by Helen Wells
Next day Nancy was cured. Next day, too, Mrs. Harrison agreed with her usual kindness to the plan Cherry suggested. A couple of days later Cherry heard that Nancy had taken makeups on all the missed quizzes. The instructors probably had her papers graded by now. Cherry did not ask how Nancy made out. Then she saw Nancy bouncing around in the corridor, handing out her remaining candy bars to the other girls and shouting, “Get ’em while they’re hot! Dee-licious! Step right up!” Cherry grinned and helped herself.
She knew even before Nancy told her that the girl had passed with flying colors.
A little after nine on Sunday evening, Sibyl Martin limped into the infirmary. Cherry was powdering her nose for her first date with Dr. Alan Wilcox. She was so annoyed and disappointed by this interruption that she had to remind herself a nurse is always on call in an emergency. Sibyl’s twisted, swollen ankle was an emergency, all right. The fact that Sibyl was all dressed up in hat, coat, and gloves puzzled Cherry.
“Never mind, Mrs. Snyder. Thanks, anyway,” Cherry said. The housekeeper was all settled to pinch hit for her for two hours. “I’m not going out, after all.”
Left alone with Sibyl, Cherry questioned her on how she sprained her ankle. Sibyl kept insisting she had fallen in her room.
In ten minutes Dr. Alan arrived. Cherry asked him to examine Sibyl’s ankle and murmured how sorry she was about not keeping their date.
“You’re not half as sorry as I am!” Alan said as Cherry walked out to the hall with him.
“Miss Cherry!” Sibyl called. “It’s killing me!”
“Do you know what I’d like to prescribe for that spoiled infant?”
“Dr. Alan, we’ll have the ice cream cones yet. That’s a promise.”
“A good spanking is what I’d recommend for her. I don’t believe her account of how she twisted her ankle.”
Neither did Cherry but she intended to find out. As Alan went down the stairs, she returned to the infirmary. Cherry cautioned herself not to “take out” her disappointment on the patient. Sibyl had not ruined her evening on purpose.
“Where were you going in all your finery?” Cherry asked. “After the curfew bell, too!”
“Please don’t scold me, Miss Cherry. I’ve had all I can stand for one evening.” Her face puckered as if she were about to cry. “Some people are plain cruel!”
Cherry made no reply except to say she thought Sibyl would be better off in her own room tonight than in an infirmary bed. “I’ll help you to your room. You can rest your weight on my shoulder, and hobble.”
They managed it, with plaintive grunts from Sibyl. Several girls along the hall opened their doors a crack, to peek. Cherry opened Sibyl’s door, reached in, and turned on the lights. She saw a “rope,” improvised of sheets knotted together. One end of it was tied to the bedframe and the other end hung out the open window.
“Sibyl Martin! What did you think you were doing?” Cherry exclaimed. “Eloping?”
“Ssh! Do you want the entire school to know?” Sibyl sank down on the bed.
Cherry had heard a commotion in Mrs. Harrison’s office the evening of the tea—sounds of arguing, and then Sibyl’s raised voice. So Mrs. Harrison must have placed Sibyl under strict surveillance and Sibyl’s response was to use a sheet ladder to keep a date with someone.
“Was it Freddie?” From the way Sibyl hesitated, Cherry knew it was Freddie and no one else. Cherry looked out the window into the brightly moonlit garden. She saw no sign of Freddie, only a squashed rose bush. Sibyl must have landed in that.
“He was supposed to meet me—with the jeep. We made the date the other afternoon at the school tea,” Sibyl started to cry noisily. “And now he didn’t—he never even—Oh, Miss Cherry, how can a man be so cruel? Freddie never showed up!”
Cherry held her hand sympathetically. Sibyl wailed: “We were going to be married and all I got was a sprained ankle!”
Apparently—Cherry did some rapid thinking—her words of warning to Freddie, after the tea, had borne results. Perhaps she had not persuaded Freddie of his foolishness; probably she had only made him see Sibyl as a sixteen-year-old schoolgirl, not a sophisticate. But that was enough, as far as results went for the moment. But if they actually had been considering elopement—marriage—they might still go through with it.
“Sibyl,” Cherry started gently, “I’m not going to scold you. You’ve had a bitter experience, this evening. Imagine how many more bitter experiences Freddie would treat you to—if this is the way he behaves at the very beginning!”
Sibyl sniffled and clenched her jaw in a stubborn way. Cherry tried another approach.
“Even if Freddie were the young prince you take him for, don’t you think elopement is a rather cheap way to do things? It would be hard on your parents, too. Here they just gave your older sister a beautiful wedding, while you sneak out of school via a bed sheet—”
“That’s enough,” Sibyl interrupted sharply. She blew her nose. “It is cheap. I never thought of it in that light.”
“How old is Freddie?”
Sibyl said that he was nearly eighteen.
“You’re both too young to get married,” Cherry observed. “There probably will be someone in your future you’ll like better.”
“I can’t believe it, Miss Cherry. I’m mad about Freddie.”
“Being mad about Freddie isn’t enough to base a marriage on. If you marry the wrong person, you can ruin the rest of your life, or at least have an awful, wretched time. I don’t think Freddie is worth sacrificing your happiness for, or your parents’. Do you?”
Sibyl sat thinking, chewing a corner of her handkerchief. She burst out, “Freddie never even let me know he wasn’t coming!”
“Boys who leave girls waiting at the church, so to speak, don’t generally bother to notify them.”
Sibyl was incensed. “Freddie didn’t drop me! He probably was unavoidably delayed. I wouldn’t be a bit surprised if he showed up yet! He was only an hour late when I gave up waiting and dragged myself upstairs to the infirmary.”
“Oh, Sibyl, Sibyl! The boys’ school is only five or six miles away and he has a car. At least he could have telephoned.”
Sibyl turned a suspicious stare on Cherry.
“Did you just happen to tell him to keep away from me? Or did prissy old Harrison? No one in this stuffy school is going to run my life for me!”
“For heaven’s sake, Sibyl, come to your senses,” Cherry said wearily, and went out.
Mrs. Harrison would learn the whole story now, if only because of Sibyl’s limp. Cherry went down to report to the headmistress, an unpleasant business. A school nurse had to treat a great deal more than upset stomachs and sprained ankles!
CHAPTER VII
Surprises
ONE DAY WHEN THE INFIRMARY WAS QUIET AND EMPTY, Cherry ventured to have another look at the doll and journal. Surely Lisette would not mind.
She eased the balky drawer open and removed the towel she and Lisette had tucked on top. Cherry frowned. She felt around with both hands, then began to dig. The doll and the journal were no longer there!
“How am I ever going to break the news to Lisette? Is there somebody else who suspects the secret in this house?”
She must tell Lisette immediately. The most likely place to find her was—outside of class hours—either in the garden or in the conservatory. Yes, there she was in the conservatory, in a plain blue smock, working with the plants.
“Why, Cherry! I’m honored. Sit down. I’m adding extra soil, bringing loam in from the garden while the days are still mild. See, I’ve already transplanted our silvery spray and also I brought more of those three important kinds of roses indoors for the winter.”
“Such devotion to flowers! Quite a hobby.”
“It’s anything but a hobby,” Lisette said with uncalled-for intensity. “May I ask why you’re looking so glum?”
“I—how am I going to tell you such a terrible thing? The doll and the journal, they’re—”
“They’re gone.”
“You know?”
“Certainly. I took ’em.” Lisette tilted her head and laughed. “Poor Cherry, I’m sorry you had a scare.”
She explained that with so many people in and out of the infirmary, with sometimes only Mrs. Snyder in charge, she decided her locked overnight case in her closet would be a safer hiding place. She took them in Cherry’s absence, and then forgot to tell her.
“We have to have a talk soon,” Lisette said. “A long private talk.”
“I have time off this evening. We can meet in my room,” Cherry offered.
Cherry felt more curious about this coming interview than she was willing to admit.
Right after dinner that evening, Lisette rapped on Cherry’s outside door. This door gave entrance from the hall. She slipped in, wearing a bulky bathrobe from which she took the journal and the doll. The key was back in the doll’s purse again for safekeeping. Lisette also brought a French-English dictionary: La Petite Larousse.
“Some passages in Great grandfather’s journal are so cryptic they could mean several things. What do you make of this one, Cherry?”
Lisette opened at once to the right page, as if she knew this old diary almost by heart. First she read the passage aloud in French. Cherry did not comprehend too well, though she recognized the liquid purity of Lisette’s accent. Then Lisette read the same passage to Cherry in English:
“Is one reduced to putting one’s trust in a doll? Must a lonely old man, the last of his generation, who in his own house has not a soul to talk to, lock his secrets in his heart? Or will the very walls hold his secret? I have lived so much and experienced so much in these rooms that sometimes 1 feel the chateau itself must know my dearest ideas. Fantastic? Not at all. One is thus reduced. But I forget it is no longer my own house.”
Cherry was deeply moved. She heard the greatgrandfather’s appeal without fully understanding the sense of his message.
“Why was it no longer his own house?” Cherry asked.
“We’ll come to that in a minute.” Lisette was referring to the dictionary. “Look, he used a tricky word. This passage could mean entirely different things depending on how you translate J’ai experiencé. That could mean I have experienced so much in these rooms, or it could mean I have tried so much or so hard, or quite possibly it could mean I have experimented so much in these rooms.”
“Quite a difference. What do you think it means? You’ve read the entire journal and you know the context—”
Lisette closed the journal. “Let me tell you the whole curious story. That is, as far as the diary tells it. It was enough to bring me to this house.”
Pierre Gauthier, born in 1865, had come from France to the United States when a very young man. He came with his family, including a little sister whose doll this was. He soon married and built the chateau for his bride. He also planted the garden with its roses and some rare flowers, using seeds and shoots he had brought from France.
Pierre and his wife lived happily here and had a son, Louis, who was Lisette’s grandfather. Louis grew to maturity and married, bringing his bride to live in the Chateau Larose. They had a son and a daughter. The son was Lisette’s father. Pierre was glad of the presence of the younger people at first, because his wife had died and he missed her keenly. To fill his time he continued his business as a grain dealer, and visited his neighbors, especially those who also planted gardens. But as he aged, Pierre could no longer work nor go out every day. His son and daughter in law, who were devoted to him, urged him to find a hobby that would not tax his strength. This was how he started with his experiments.
“Experiments?” Cherry asked. “In the sense of research?”
“Well, he called it a search, and his son and daughter in law called it tinkering.”
His family never took his “tinkering” seriously, according to the journal. They considered that the elderly man was tiring himself unduly, and they admitted the heavy scents involved became rather oppressive. Pierre complained to his journal that Louis, his son, laughed a little at “Papa’s pet folly”; no one had any real comprehension of what he was trying to achieve.
Cherry broke in, in impatience. “Heavy scents of what? Chemicals? Cooking?”
“Not exactly. You’ve noticed the garden—his garden—and how fragrant and unusual the flowers are? Well, he was making perfume. Or at least trying to, for several years. According to what Great-grandfather wrote in the journal, he believed he came close to creating an exquisite and rare scent. Thought he had it almost perfected.”
Only, his son and daughter-in-law did not believe in the seriousness of his efforts. They meant well, but they were concerned about his long hours of work in his bedroom. Their good intentions led to unhappy results, quite accidentally.
One day Pierre had gone out, despite the rain, to obtain a few additional fawn roses from a distant neighbor’s garden. That week the chateau was being repainted, plastered, and papered, and Pierre’s absence for the day provided a convenient time to work in his room. Both Louis and his wife were at home to oversee the job, but since they had never taken old Pierre’s experiment very seriously, they were careless or ignorant in regard to his precious ingredients, bottles, and tools. He had set these up in a niche in the wall which, with shelves built in, served as a medicine cupboard. Louis and his wife thought this old wall cupboard ugly, so they told the workmen to plaster it over, apparently forgetting about the contents. When old Pierre arrived home that evening, with the roses for his final experiments, he found that his precious work had been walled in. All he had left, because he always kept it in his pocket, was the filigree key. But the cupboard with its valuable contents was now lost behind a thick wall of rapidly hardening plaster. The son and daughter in law were truly sorry about the accident. The great grandfather pleaded with them to rip out the new plaster. But they regarded that as an old man’s nonsense.
Pierre was old, weak, alone, and thus unable to tear out the plaster himself. Besides, he had deeded the chateau over to the younger people, so that it was no longer his house to do with as he pleased. He was dependent on his son. He tried to resign himself to the loss of his little homemade laboratory, to the stoppage of his experiments. All of this Pierre confided to his journal.
“Poor man! Did he write down parts of the formula, too?” Cherry asked.
“Very little. Great grandfather’s notes are hard to decipher at times, but vague references hint that the formula must be in the walled up cupboard,” Lisette replied. She went on to tell about the other entries in the journal.
For some time the old man had been supposed to make a sea voyage to France. The journal was not clear as to whether this was entirely at his doctor’s recommendation to aid his health or whether he had some other reason—perhaps connected with his perfume discovery—for traveling to France. By this time transatlantic travel was popular, and the great liners were booked far in advance. Shortly after the incident of the walled up cupboard, Pierre received a telegram that the reservation for his steamship passage was now available.
The old man, bewildered by the speed of events, hoping still to reopen the sealed cupboard somehow when he returned, took the best precautions he could. He hastily secreted the key in the doll’s purse, and hid the doll. Then he recorded the hiding place in his journal as a reminder to himself, but in cryptic language so that no one else could intrude on his work a second time, and cautiously took this personal journal with him.
“Poor old fellow!” Cherry exclaimed. “So he sailed to France in a sad frame of mind. How did things go when he returned?”
“He never returned,” said Lisette. “He never even reached France. He died during the voyage out. See how the diary breaks off short. The very last words he wrote are—”
Lisette showed Cherry the last page of delicate script, and translated: “I still hope. So lovely, so joyful a fragrance!”
“Imagine,” Cherry said softly, “for him to put his heart
into it like that. If the perfume resembled this garden, it might have been as lovely as he believed. I hope so.”
“I’m so glad to hear you say that!” Lisette’s white face glowed. “That’s exactly how I feel! Just think, everything has been waiting here in this house for two decades or more, exactly as Great grandfather left it on that rainy day. The doll has been waiting all these years behind the stuck drawer. His formula, and possibly even his ingredients if they were tightly corked, are waiting somewhere in this house—waiting for us to find them!”
Cherry could not help smiling at Lisette’s excitement. First she suggested they talk more quietly, or the whole inquisitive school would come knocking on Cherry’s door. Then, reluctant but practical, Cherry asked Lisette what she hoped to gain by recovering the perfume. Was it to vindicate Pierre and fulfill his long hope? Or did Lisette think, if they could find and figure out his formula and if they could make up a sample, that his perfume might have some market value?
“Yes, to both reasons!” Lisette exclaimed, then clapped her hands over her mouth. “Ssh. Wouldn’t you want to right the wrong done to an innocent person? And if you could, wouldn’t you save a lovely perfume from being lost forever? I’m convinced it’s good, and I’ll bet you the formula could be developed and sold to a perfume manufacturer. Imagine! With that money we could—”
“You’re daydreaming.” Cherry laughed.
“I’m not! You think I’m a mere dreamer like my father? Please note I actually got to the chateau, I actually studied French, and the chemistry of flower
oils and of perfume making—”
“I take it back,” Cherry said good humoredly.
“Well, if the formula is salable, a lovely ‘new’ perfume would provide a living for my mother and future schooling for me. Also, Cherry, it could give the school some measure of financial help. Not that it would be enough to put the school on its feet financially. But since Mrs. Harrison owns this house, and the formula is in it, she’d be entitled to some compensation.”
