"London," announced Mary Price, "is just like a moody person. When she
is sunny and warm, she is so charming one would never dream how black
and ugly she could be."
"She's in a very good humor this morning," exclaimed Billie, trying to
bottle up her overflowing spirits until the others had finished their
toilets, that they might all go forth together to see the sights.
It was the morning after the opera and their thoughts were still taken
up with the great occasion. Nancy hummed the wedding chorus as she
twisted her curls around her fingers, and smiled lovingly at her image
in the glass.
"Are you quite ready, now, children?" said Miss Campbell suddenly; a
question which caused the Motor Maids to smile secretly, since Miss
Helen herself had been keeping them all waiting some quarter of an hour,
while she arranged her hat and veil, drew on her immaculate pearl-gray
gloves and pinned a jabot of fine Irish lace at her neck.
"What are we to see first, Billie, dear? Have you arranged a schedule
for the day? You are to be guide, remember."
"I had planned Westminster Abbey," said Billie, "if that's agreeable to
all concerned."
It was decidedly a delightful thing to do, and two at least of the five
tourists were thrilled at the notion. All her life Mary had longed to
see the great cathedral, and Elinor, also, was moved with a deep
pleasure at the thought. Nancy, gay butterfly that she was, was not so
overcome by the solemnity of the visit.
"Has each person some special thing that she wants to see most? If so,
let her wishes be known before we get there, so plans may be made
accordingly," announced Billie.
"I want to see the Stone of Scone where all the kings have been
crowned," observed Elinor.
"I want to see the tomb of Queen Elizabeth," put in Nancy, after deep
thought.
"I know why," cried Billie. "Because she had several hundreds of
dresses."
"You're just a tease, Billie. It's because she was a great queen."
"I want to see the Poets' Corner," announced Mary.
"We shall certainly see all those things and a great deal more," said
Miss Campbell.
They entered the Abbey by the western door and stood silently in a
little group, looking up at the great stone arches which seemed to them
like the spreading limbs of ancient forest trees. A pale ray of sunlight
flickered in through one of the enormous windows; but the great church
was dim and gloomy with age. Here lay most of England's dead kings and
queens and her great men.
With a Baedeker in one hand and a guide-book of the Abbey in the other,
Billie led her friends from chapel to chapel. Even Nancy was subdued and
quiet in "this silent meeting place of the great dead of eight
centuries." Mary crept along like a little gray mouse, poking her nose
into this tomb and that, and never speaking a word. She intended to
write an essay next winter at West Haven High School called "A Visit to
Westminster Abbey," and win a prize for the best thesis of the year.
For hours they wandered through the ancient church. Lunch time passed
and they had not even felt the pangs of hunger.
"Just think," Mary was saying, "Henry VI. was crowned here when he was
only nine years old, and the Archbishop put a gold crown on his poor
little head; and Richard II., who was just a boy, too, fainted from
fatigue when he was crowned and had to be carried out; and Queen Anne
cried because her crown hurt her head; and George IV. was almost
strangled by his heavy coronation robes."
"All of which argues," remarked Billie, "that it's much more agreeable
and comfortable to be a Motor Maid than a royal personage."
A middle-aged woman dressed in black and a young girl who had wandered
up to the tomb of Aveline of Lancaster, where the four girls and Miss
Campbell had paused, exchanged an amused glance. As they were moving
slowly away, Billie called softly:
"I think you dropped something."
She had picked up a beautiful little sapphire brooch which had broken
from its fastenings and lay shining like a bit of blue sky on the
ancient gray floor.
"Oh, you are very kind," exclaimed the girl hurrying back. "It is my
favorite brooch. I would not have lost it for worlds. Thank you very,
very much."
"What charming manners," thought Billie.
"How pretty she is," thought Nancy.
"She is very high-bred looking," was Elinor's comment to herself.
And Mary thought:
"If she were turned to stone and laid on top of a tomb with her hands
crossed, she would look very much like Aveline of Lancaster."
"I think you must be Americans," said the young girl, smiling into
Billie's face with a kind of shy frankness.
"We are," said Billie; "and you are English, of course."
"Half English." She paused. "I thank you again, very much."
Then she turned away rather reluctantly, the girls thought, and they
were sorry, too, for some reason.
"Isn't she sweet?" Mary remarked as the girl disappeared from the
chapel.
"So simple, too," Miss Campbell observed. "So unassuming and such plain,
nice clothes."
"I could almost believe she was poor from her clothes," put in Nancy,
"but her face doesn't look poor."
"And, pray, how can you tell whether a person's face looks poor or
rich?" demanded Billie, always ready to enter into an argument with her
friend.
"Don't you know the difference between a poor face and a rich one? Rich
faces have a used-to-things expression and poor people always give
themselves away by looking surprised."
A most delicious laugh broke into this grave explanation of Nancy
Brown's. The young girl had come back.
"I beg your pardon. I didn't mean to be eavesdropping," she explained,
"but we have a card that admits us into the room where the wax effigies
are kept. You didn't know there were wax works in Westminster Abbey, did
you? And we thought perhaps you might like to go with us to see them.
You know when royal persons died their bodies used to be carried through
the streets for the people to see. But later they stopped that practice
and effigies of wax were borne instead. And these are some of the
effigies. Queen Elizabeth is there----"
"Oh, do let's go," cried Nancy.
It ended, therefore, by their accepting the invitation with much
pleasure, and presently they found themselves with the English girl and
the older woman, who was called "Fraeulein Bloch," and a verger, in a
room over an ancient chapel. Here were laid out in state the waxen
effigies of Queen Elizabeth, Charles II., William III. and Queen Mary,
his wife, and Queen Anne. Certainly there was something very weird and
ghastly about these wax images of kings and queens dead and gone, in all
their royal regalia, crowded into glass cases around the wall. There was
a battered old wax-doll likeness of the great Queen Elizabeth arrayed in
faded finery, and an apathetic Charles in blue and red velvet robes
trimmed with real point lace.
William and Mary were leaning up against each other sociably and
lovingly in a case all by themselves; and close by was a large, heavy
Queen Anne, an elaborate curly wig on her head and on her face a haughty
fixed stare.
Whether it was the sight of all this past glory now so crumpled and
faded, or whether it was that our tourists had eaten nothing since
breakfast, it is hard to say. The Motor Maids always blamed what
happened on the Duchess of Richmond. At any rate, Mary Price was
standing just in front of that grotesque effigy, which was dressed in
the very robes she had worn in life at the coronation of Queen
Anne,--and by her side perched a stuffed parrot, said to have lived with
her forty years,--when the young girl suddenly turned very pale and
slipped down to the floor. So quietly did she fall that the others, who
were viewing a jaunty effigy of Admiral Nelson, did not notice the
little gray figure lying in a heap on the chapel floor.
It was growing late and the verger reminded them that they must be
leaving before closing time. Laughing and talking softly together, they
filed slowly out of the gloomy old place and the door was locked. And
there all the time lay little Mary, as pale and stark as any of the wax
kings and queens in the glass cases above her.
It all came back to them afterward like a curious dream, how they
happened not to miss their friend even when they had returned to the
church. In a remote corner somewhere a service was evidently being held.
The sound of the organ and of boys chanting floated to them. Following
their new friend and Fraeulein Bloch, they presently entered the chapel
and joined a few scattered worshippers kneeling at their devotions.
It was Billie who first noticed Mary's absence, and she was rather
surprised, because Mary was more religious than the others and loved
these ceremonious services.
"Perhaps she is snooping about in some of the tombs," she thought, and,
whispering a word to Miss Campbell, she slipped out of the chapel and
began a search for her friend. But Mary was nowhere in sight in the
vast, dim place, and, with a somewhat anxious feeling, Billie hastened
to join the others, who had now left the chapel and were waiting for
her.
"Where is Mary?" she demanded.
But no one had seen Mary. No one could remember to have seen her for a
long time. Miss Campbell was not as uneasy as Billie. She was sure that
Mary could take care of herself. She was a reliable little thing and
knew the address. If she had lost them, the child knew just what to
do,--take a hansom and drive straight to their lodgings.
"I dislig to alarb de ladies," here put in Fraeulein Bloch, "bud de
young lady might be by dat room loged."
"What!" cried Miss Helen; "locked in the room with all those horrible
wax figures that look like corpses! Oh, heavens, where is a guide?
Suppose the child has been left in that dreadful place? It's enough to
make her go mad."
Filled with alarm, they hastened to find a verger, but there was no one
about. Finally they discovered a very old man with a big bunch of keys.
"Come with us at once to the room with the wax effigies," cried Miss
Campbell. "A young girl has been locked in there by mistake."
"Have you a permit, Madam?"
"Permit! Permit!" cried the distracted woman. "Do you think I care for
permits when one of my children is locked up in a roomful of dead kings
and queens and parrots? Go instantly and get the key."
"It is against the rules, Madam."
Their new friend, whose name they still did not know, now drew the old
man aside and spoke to him in a low voice. Then a most remarkable change
came over his aged face.
"The ladies will please follow," he said with cringing politeness, as he
selected a key on the bunch and led the way to the distant chapel where
the wax figures were kept.
It was all over very quickly now, but the girls never forgot the picture
their friend made when the door was opened. She was kneeling on the
floor in a pale shaft of light, the only one in all that gloomy place.
"Mary, my darling," cried poor Miss Campbell, hastening to her, "were
you terribly frightened?"
Mary did not reply at first. She seemed startled by the sudden entrance
of her rescuers. She told them afterward that the silence of the chapel
was so deep it seemed to have entered into her very soul, and after the
first few dreadful moments of her return to consciousness, when she
found she had been left behind, she had not been frightened, only
overwhelmed and pressed down by the weight of the vast quietude. And
Mary was silent now, as her friends gathered around her and helped her
to rise.
"I am quite well," she kept repeating with a faint little smile.
"I am quite to blame," said the English girl, taking Mary's hand. "It
was I who enticed you into this dismal place."
"No, no," protested Mary. "The real reason of it was because we forgot
to eat lunch."
Lunch? They had never thought of it, and immediately five American
ladies became desperately weak in the knees and shaky. At least two of
them turned pale at the mere suggestion that they had had no nourishment
since nine that morning, and one of them, the smallest, most fragile and
oldest, cried:
"What a poor excuse for a chaperone I am, that I should let my girls
come to the point of starvation and never even notice it!"
"You must be very, very hungry," said the English girl in her beautiful,
cultivated voice, which made the other girls thrill every time she
spoke. "It is quite tea time, now, is it not, Fraeulein? I have a
delightful idea," she exclaimed impulsively. "You must have tea with me.
You must all go in the car. It is just outside, and this poor dear shall
not say she is starved when she visits England."
"But----" protested Miss Campbell.
"No, no. I really wish it very much. You will come, will you not?"
exclaimed this impulsive and charming person, seizing Miss Campbell's
hand.
Thus it happened that Mary's imprisonment with the wax effigies resulted
in the most wonderful tea party that the Motor Maids or Miss Campbell
either, for that matter, had ever been to in all their lives.