THE LETTER IN CIPHER.
“‘School again, school again,
From a foreign shore!
And O, it fills my heart with pain
To see its walls once more!’”
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.