Witch Winnie's Mystery, or The Old Oak Cabinet Part 1

Witch Winnie's Mystery, or The Old Oak Cabinet.

by Elizabeth W. Champney.

INTRODUCTION.

For those who have not read the first volume of this series, "Witch Winnie, the Story of a King's Daughter."

We four girls,

Adelaide Armstrong, Milly Roseveldt, Emma Jane Anton, Nellie Smith,

had been chums at boarding school.

(Let it here be explained that although my name is Nellie, I am never called anything but Tib by my friends.)

We occupied a little suite of apartments in the tower, consisting of a small study parlor from which opened two double bedrooms and one single one. Our family was called the Amen Corner, because our initials, arranged as an acrostic, spelled the word Amen, and because we were a set of little Pharisees, prigs, and "digs," not particularly admired by the rest of the school, but exceedingly virtuous and preternaturally perfect in our own estimation.

This was our status at the beginning of our first school year together, and the change that came over us, owing to the introduction into our circle of Witch Winnie, the greatest scape-grace in the most mischief-making set of the school, the "Queen of the Hornets," has already been told. A quieting, earnest influence acted upon Winnie, and a natural, merry-hearted love of fun reacted on us, and we were all the better for the companions.h.i.+p.

The greatest practical result outside the change in our own characters was the formation, by the uniting of the "Amen Corner" and the "Hornets," of a Ten of King's Daughters, who founded the Home of the Elder Brother, for little children. This inst.i.tution was adopted by our parents, who formed themselves into a board of managers, but left much of the working of the enterprise in our hands.[1] The Home prospered during the first year of its existence in a truly wonderful manner. It was undenominational and unendowed. No rich church or wealthy man stood behind it. It was entirely dependent on the efforts of a few young girls, and on the voluntary subscriptions of benevolent people. But it grew day by day. Little ripples of influence widened out from our circle to others. During the vacation our ten separated, and at each of their homes they formed other tens, who worked for the same object. Every one who visited the Home was interested in its plan of work, which was to help the poor without pauperizing them; to aid struggling women whose husbands had died, or were in hospitals or prisons, and who could have no homes of their own, by providing them with a subst.i.tute for the baby farming, so extensively carried on in the tenement districts, by offering them, on the same low terms, a sweet and wholesome shelter for their little ones. Some wondered why we charged these poor women anything; why the _half_ charity was not made a free gift. But wiser philanthropists saw the superior kindness of this demand. The women whom we wished to aid were not beggars, but that worthy, struggling cla.s.s who, overburdened, but still desperately striving, must sink in the conflict unless helped, but who still wished to do all in their power for their children, and brought the small sum asked for their board with a proud and happy self-respect.

[1] This Home is a truthful picture of one really founded by a band of little girls--the Messiah Home, at 4 Rutherford Place, Stuyvesant Square, New York, which is aided in its good work by different circles of King's Daughters.

One of our own members, Emma Jane Anton, on graduating at Madame's, became matron of the Home, a.s.sisted by dear Miss Prillwitz, formerly our teacher of botany, from whose heart this beautiful thought had blossomed.

The Home was just across the park from the school building and we frequently visited it; but though we were all deeply interested in this sweet charity, it did not interfere with our studies or with a great deal of girlish, innocent fun. Since Winnie had become my room-mate we had lost much of the prestige which was formerly the boast of the Amen Corner, and after Emma Jane left the little single room, Madame, feeling that our influence had done much for Winnie, sent another of the "Hornets" into our midst.

We had accepted and adopted Winnie with all our hearts, for her many lovable qualities, and above all for her genuine good fellows.h.i.+p and affectionate nature, but Cynthia Vaughn was a very different character.

There was nothing but enjoyable fun in any of Winnie's tricks; Cynthia's were mean and malicious. We never liked her, and she openly showed her scorn of Winnie and of me, while she fawned in a hypocritical manner, striving to ingratiate herself with aristocratic Adelaide and with gentle Milly, who was the wealthiest girl at Madame's.

We were no longer the best behaved set in school, and an acrostic formed from our initials could not now be made to spell anything; but the name "Amen Corner" clung to the little apartment, and Madame still looked upon us with favor. She knew that Adelaide and Milly, Winnie and I, were all, beneath our mischief, true-hearted, earnest girls, and she charitably hoped for great improvement in Cynthia.

There was one person who did not believe in us--Miss Noakes, our corridor teacher. She believed that Winnie was filled with all iniquity and that Adelaide was far too attractive to be allowed the confidence which Madame reposed in her. It was Miss Noakes's great grievance that she could never discover the least approach to a flirtation in Adelaide's conduct. I believe that she fairly gloated with antic.i.p.ated triumph when Madame engaged a handsome young artist to take charge of our art department, and that from this time she watched and peeped and listened with an industry which would have done credit to a better cause. She seemed to argue that as no lover of the beautiful could fail to appreciate Adelaide's beauty, therefore our artist must admire Adelaide, and in this deduction she was not far from the truth, but she ought not to have taken it for granted that Adelaide must be equally pleased with her admirer. How her espionage tracked us through several innocent tricks and capers, and was finally foiled by our beloved Winnie; how the great mystery of the robbery for a time brought doubt and suspicion between four dear friends who would, and did, go through fire and water for one another; and how, in spite of doubt and jealousy and trouble, our love and devotion for one another: burned brightly and steadily on to the end of the school year, and into the life beyond--this little book will tell.

That the events which I am about to relate may be better understood, I subjoin a plan of the "Amen Corner."

[Ill.u.s.tration: PLAN OF THE =AMEN CORNER=]

WITCH WINNIE'S MYSTERY.

CHAPTER I.

THE FIRST ESCAPADE OF THE SEASON.

[Ill.u.s.tration]

"Girls!" Winnie exclaimed excitedly as we entered our study parlor after recitation, "I am wild with curiosity to know what they are doing in the hospital. All the morning, while I have been trying to study, there has been the greatest thumping and b.u.mping going on in there. I wonder whether they are chaining down an insane patient, or if the ghostly nurses are having a war dance."

"Why didn't you look and see?" Cynthia Vaughn asked, pointing to the transom over a locked door, which formerly opened from our parlor into the hospital ward.

Madame had made abundant provision for sickness in the original arrangement of the school building. A large sky-lighted room had been set apart as an infirmary, and a little suite of rooms in the great tower adjoining as the physician's quarters. But it was rare indeed that any one was ill at Madame's, and when a pupil was taken sick, her parents usually took her home at once. So the doctor, having nothing to do but to hear the recitations in physiology, preferred not to reside in the school building, and the pretty suite of rooms, consisting of a parlor and three bedrooms, was a.s.signed to us, and the hospital proper was used as a trunk room. Winnie always maintained that ghosts of medical students experimented there in the night watches on imaginary cases of vivisection, that corpses were embalmed, and shrieks and howls were to be heard, in the wee small hours, while phantom lights fumed blue on the other side of the transom, and sickly odors of ether and other drugs penetrated through the keyhole. We all laughed at Winnie's phantasms, but there were none of us so brave as to care to visit that room after nightfall. The trunks looked too much like coffins, and there were dresses of Madame's sewed up in bags made of sheets, and suspended from the roof, which had the uncanny look of corpses of people who had hanged themselves.

It was broad daylight now, and we were not at all nervous, and Cynthia remarked scornfully, "Winnie has told us so many of her bug-a-boo stories that she has come to actually believe in them herself. She dare not for her life look through that transom to see what occasions the noise in the hospital."

"You dare me to do it?" Winnie asked, confronting Cynthia with flas.h.i.+ng eyes.

"Don't, Winnie," I pled. "We have no right to peep."

Winnie hesitated.

"I told you so," Cynthia said provokingly. "She dares not look. It is only a lumber room. The noise was probably made by some cat chasing a rat around."

"It would take a whole army of cats to make the noises I have heard,"

Winnie replied hotly, at the same time rolling Adelaide's great Saratoga trunk in front of the door.

"There it goes again!" and as a loud hammering re-echoed through the adjoining room, she sprang upon the trunk. The transom was still too high for her to reach. "Quick, girls, something else," she exclaimed, and Milly dragged the "Commissary Department" from its retirement under my bed.

The "commissary" was a small, old-fas.h.i.+oned trunk, which had belonged to my great-grandmother. It was covered with cow-skin, the hair only partially worn off, and studded with bra.s.s-headed nails which formed the initials of my ancestors. It was lined with newspapers bearing the date 1790, and was altogether a very quaint and curious relic. Its chief interest to us, however, lay in the fact that it had come to us from my home filled with all the good things that a farm can produce and a mistakenly soft-hearted mother send. There were mince pies and pickles, a great wedge of cheese, a box of honey, pounds of maple-sugar, tiny sausages, a great fruitcake, jars of pickled peaches, ginger snaps, walnuts and chestnuts, pop-corn and mola.s.ses candy, and what Milly called the _interstixes_ were filled in with delicious doughnuts. It was a treasure house of richness upon which we revelled in the night after the gas was turned out and we all met in our nightgowns, and formed a semicircle sitting on the floor around the register, while Winnie told the most deliciously frightful ghost and robber stories.

Then, it was that the "commissary" yielded up its contraband stores and we ate, and s.h.i.+vered, partly with cold and partly with delightful terror inspired by the rehearsal of legends for which Winnie ransacked, during the day, the pages of the detective Vidocq and Poe's prose tales.

Then if a mouse did but squeak in the deserted hospital ward, or the shuffle of Miss Noakes's slippers was heard in the corridor outside, we all scuttled incontinently to our beds, and Winnie snored loudly, while Milly buried her head beneath the blankets. Miss Noakes occupied a large room opposite the hospital. She was a disagreeable, prowling teacher and we had nicknamed her _Snooks_.

The "commissary" being now carefully poised upon the curved top of Adelaide's trunk, Winnie mounted upon it, and found that it was exactly what was needed, as it brought her face just on a level with the transom.

"O girls!" she exclaimed, "the trunks are all gone, and they are making the room over into a studio. And that handsome man that sat at Madame's table yesterday at dinner is in there hanging pictures. I wonder if he is an artist and is going to teach us. My! he is looking this way,"

and Winnie crouched suddenly. The movement was a careless one, and the commissary slid down the sloping cover of the trunk upon which it rested, striking the door with its end like a battering-ram, and with such force that the rusted lock yielded, and the commissary, with Winnie seated upon it, swept forward, like a toboggan, far into the center of the hospital.

It was strange that Winnie was not hurt, but she was not; and before the astonished artist could quite comprehend what had happened, she had picked herself up, scampered back into our room, and we had closed the door behind her, and were fastening it to the best of our ability by tying the k.n.o.b to Adelaide's trunk by means of a piece of clothes-line which had formerly served to cord the commissary.

At first we laughed long and merrily over the adventure, but by degrees its serious aspects were appreciated.

In the first place, Milly suggested dolorously that the commissary had fallen into the hands of the enemy, while Cynthia Vaughn drew attention to the fact of the broken lock.

"However you girls will explain that to Madame is more than I know," she remarked maliciously.

"_You_ girls!" Winnie repeated indignantly, "as if you were not as much concerned in it as any of us."

"Indeed," Cynthia exclaimed scornfully, "if I remember rightly, it was Milly who brought the commissary from its retirement, Tib who balanced it so judiciously, and Winnie who dawned so unceremoniously on that strange man in the other room. I had absolutely nothing to do with the affair."