once.
How mysterious it all sounds! Louis declares he can't imagine what it
means, and it makes him very uneasy, because he is almost certain that
it is something concerning himself. He says he sometimes thinks his
uncle is planning to send him to France before he gets much older, to
complete his studies there and to become a French citizen, and he
doesn't want to go.
My idea was that perhaps he had some relatives there and that they
wanted him to come back. But Louis says his uncle has often told him
that he hasn't any relatives living. And if he had, he says there's no
reason why there should be all this secrecy about it. But he can't
understand who the people are with whom his uncle is corresponding.
Carol's opinion was that perhaps Louis was a descendant of some titled
person,--a count or a marquis or something like that,--and that these
people are trying to bring him back to his legal title and estates.
Louis simply hooted at that. He says that his great grandfather was a
plain "monsieur" when he came over here long ago; that he never had been
anything else and didn't want to be. So that Carol's idea was all
nonsense. Carol is always romancing like that, and generally getting
laughed at. Just at this point the Imp came suddenly around the corner
of the veranda and demanded:
"What are you talking about? I warrant dollars to doughnuts it's about
Louis."
That child has a perfectly uncanny way of lighting on just the thing you
don't care to have her know about. She's a veritable mind-reader. None
of us cared at that particular moment to explain what we were
discussing, so no one said a word. Meanwhile the Imp eyed us with a
grin. And before any one could think of something to say that would
change the subject, she exploded this bomb in our midst:
"Louis' Aunt Yvonne has come home. She's having a fit!"
Louis just scooted for his own house as fast as he could. We asked her
how she knew Miss Meadows was having a fit, and she said:
"Because I saw her drive up and get out of the hack and run up the
steps. I had climbed a tree in their side yard to look into an oriole's
nest, and I heard her open the door and call out a lot of things in
French to old Mr. Meadows."
The Imp is terribly quick about picking up languages, and she has teased
Louis into teaching her quite a little French, which he declared to us
she picked up with lightning speed. It makes Carol and me furious
sometimes to feel that she has this advantage over us, for we haven't
come to French yet in high school, and are so busy digging out our Latin
that we haven't either time or interest to learn another language on the
side. Well, it humiliated me to pieces to have to ask her what Miss
Yvonne said, but I swallowed my pride and did so. All the little wretch
answered, as she walked away, was:
"Wouldn't you like to know?"
[Illustration: "Wouldn't you like to know?" she replied, exasperatingly]
We didn't see anything more of Louis to-day, and Carol and I are just
burning up with curiosity. I could shake the Imp till her teeth
chattered!
There was a cosy group gathered about the open fire in the Birdseys'
big, comfortable, and not too tidy living-room. At a large center table,
drawn close to the blaze, sat Carol and Sue, scribbling away for dear
life in two large, fat note-books and covering the table with many trial
sheets of mathematical figuring. They were exact opposites in
appearance. Sue was tall and slim to the point of angularity. She had
dark eyes, and her dark hair was coiled heavily about her head. Carol
was short and plump, with dreamy blue eyes and wavy auburn hair that
still hung in a thick braid.
On the davenport, curled up like a kitten in one corner, sat the Imp,
or "Bobs," as she was generally called,--her chin propped in her hands,
a book balanced against her knees. In sharp contrast to the other two
girls was her tiny body and dark, straight hair, and the big blue eyes
that could at one moment gaze with liquid, angelic candor, and at the
next snap with impish mischief. There was mischief in them at the
moment, as she stared reflectively at the two girls bent over the table.
Unaware of her gaze, they scribbled on, comparing notes at intervals.
"Do you get the answer 4ab(ab+2bm) ½ to your third problem?" presently
inquired Sue, without looking up.
"No, I don't!" moaned Carol in depressed tones, pushing aside her work
and running her fingers through her hair. "I don't get anything at all."
"Well, don't worry. Let's see what's wrong. Hand over your work and I'll
compare it with mine," said her companion soothingly. She dragged
Carol's note-book toward her and compared it with her own.
"Oh, I see what you've done!" she exclaimed in a moment. "In the first
equation you didn't put down--"
At this instant the Imp, whose eyes had been smoldering with suppressed
mischief, yawned loudly, stretched herself, and remarked with apparent
irrelevance:
"It's a long day when you don't go to school, isn't it?"
Both girls sat up with a jerk and surveyed her sternly.
"Do you mean to say that you haven't been to school to-day?" they
demanded in a breath, and Sue added, "I'd like to know why not."
"I had a bad headache this morning, Susan," explained the Imp sweetly.
"Mother let me stay home. I was all right by two o'clock, though. Louis
and I had a game of basketball before it began to rain."
Her companions glanced at each other with a meaning expression, none of
which was lost on the Imp. With a grin of satisfaction, she proceeded:
"His aunt called him in just before we finished, and he didn't come out
again."
With a visible effort, Sue inquired:
"Did he say why he wasn't at school to-day? We thought it rather queer
when he didn't come, but perhaps, after the strange thing that happened
yesterday--"
This was precisely the trap into which the Imp had planned that they
should fall.
"I didn't ask him," she remarked, with exasperating calm.
"No doubt you didn't," retorted Carol heatedly, "but perhaps he told you
without being asked."
"Perhaps he did," returned the Imp, "and perhaps he told me a lot more.
However, I must say bye-bye for the present. I've got to go and study my
lessons somewhere where I won't be disturbed!"
She scrambled down and sailed out of the room, waving airily to them
from the doorway.
"Isn't she simply maddening!" exclaimed Sue. "The idea of saying she had
to go and study! I never knew her to study a thing in my life. She
seems to know her lessons by instinct."
"But what _do_ you suppose Louis told her?" mused Carol.
"Not much, or I miss my guess," returned Sue. "She's only trying to
tease us. But it is strange that he stayed home to-day. Something
serious must be the matter. He hasn't missed a day this term before."
"But if it was serious," argued Carol, "why should he be out playing
with the Imp?"
At this moment the door opened and a tall, slender boy of seventeen or
eighteen strolled in, his hands in his overcoat pockets, his cheeks and
overcoat still wet with the driving rain.
"Hello, girls!" he remarked, warming his hands by the blaze of the open
fire.
"Hello, Dave!" they replied. "Where did you come from?"
"Been over to Louis's. Queer thing about it, too," he commented,
dropping down on the vacant davenport.
"What?" they gasped in breathless chorus.
He looked at them inquiringly.
"Why all the astonishment on _your_ part?" he demanded. "What do you
know about it, anyway?"
"Oh, a lot of queer things seem to be happening to Louis lately,"
explained Carol. "But go on! Tell us all about it."
"Well, Father didn't need me to-night, so I thought I'd stroll over to
Louis's and see if he wanted a little session with that higher
mathematics course that he and I are working at together on our own
hook. I rang at the front door several times, but didn't get any
response. Then I tried the back door, with no better luck. There was a
light in the parlor, too, but, on glancing in the window, I saw that no
one was there. Mr. Meadows had evidently gone to bed. I had just started
out to the barn, thinking that Louis might be in his work-room there,
when I noticed a light in one of the cellar windows. I then felt sure
that Louis was down there, clearing up or getting vegetables for his
aunt, so I went over and peeped in, thinking to give him a surprise. It
was _I_ who got the surprise, though!"
"What did you see?" demanded Sue in an awestricken whisper.
"Funniest sight ever! There Miss Yvonne was standing with a lamp in her
hand, and Louis, with a pickaxe and shovel, had pried out one of the
stones in the foundation near the big chimney and was poking around in
the hole he'd made, while Miss Yvonne stared into it, those big black
eyes of hers as round as saucers. While I was still looking, she shook
her head, motioned Louis to put the stone back, and pointed to another a
little farther along. I began to feel as if I'd lit on something that
wasn't any business of mine, so instead of knocking on the window as I'd
intended, I just got up and came away. Guess they must be hunting for
buried treasure or something. Never knew they suspected the presence of
any in their old ranch. Louis didn't look as if he were particularly
enjoying the job, however."
"Well, that's about all," he ended, suddenly remembering what, in the
excitement of the little adventure, he had momentarily forgotten,--his
superior pose toward all girls and toward his sister in particular. Then
he vanished swiftly out of the room, lest they be moved to ask him any
further questions and lest he be tempted to answer.
After he had gone, Sue and Carol stared at each other in a maze of
excited conjecture.
"What do you make of it?" sighed Carol.
"I don't make anything of it," declared Sue. "It sounds too mysterious
for words. But I know this much. They weren't hunting for buried
treasure. It's for papers of some kind. I'm sure of it. But what can
they be about, and why should they be in the cellar?"
But Carol was off on another tack.
"At last we'll have something worth while to write about in our
journals," she remarked. "Don't you ever think again, Susette Birdsey,
that nothing exciting happens in our lives! I can fill up three or four
pages about it."
Her companion assented absently.
"Do you realize," she suddenly exclaimed, "that here's where we got way
ahead of the Imp? Serves her right for playing us such a mean trick and
going out of the room. I call it a piece of downright luck!"