CHAPTER XVIIIANOTHER BARRIER
Bethwent home to Hudsonvale for the winter holidays, which lasted till the middle of the first week in the new year. Molly went with her on the train, as, of course, navigation on the river had ceased, keeping on to Hambro—and the seven aunts—farther down the stream.
Beth was delighted to see her father and mother and the children. And many of her old schoolmates beside Mary Devine came to see her.
But she did not see Larry. She had heard from him again, after that first letter; and he had told her he would be away over the holidays. Mrs. Euphemia had expressed a sudden wish to go to Old Point Comfort and had insisted that Larry go with her.
“And what the Mater says, goes,” he had written to Beth. “She’s been awfully good to me—especially since I came home from the law school. Why! I never could have afforded such a fancy office if it hadn’t been for her. She’s bribed me to take this trip; but I don’t really see how thelocal bar is going to get along without me for a fortnight or three weeks.”
Nevertheless, Beth felt distinctly disappointed that Larry was not in Hudsonvale. There was something lacking in her holiday.
She had but one other source of worriment. And that she was not sure should be a worriment.
She noticed that her father was thinner, grayer, and that his walk seemed to have less springiness. She asked him if he did not feel well, and he laughed at her. Yet the laugh was not convincing.
She would not whisper to her mother or to the other children her fears for him. Mr. Baldwin had always been a thin and wiry man—one of the kind, as he often said, that wears out, but does not rust out.
The holidays, however, were gay. Besides a party given for her young friends by her mother on Christmas Eve, Beth went to the usual midwinter ball at the Town House—a very popular affair, indeed. She wore the poplin, and she danced many times with the men and boys who remembered her from the night of Larry Haven’s “coming out” party.
There was one little thing that, strangely enough, rather marred Beth’s enjoyment of the evening. She had never put on her pretty frock at Rivercliff without wishing that she had herGreat-grandmother Lomis’ corals to wear; and now she suggested to her mother that she be given a second chance to display her heirloom.
Mrs. Baldwin suddenly looked troubled—exceedingly troubled. Hesitatingly, she said: “My daughter, I do not think it would be wise. You are really too young to wear such things yet. It caused, I believe, some comment before.”
Beth laughed. She would not show her mother how deeply she was disappointed. “I guess it’s because Mrs. Haven or Larry will not be there, isn’t it? You wanted to show me off before them. Now confess, Mother mine!”
Her mother seemed unable to laugh at this pleasantry. But Beth cheerfully put Larry’s present into the lace at her bosom and went to the ball. No taxicab this time, although there was snow on the ground. She carried her slippers, like most Hudsonvale people, under her arm.
The holidays slipped away and Beth soon boarded the train again, finding jolly Molly Granger, by agreement, in one of the parlor cars. Molly had a warm invitation for Beth to spend a part of the summer vacation at Hambro.
“We’ll neither of us get home at Easter, you know,” Molly declared. “It’s too far to travel, and the time’s too short. And, as I tell the aunties, we’ve got to work.”
“I shall have to work, that is sure,” proclaimed Beth. “I’m afraid I spent too much money for Christmas presents. Oh dear!”
“How much money have you earned altogether?” demanded the curious Molly.
“I wouldn’t dare tell you. It might arouse your cupidity. And there’s only a door between us at school,” laughed Beth. “But I’ll tell you this: I put twenty-five dollars in the postal savings bank at Rivercliff before we came away.”
“Oh, cracky-me! What a lot!” cried Molly. “You’ll be a millionairess yet.”
“Not much, considering what I shall have to earn before next fall when Rivercliff opens again. We have to pay half the year’s fees in advance, you know.”
“I suppose it does mean a lot of work for you. My! the aunties think you are wonderful to do it.”
“Haven’t done it yet,” sighed Beth. “But I hope to.”
“Oh, I hope we’ll both have a better half year this time than the last.”
Beth looked forward with equal hope, too; but it proved to be dashed within the month. Her fears for Mr. Baldwin were realized. Her mother wrote that he was ill.
Beth was in some suspense for several days,for the information at first was very meager. But finally she learned the particulars. Her father had been taken with a hemorrhage in the shops—a strain had brought on the attack, the doctors said. But the trouble was deeper than that.
“He must stop all indoor work for months—perhaps he can never go back to the Locomotive Works,” Mrs. Baldwin wrote. “It is a sad loss; of course, they will not hold his situation open. They never do, no matter how long or how faithfully a man has worked for that corporation.“My dear, you must make the most of this year’s schooling that we have paid for. I am afraid it will be your last. You cannot look forward to being a teacher, my poor dear. Marcus has already got a situation—‘job,’ he calls it. He insisted. He declares he is going to be the man of the house till papa gets well.“I am sorry for you, Daughter—after all your high hopes. But there must be some good reason for it and He will not put upon our shoulders a harder trouble than we can bear.”
“He must stop all indoor work for months—perhaps he can never go back to the Locomotive Works,” Mrs. Baldwin wrote. “It is a sad loss; of course, they will not hold his situation open. They never do, no matter how long or how faithfully a man has worked for that corporation.
“My dear, you must make the most of this year’s schooling that we have paid for. I am afraid it will be your last. You cannot look forward to being a teacher, my poor dear. Marcus has already got a situation—‘job,’ he calls it. He insisted. He declares he is going to be the man of the house till papa gets well.
“I am sorry for you, Daughter—after all your high hopes. But there must be some good reason for it and He will not put upon our shoulders a harder trouble than we can bear.”
Beth could not agree with this doctrine of her mother’s. Either she was not sufficiently orthodox, or she had a clearer vision. She knew her father had been warned years before by physiciansthat his work was not suited to his constitution. And Mr. Baldwin had made no attempt to change it.
“It isn’t fair,” thought the young girl, “to lay it on God. I could not believe that He is love, if we suffered such trouble because He willed it. We have brought it on ourselves—and I guess it’s our work to hustle around and get the best of this trouble. Poor papa!”
She wasted no time in useless worry. First of all, she drew fifty dollars from the bank and sent it home.
“I will not be behind brave, little Marcus,” she wrote her mother. “I want you to use this. I can earn more—a lot more. And I’ll earn all I can before I come home for the summer.”
She confided in nobody but Molly—and to her under promise of secrecy. Beth shrank from the casual sympathy of others. Sympathy of that quality is so apt to be mixed with curiosity.
Molly was heart-broken. “Beth Baldwin! you’ll never leave Rivercliff before your three years are finished—never! Don’t tell me such a horrid thing!”
“I don’t see how it can be helped,” her chum said. “It is a dreadful blow to my hopes. Don’t say much about it, Molly dear, or I shall cry.”
Molly was already frankly sobbing. She raninto her own room and came back again in a moment with her purse. The contents of this she dumped into Beth’s lap.
“There!” she sobbed. “You can have all I’ve got—only say you’ll stay. There’s most as much as you sent home. I’ll willingly go without bonbons and ice-cream sodas and furbelows and all the rest of it, if you’ll take it, dear, and say you’ll stay the three years out. I’ll give youallmy pocket-money!”
“You dear goosie!” cried Beth, hugging her closely in her arms. “Oh! how glad I am that I have such a friend. But I can’t take your money, Molly. It would be right for neither you nor for me. You need bonbons and furbelows just as much as I need money for other expenses. No, no, dear! ‘Take back thy gold!’ I am Independent Elizabeth—and you must not tempt me.”
Resolved, as before, to earn all the money possible, Beth did not neglect her studies. Even Miss Hammersly had to admit that her standing averaged better and better as the months went on. She was among the few first students in the so-called freshman class.
In Easter week Beth made seventeen dollars by mending and repairing lace and silk hose. The news that one of the girls did fine mending spread outside of the school. Between Rivercliff Schooland the town of Jackson City was a suburban district occupied by many wealthy and well-to-do people. Some orders began to come to Beth from these households.
The girl sent for a special thread and began to make a specialty of repairing the fine lingerie of her more fortunate fellow-students. And this work increased steadily.
Saturday afternoon at Rivercliff was always free. Beth, as the spring advanced, began to refuse to spend this holiday with Molly and her friends. “Four whole hours to myself!” she proclaimed to her disappointed chum. “I cannot spare them, my child. I must make hay while the sun shines.”
“But the sun isn’t shining to-day,” said Molly, pouting.
“The more reason, then, that I should get my cured hay in the barns,” declared Beth, with a grim little nod. “‘Avaunt! Avaunt! I scorn thy gold, likewise thy pedigree; I am betrothed to Ben-ja-min, who sails upon the sea,’” quoted Beth from a burlesque verse that they were fond of. “Tempt me not, I tell you.”
And on this very Saturday afternoon something happened that made Beth very glad she had remained in her own room, working. A pair of very plump bay horses, drawing an old-fashionedfamily carriage, came to the main door of the school, and a footman as fat as the horses, who sat beside the coachman fatter still, got stiffly down and puffed up the steps.
He bore a card which he gave to Miss Small, who chanced to be in the hall at the moment. The card read:
Mrs. Ricardo Severn
“Does Miss Baldwin live here?” asked the fat footman, asthmatically.
“There is such a student,” the under housekeeper said, wonderingly.
“My missus sent me for her,” said the man, blinking sleepily.
“Mrs. Severn?” repeated Miss Small.
“Oh! who does Mrs. Severn want?” cried Maude Grimshaw, who chanced to be passing through the hall and saw the footman’s gorgeous livery, as well as heard the lady’s name mentioned.
She came swiftly to the under housekeeper’s side and whispered: “Mrs. Severn is the e-nor-mously rich old lady who lives on the Boulevard, in the stone house, with the parrot and a whole raft of servants. Who does she want, dear Miss Small?”
“Miss Baldwin,” puffed the footman, gloomily.
“Oh!” gasped Maude, taken aback. Then hervenomous tongue came to her rescue: “Of course! She has heard that one of the girls of Rivercliff goes out to service, I presume,” and she went away, laughing scornfully.
But Miss Small sent Mrs. Severn’s card up to Beth’s room. However, Maude wrote home that day and told about the ridiculous way in which Miss Hammersly was allowing “a pauper girl named Beth Baldwin to go out to work by the day like a common servant.”
As it chanced, Maude’s equally light-headed mother read this part of her foolish daughter’s letter to a caller. That caller made inquiries and learned that Beth came from Hudsonvale. She knew Mrs. Euphemia Haven of Hudsonvale—had recently met her at Old Point Comfort.
Immediately, this mutual friend wrote Mrs. Haven what Maude had written to her mother. And something came of that!