Her tone was not definitely impudent, but it was not, on the other hand, that of the trusty domestic, whether alarmed or otherwise. Mrs Bradley was interested.
‘I should like to speak to you alone, Cook,’ she said loudly, knowing that Cook was rather deaf. ‘Come out here, please. Shut the door. Now, are the maids alarmed?’
‘We was all frightened out of our seven senses.’
‘Where did the noise seem to come from?’
‘Right outside these very doors. You’ll get my notice in the morning. I’m not stopping on in an ’aunted ’ouse. There was none of these goings-on when poor Miss Murchan was here.’
Nothing more was heard of the ghost that night. By the following midday, however, the story was all over College, and ‘the ghost of Athelstan’ was freely discussed. Various explanations were offered by students from the other Halls, but each, as it was presented to the Athelstan students, was rejected by them as being out of conformation with the facts.
‘You ought to have heard it! I thought I should have fainted!’ was the burden of the Athelstan chorus. The talk during the day-light hours was amused, speculative and ribald, but when dinner was over in Hall and the sun was beginning to set, there was a marked disinclination among the students to go about the house, or to remain alone in study-bedrooms. The group which assembled in Miss Mathers’ room was typical of others on both floors. It consisted of the senior student herself, two or three of her year, three First-Years, and even the ostracized Miss Giggs, the mild Miss Morris and the ticket-of-leave Miss Cartwright.
‘What do you think the Warden will do if it happens again?’ asked Miss Morris.
‘I can tell you one thing she’s done already. Sacked Cook,’ volunteered Miss Cartwright. Like a great many of the more adventurous spirits, she was extremely popular in the servants’ hall, and so was in receipt of this bit of, so far, exclusive information.
‘Sacked Cook? But who cooked dinner?’ demanded Miss Morris.
‘The ghost,’ Miss Cartwright answered frivolously. ‘No, as a matter of fact, Mrs Croc. has promoted Bella. She “knows the apparatus,” as Mrs Croc. puts it.’
‘She made a very good job of the dinner,’ said Miss Mathers critically. ‘And now, if it’s all the same, I’ve got to get out some notes of lessons for next week.’
The guests departed unwillingly, keeping close together. Miss Giggs came back.
‘I wish you’d let me sit in here until supper,’ she said abruptly. Miss Mathers got out her notebooks and then looked up.
‘All right,’ she said. ’To be perfectly truthful, I’m not over and above anxious to be left alone, any more than you are.’
‘What do you think it was?’ asked Miss Giggs, lowering her voice and speaking hoarsely.
‘An owl caught up in one of the chimneys, or something of that sort, I fancy.’
‘Has the Warden said anything more?’
‘No, but I happen to know she thinks it was some of the Wattsdown men playing the fool. I heard her telling Miss Cloud so.’
‘What did Miss Cloud say?’
‘Oh, I think she agreed.’
‘It would be a good thing if it could be proved, though, wouldn’t it? Did she think Cook was bribed to open the door or something?’
‘Yes. Cook was rude to her this morning.’
‘I shouldn’t have thought anyone would dare.’
‘Yes. She told Mrs Bradley that there had been none of these disturbances until Miss Murchan’s illness.’
‘Where is Miss Murchan? Is she at her own home?’
‘I think she must be, but she is forbidden to have letters, Mrs Bradley said, so it isn’t any use our writing, and Mrs Bradley won’t give the address.’
In the study-bedroom apportioned to Kitty, the Three Musketeers were seated on the bed.
‘So you can’t take it, young Alice?’ said Kitty. ‘And, to tell you the truth, Dog,’ she added, before Alice could reply to this derogatory estimate of her powers of endurance, ‘I don’t blame her. Where’s the sense, anyway, of losing our beauty sleep? Suppose it is some of those silly goops from Wattsdown playing the fool, ten to one they won’t risk it again tonight, or ever any more, come to that. They might not get away with it another time.’
‘I didn’t sleep a wink last night,’ said Alice.
‘Don’t see how you could, with three of us trying to share your bed,’ said Laura. ‘So don’t make that an excuse. Now I’ve got my hockey stick, you’ve got a cricket-stump each, and if we can’t manage, between us, to knock any ghost for six, I shall be surprised.’
‘Don’t you believe in ghosts, Laura?’ Alice inquired. Laura grinned.
‘I don’t, but my Highland blood believes with its every drop,’ she confessed. ‘Nevertheless, reason still holds sway.’
‘Yes, until it gets round about midnight,’ said Kitty pointedly. ‘What I say is, I’m going to bed and to sleep, and you’ll see there’ll be no disturbance.’
She proved to be perfectly right, and by the following Sunday night the fears engendered by the ghost had given place to the less nebulous and more reasonable fears of School Practice.
Unlike some training colleges, Cartaret believed in getting School Practice over for all the students at the same time of year so far as this was possible, and for the last fortnight of the Christmas Term each student was assigned to a school.
Laura and Alice had been assigned to an establishment named immediately by the former the Village Institute.
It was an old-fashioned Church School, consisting of one main building with an annexe. The main building had been divided into classrooms by the expedient of putting partitions, mostly of glass, at intervals across the width. Thus the original three east and two west windows still lighted the whole of the building. The annexe consisted of a brick-built classroom and a cloakroom. Physical training, when the weather was too bad for it to be taken out of doors, took place in the Church Hall, on the opposite side of the playground.
Kitty’s lot was both more and less enviable. She had been assigned to the Council School from which children were brought to College for the Demonstration lessons. What she gained upon the roundabouts was lost upon the swings, for the Church School came under the heading, in Supervisors’ notebooks, of Special Difficulty, whereas the Dem. School, as the students called it, was given a mark of Alpha, and those unfortunates who were allotted to it for School Practice were expected, in the words of Miss Cartwright, to make good or bust. She herself had busted, she told an apprehensive and interested audience, on the Sunday night before The Terror (Laura’s name for School Practice) began.
When Monday dawned, students in various degrees of anxiety and nervousness arose (many of them before the rising bell had rung in the various Halls) and began to put ready the impedimenta (Laura’s carefully-chosen collective noun, much appreciated by Mrs Bradley when she heard it) for the day.
Of the Three Musketeers, Alice was the most nervous, Kitty the most ill-prepared. The latter set out at a quarter-past eight armed with her School Practice notebook, her time-table, a roll of large-scale paintings of various kinds of embroidery stitches, a stuffed fox (borrowed from the gardener’s drawing-room for a Nature lesson) and a twig of poplar. This last was in case the fox gave out on her half-way, she confided to the grinning Laura and the apprehensive Alice. She knew she couldn’t keep a lesson going for three-quarters of an hour, she concluded.
‘Old Kitty will break her own record if she keeps it going ten minutes,’ said Laura philosophically, as she and Alice walked to the bus stop, half a mile down the moorland road. In this estimate of Kitty’s powers of entertainment she did her friend grievous wrong, however, for Kitty’s first lesson, delivered with that aplomb and explosive energy which only the last stage of desperate fright can produce, went particularly well.