AT HOME IN THE ORIOLES’ NEST

Invitations in this form were distributed on the next Saturday among the classmates of the hostesses. The cards were enticingly illustrated with water-color sketches by Cecily,—two Baltimore orioles on the edge of a nest, each perched on one foot and holding a tea-cup in the other. The guests one and all accepted, and at the appointed hour the whole class gathered in that coziest of rooms.

“Oh, what a gorgeous cake! And I’m starving!” cried Frances. She wisely seated herself next to the pretty little table on which stood a frosted birthday cake with fifteen lighted candles, all rose-pink, and also pink paper baskets filled with bonbons, a tall pitcher of lemonade, and a set of dainty glasses. Cecily, as queen of the day, cut her cake into twelve generous slices, while her sister oriole poured the lemonade.

“Now don’t take too long to eat, girls,” said Betty, hospitably. “We have a scheme to tell you about when you’re through.” But no coaxing could induce the hostesses to divulge their secret while there was a crumb of cake or a sip of lemonade to be enjoyed.

“Now for your scheme,” said Phyllis Morton, when the feast was over.

“You tell it, Jean,” said Cecily. “You thought of it.”

“Why, we want to found an order,” said Jean, impressively.

“An order! What on earth do you mean?” asked Mildred Carrington.

“I mean an order like the Knights Templars,” said Jean. “Don’t you know we read about them in French history? Now don’t laugh, this isn’t just for fun. We’re in real sober earnest. Why shouldn’t we found an order,—a society that will bind us together, maybe for all our lives, and anyhow will help us all through our school life? Don’t you remember that time in the literature class, when we were studying about the legends of King Arthur, and Miss Carlton gave us that talk about the battle of life, and girls fighting like true knights in it?”

“I remember,” said Thekla Hoffman. “You started it up, saying you wished you’d lived in the days of chivalry. You thought all the battles and sieges would have been so nice and exciting.”

“I know, and I felt like a goose after I’d said it,” Jean admitted. “But Miss Carlton said we didn’t need to go back to the days of chivalry for our battles. She said life was a great long warfare, and we had battles to fight every day! And don’t you remember she said the girl that always stood up for what was right, and was always high-minded and honorable, was a true knight, and she wanted all the Hazelhurst girls to be true knights? Well, we thought we’d better do what she said, and be knights, and found an order like the Round Table. Of course, we can’t go on ‘quests’ as they did, but there are plenty of things we can do in helping to straighten out troubles for one another, and Miss Carlton says we can right wrongs and better the world.”

“My senses, Jean! Have we got to dress up in armor and cavort on horseback?” laughed Maud Perry.

“If you please, how are we school-girls going to better the world?” asked Phyllis. “Be missionaries, and one take America, and one Europe, and one Asia, and one Africa?”

“Oh, I don’t mean this in a preachy way!” said Jean. “But if life’s one big war, with battles every day, we’ve got to keep fighting, haven’t we? Just look at Carol Armstrong and her basket-ball team; don’t they have to fight hard if they want to win? Well, we can fight hard to stand well in our lessons, and to help each other, for love of Hazelhurst, just as the basket-ball teams fight. We can be girl knights.”

“Girl knights! I never heard anything so babyish!” Adela observed to Frances. “Let’s buy tin swords and rocking-horses!”

Jean colored hotly. “I don’t want to play King Arthur any more than you do, Adela! I’m not five years old!” she declared. “I haven’t had a chance to explain. We really can be girl knights. There’s a legend about a girl knight somewhere; my father told me about her when I was a little bit of a thing. He said she was a beautiful princess and she became a knight and she had a magic spear that would overthrow all her enemies, and a wonderful shield. I used to make up stories about her.”

“Oh! Just tell them that story you told me,” Cecily interrupted.

“Oh, Cecily, no!” Jean protested. “They don’t want to hear my silly old stories!”

“Yes, they do. Don’t be so shy,” said Cecily.

“Of course we do!” said Maud. “I know I’ll never feel too old for fairy tales if I live to be eighty.”

“Well, then,” began Jean, twisting her handkerchief nervously, and looking down, “I made up a story, once, about how the princess came to be a knight. One day she slipped into the council-hall where her father, the king, was in council with his knights, and she heard them take a solemn vow to ride forth on a quest, and right all the wrongs of the kingdom. And the princess said to herself, ‘I’m going to be a knight, too!’ But she didn’t have any armor, and when she went to the king and told him she wished to be a knight, he laughed at her and said she was only a girl, and girls weren’t strong enough to fight, and there wasn’t any armor in the whole world that would fit a little slip like her; and he told her to go and learn the new court dance with her maids of honor, and embroider some golden tapestry for the council-hall, and let the knights do the fighting. But the princess was too unhappy to dance, and she was sick and tired of stupid old tapestry. So instead she ran off and tried all the suits of armor in the palace, but they were all too big and heavy,—every one of them. At last she gave up in despair and went out to her bower of roses, and threw herself down on the ground and cried. And she said, ‘I’m only a girl, and girls can’t do anything!’ But while she was crying she suddenly realized that the bower was growing bright, and she looked up and saw, standing before her, a knight in white armor. He had a spear that flashed like lightning and a shield shining like the sun; and he told the princess to kneel down and he would make her a knight, too, and that though she was only a girl she should be the greatest knight in the whole kingdom. So she knelt down and he knighted her, and then he gave her the spear and the shield, and told her that she would always conquer with that spear, and that while she carried that shield she couldn’t be wounded. Then he told her to go and conquer all the king’s enemies; and so she rode out on her quest and fought and was victorious. At last she came back to her palace in triumph, and as her father was dead, they made her queen, and at her coronation the knight in white armor suddenly appeared again, and crowned her with a crown that shone like the sun; and she became the greatest queen that ever lived!”

Jean’s head was raised now; there was a flush in her pale cheeks and her eyes were shining. “There—that’s just a babyish fairy-story, I know,” she apologized; “but it gave me the idea for our order.”

“There was a real girl knight in history, too,” said Cecily. “Joan of Arc wore armor and fought and saved France. I’m sure she looked just like you, Jean. I’m going to call you Joan of Arc! Miss Carlton says we can fight our troubles and other people’s too. So we’ll help to conquer the trouble and unhappiness in the world, and that’s the way we’ll better the world.”

“And we’ll form a society of girl knights,” Jean went on, “and we’ll have a sword that’ll conquer all our enemies, like the magic spear in the legend. I like a sword better than a spear, don’t you? It sounds so victorious! You think of a general leading on to victory with his sword. Well, we must bind ourselves to love each other always, you know, and Miss Carlton wants us to be on the lookout to do all the kind things we can. So our sword will be the sword of love and kind-heartedness. We’ll have it a silver sword. Father told me that silver is the symbol of love and gold the symbol of truth. We can call ourselves the Order of the Silver Sword.”

“Order of the Silver Sword! That sounds splendid!” cried Phyllis.

“And you know King Arthur’s sword was named Excalibur,” said Jean. “Well, we’ll name our sword Caritas; that’s the Latin for love.”

“Why, amo means to love, child,” Mildred corrected. “Amo, amas, amat, amamus, amatis, amant!”

“Amo, amas, amat means the falling-in-love kind of love,” Jean explained, “but caritas means the other kind: the higher sort of love. It means charity and kind-heartedness. I studied it out and then I asked Miss Carlton. Well, if you like the idea, we’ll be the Order of the Silver Sword. And the head of the order will be the Queen, and we’ll elect a new queen every year.”

“Then she’ll be a president,” observed Maud.

“Yes, of course; but you have to say queen to make it old-timey. The president and her knights would sound too funny! And the officers will be the princesses. The secretary can be the Princess of the Scroll, and the treasurer can be the Princess of the Treasure. And the rest of us will be the maids of honor, but we’ll all of us—Queen and all—be girl knights, warrior maidens.”

“That’s just the thing for me!” broke in Hilda Hastings. “My name means battle maid.”

“Does Hilda mean battle maid? Oh, but that’s just perfect!” exclaimed Jean. “Battle maid sounds ever so much better than girl knight. Let’s call ourselves battle maids, shall we?”

“But you haven’t said anything about the badges, Jean,” said Betty. “We’re going to have the darlingest badges!”

“Yes,” said Jean. “You know we must have a shield as well as a sword, and the two together will make a lovely badge. And don’t you think it would be beautiful, if the sword’s silver, to have the shield gold?”

“Lovely!” said Thekla.

“So we’ll have the golden shield of truth,” continued Jean. “That will mean that we’re going to be true to each other, and true to what is right. And truth is veritas in Latin,—I looked it up. So we’ll name our shield Veritas. And our badge will be a golden shield with a silver sword across it; and the motto will be ‘Caritas et Veritas.’”

“Don’t you think it’s a terribly solemn kind of a society?” ventured Mildred.

“Oh, no, because we’re going to have lots of fun in it, too!” declared Jean. “We’ll have meetings every week and always get up something jolly to do. And we can give entertainments for charity. We might act a play some time!”

“And we must have initiations,” said Betty.

“Initiations are loads of fun,” said Frances. “We can play all sorts of tricks and scare each other to death!”

The gleam of silver swords and golden shields, the martial tone of the enterprise, and the prospect of initiations and entertainments kindled the zeal of the company in general, and from frisky Frances to ponderous Blanche every one expressed her readiness to enlist.

“Now,” said Cecily, when the recruits had been enrolled, “first of all we’ll have to call a meeting to elect our officers. Oh, and Jean, do get us your list of rules! Jean’s written out a beautiful set of rules.”

“I haven’t had time to finish copying them. I’ll do it right away. It won’t take me five minutes,” said Jean. She whispered something in Cecily’s ear and left the room.

“I’m going to give out my birthday souvenirs while we’re waiting,” said Cecily, and she and Betty took from the table the dainty candy baskets and distributed them among the guests. To the handle of each basket was tied with a pink ribbon a card bearing the name of the girl who received it, and an accompanying bit of verse.

“Why, I didn’t know you could write poetry!” exclaimed Phyllis, looking up from her card.

“P’raps I can and p’raps I can’t,” replied Cecily. “P’raps I promised not to tell who wrote them!”

“I know who wrote them!” said Hilda. “It was Jean, so you might as well own up. She’s the only one of us all who could do it.”

“Yes, it was Jean,” said Betty. “I didn’t promise not to tell.”

“She asked me to give out the baskets while she was out of the room,” said Cecily, “so she wouldn’t have to listen to her own poems.”

“My, isn’t she funny! I should think she’d be so proud she could write!” said Phyllis. “Just listen to mine, girls, it’s too dear for anything!” And she read:

“Why don’t you two read your poems?” Cecily demanded of Frances and Adela, who had sat whispering over their cards without joining in the applause.

“We Mouses are too ashamed,” said Frances. “Oh, dear! oh, dear! I’m really and truly ashamed of myself! I made Jean hopping mad yesterday; I illustrated her composition with giraffes—giraffe’s my name for her, you know,—she’s so tall and lanky! And now just hear what a duck of a thing she’s given me! I’m going to call her Giraffe the Generous!” And she read:

“Mine’s a dear, too,” said Adela. “Listen:

“I’ll tell you why she’s so nice to you,” said Cecily. “It’s because she’s using the sword Caritas! And you’ll have to stop teasing her after this if you wish to belong to the order! I’m going to tell her we’re all through; and please everybody be nice to her when she comes back.” She left the Orioles’ Nest and went upstairs to Jean’s room, “Castle Afterglow,” as Jean had sentimentally named it while gazing out at a sunset. Cecily walked in, stopped short and stared, the spectacle which met her astonished gaze banishing all thought of battle maids and their silver swords.

“Why Jean!” she exclaimed, “what on earth are you doing? Are you house-cleaning?” For Jean was sitting on the floor of Castle Afterglow, surrounded by all her worldly goods. Dresses and school-books, petticoats and writing pads, shoes and ribbons, Sunday hat and tennis racket, all lay in one chaos. Bureau drawers were tilted forward, empty and threatening to fall out. The desk had been emptied and a snowfall of papers was sprinkled about the room. Jean met Cecily’s amused look with a glare.

“I’ve been robbed!” she said, in a tragic tone.

“Robbed?” cried Cecily.

“Yes, robbed, robbed, robbed!” Jean repeated. “And I know who did it, too!”

“Who?” asked Cecily, thinking of the new housemaid.

“That contemptible Adela Mears!”

“Jean, are you crazy! The idea of any girl at our school stealing! You ought to be ashamed of yourself!”

“I call it stealing, to come into my room when nobody’s here and take away my book!”

“Oh, is that all? She borrowed a book?”

“Borrowed! She stole it to torment me, and I’ll never forgive her!”

“What book was it?”

“The book with all my writings,” moaned the authoress of fourteen.

“The book she saw you writing in when she hid in your closet?” asked Cecily.

Jean nodded disconsolately. “I’d scribbled the rules for the order in the end of the book, and I hadn’t quite finished copying them out nicely to read to the girls when I had to go down to the party. And when I came upstairs just now, to finish them, I found the book was gone.” Then she started to her feet. “I’m going for Adela this very minute!”

Cecily caught Jean and held her tight. “Wait, please wait!” she begged. “I don’t believe she’s taken it at all. It’s probably under some of your things.”

“No, it’s not,” answered Jean, as Cecily began to fish in the conglomerate mass on the floor. “I’ve hunted through everything. And I know it’s Adela, because she’s been simply crazy to find out what’s in my book. I’d die before I’d show it to her. Oh, the mean, hateful thing! I’m going for her!”

But Cecily caught her again. “Please! Jean, please!” she begged. “You don’t want to spoil our party, do you? Let me go for you, and if she has taken it I’ll make her give it back. But if you fly at her and then you find she hasn’t, you’ll feel so silly.”

“She has taken it.”

“Well, any way, let me go for you, and you pick up your things. Miss Sargent will give you a big scolding if she finds your room like this.”

Jean knelt down again amid the chaos, but she asked anxiously: “You won’t look at my book if you find it, will you?”

“I should think not!” answered Cecily, indignantly. “But why are you so afraid to have anybody see it?”

“Why, Cecily, it has all my most secret thoughts!” replied Jean tragically.

“What do you mean? Is it a journal?”

“I began it as a journal,” said Jean. “But I kept forgetting to write it up. So I began putting in all kinds of stuff; rhymes and stories and lots of nonsense; and I’ve written some things that I wouldn’t have anybody see for the world. To think of her reading it all and making fun of it!”

“Oh, she couldn’t be so mean! And I don’t much think she’s taken it,” said Cecily, refusing to believe in such villainy; but Jean picked up a little linen handkerchief.

“Look there!” she cried. “It’s Frances!”

Cecily examined the innocent bit of white and saw on the hem “Frances E. Browne” marked in indelible ink. She looked at it in dismay.

“It was both of them! I’ll speak my mind to them now!”

“No, no! Go to their room first. They must have left it there,” said Cecily.

“Yes, that’s what I’ll do!” exclaimed Jean. “I’ll get it first and then I’ll settle them!”

They went down together to the floor below and invaded the Mouse Hole, searching in every nook, but that precious volume was nowhere to be seen. “I’m going now! I’ll make them give it to me!” Jean’s eyes flashed fire. She turned and found peeping in at the door, Frances and Adela.