CHAPTER XXIIA RENEWED RESOLVE

Bethonly half promised to go to Hambro later in the summer to visit Molly Granger and the seven aunts. She was not at all sure that she could accomplish it, for she did not know exactly how she should find things at home.

Molly said: “If you don’t come, Bethesda, I’ll advance on Hudsonvale some day soon, with all the aunts at my back, and like a crew of brigands we will capture you and carry you bodily away.”

There was more cheerfulness in the atmosphere at home than Beth expected to find. Mr. Baldwin had obtained some light work that paid a few dollars every week, Marcus had been raised by his employer to five dollars, and the family in the Bemis Street cottage was getting along fairly well.

Of course, there were no new dresses, and Mrs. Baldwin was doing her own washing and ironing with the smaller girls’ help, while what came upon the table was very plain. “We fortunately have no rent to pay, and the taxes are small,” Mrs. Baldwin said.

When Beth produced the hundred dollars she had saved, her mother really seemed more troubled than amazed.

“Why—why, Beth! you are quite wonderful. I will put it with that other fifty you sent——”

“Haven’t you used that?” cried her daughter.

“No, my dear. We have not had to.”

“We’ve nearly half the sum you borrowed for me, and can soon pay it all back, for I shall get more work this summer,” Beth declared briskly. “I shall start right out to call upon the folks in town and show them the work I can do mending lace and silk hose and the like. I can make more at such work, if I can get enough of it to do, than I possibly could in a store or at the factory.”

“But, my dear child——”

“It is my duty to do it, Mamma—and I love it,” Beth said firmly. “The money you borrowed was spent for me. I’ll make up the whole in time.”

“It was not a loan to be paid back—at once,” said Mrs. Baldwin, desperately.

“Why, Mamma! what do you mean? All loans must be paid.”

“At least,” the troubled mother hastened to add: “You are not to try to repay it. This hundred and fifty dollars you have earned so bravely in your school year, must be kept to help pay your next year’s fees at Rivercliff.”

“Oh, Mother! I cannot do it,” cried Beth. “I must help you here. It is only right that I should.”

“Let me be the judge of that, Daughter,” Mrs. Baldwin said. “I thought you had resolved to win your teacher’s certificate—and at Rivercliff?”

“But, how can I?” murmured Beth. “It is impossible.”

“It seems to me,” and Mrs. Baldwin’s eyes twinkled a little now, “that you have proved quite the contrary. I am proud of you. You have done so well according to your school reports, and been able to earn so much money, too, that I feel you are to be highly commended. I wonder what Euphemia will say?”

Beth looked at her mother sharply. In that moment she guessed half her mother’s secret. The four hundred dollars had been loaned by Larry’s mother!

She felt that she could say nothing to her mother about it. The subject of the supposed loan and her possible return to Rivercliff in the autumn was avoided by both of them for a time. Meanwhile, however, Beth thought deeply about it.

If there was anybody in the world to whom Beth did not wish to feel indebted, it was to Mrs. Euphemia Haven. She could scarcely have told why had she been taxed with the question. She certainly had no dislike for Larry’s mother; onlyshe always felt that the lady was patronizing her and trying to push her aside.

She might have guessed before, Beth told herself, that Mrs. Haven was the only person her mother could possibly have borrowed four hundred dollars from—and without security. So that was how, the summer before, Larry had known that she was going away to school and when, and so had filled her stateroom aboard theWater Wagtailwith flowers.

Beth suspected, from what Larry let drop when he called at Rivercliff, that he had come there for the special purpose of learning if reports his mother had evidently heard of Beth’s work were true.

“And he got his answer—with a vengeance,” sighed Beth.

She believed that now Mrs. Haven must be sorry that she had lent the money to pay for the first year’s expenses at Rivercliff. “Of course, my earning money in the way I do has disgusted her. And Larry——”

She could not bear to think of her old friend. Never—till the day she died—could she have just the same measure of affection for a friend that she had for Larry Haven!

He must have known that his mother had loaned the four hundred dollars which Beth had mentionedat their last interview—the day Larry called at Rivercliff School. He knew then that Beth was intent upon paying that loan with the money she earned. And here was her mother desiring her to go on with her education, and so necessarily postponing the evil day of payment into the future.

Beth did not know what to do. It was evident her mother did not wish to discuss the loan—did not wish to be questioned about it. Beth had been brought up too strictly to doubt her parents’ judgment.

And now, soon after her return home, came kind Mr. Lomax, the principal of the high school, to congratulate her on her standing at Rivercliff.

He brought with him, too, a letter he had received from Miss Hammersly. Although that good woman had said nothing to Beth before she came home for the summer, in this letter she begged Mr. Lomax to use his influence with Beth’s family, that they would allow her to complete her course at Rivercliff.

“I do not approve, as a general rule, of my girls working as many hours or as hard as Miss Baldwin does to earn money to pay school expenses,” wrote Miss Hammersly. “Usually, the girls who have to struggle so to achieve the barenecessities through school and college, are the ones who, after all, gain but a superficial benefit from the educational courses. The work they must do to live comes first with them, as is natural. They fall behind in their school work. Not so with Miss Baldwin. I am proud of her and I want to see her finish her course so auspiciously begun.”

“Somehow, Mrs. Baldwin,” Mr. Lomax said to Beth’s mother, “you must push Elizabeth on. She must continue her course at Rivercliff. Why! it will be a distinct loss to the educational community if she does not become a teacher.”

“I do not know how that may be,” said Mrs. Baldwin, quietly; “but I do know that I want Beth to continue at the school. At first, when Mr. Baldwin was taken ill, I did not see how we could accomplish it. But now, by her own exertions, she has proved that it is possible. Why! she has already in hand enough to pay the first half of next year’s expenses.”

So it was settled. Beth renewed her resolve and, as Marcus said, “buckled down to work.”

She had cards printed, and with them she went from house to house in the better residential sections of Hudsonvale and the neighboring towns, showing samples where she could of her really beautiful work. Both Mrs. Baldwin and Bethhad a “sleight,” as old-fashioned people called it, with the needle—especially on such fine work as Beth now essayed.

“You work up a good trade this summer, Daughter,” said the practical Mrs. Baldwin, “and I’ll hold it for you until next long vacation. Ella is getting such a big girl now, and Prissy is so helpful, that I can do it.”

Beth had already shown her own capability in getting ahead. She was not afraid to ask for work, and where she was allowed to show specimens of mending she was almost sure of being engaged for similar tasks.

One thing she would not do, and her mother suggested it only once—and that faintly. Beth refused to take her samples of work to the Haven place and ask Mrs. Haven to recommend her to her friends.

Everybody who could afford it in Hudsonvale went away for at least a fortnight in the summer, and Mrs. Haven and her son went to some northern resort soon after Beth came home from Rivercliff; so it was not strange that Beth saw little of Larry, even in the most casual way, during the vacation.

She was once during the summer at a simple evening party, dressed in the poplin, refurbished with new ribbons, and Larry unexpectedly droppedin. He devoted himself to her entertainment for a part of the evening and, quite as a matter of course, saw her home.

Both talked very fast, and about perfectly uninteresting matters, all the way—both too nervous and excited to know afterward just what either had said—and parted with a handclasp at Beth’s gate.

Several times, however, during the later summer, Larry was at the Bemis Street cottage to see Mr. Baldwin. Beth’s father and the young man usually remained closeted together for some time, and once Mr. Baldwin came into the sitting room after such an interview, smiling broadly.

“Let me tell you,” he said, “that young chap has got something in his head that didn’t have to be put there by a surgical operation!” But just what he meant by this commendation he did not explain.

Beth was very successful that summer, and for a girl, earned a good deal of money with her nimble fingers. It was a fact that she had remarkable talent for the occupation she had taken up. People who own nice laces and the like, are only too glad to pay a commensurate price for their restoration by skilful workwomen.

She had put her acceptance of Molly Granger’s invitation to Hambro off as late in the summer asshe could. But now, finally, Molly threatened so seriously to lead a pirate band of aunts into the Bemis Street camp, that it was decided Beth must go to her chum’s. And she welcomed the diversion, too.

She went to Hambro by boat, of course; and the day of her departure on this outing she received a letter from long silent Cynthia Fogg. It was rather a queer letter, too—just as queer as the girl herself!

“Are you going to return to Rivercliff School?” was a part of the epistle. “I’ve heard your father is ill and that you are not going back there. Tell me if this is so at once.... I have a good job and all is well with me.”

There was something so insistent about that question that Beth wrote at once, reassuring her strange friend, that she was to return to Rivercliff. Cynthia’s address was on Dekalb Avenue, Philadelphia. Beth wondered what part of the city that was—whether it was in the wealthy residential portion, where presumably Cynthia had secured her “good job,” or among the poor of the Quaker metropolis. Beth did not believe that it could be at the orphanage in which Cynthia presumably had been brought up.

Beth had looked forward to her visit to Molly and the seven aunts with a great deal of satisfaction and curiosity; nor was she disappointed. It proved interesting and she made seven very lovely friends. The aunts and Molly lived together in a big house in the better residential section of Hambro, and were, indeed, quite the most important people, socially, in the whole town.

Aunt Celia liked Beth because she really was a student and loved books. Molly’s eldest aunt spent her days in a comfortable chair in her own sitting room, reading—and reading the solid, not to say stolid works of certain English authors who have mostly gone out of fashion in this day.

Aunt Catherine—almost always suffering from a cold in the head and never by any possibility going out of doors without overshoes—was considered delicate by all the family. She confided to Beth her favorite remedies for most diseases, from cholera to housemaid’s knee.

Auntie Cora was society’s devotee—a little, bustling woman, who was the cheerfulest company and never talked of anything that amounted (so Aunt Celia said) to “a row of beans.” She took Beth and Molly to afternoon teas to show them off, and drove with them in borrowed coupés behind stiff-backed coachmen and footmen through the pleasant roads around Hambro.

Aunt Carrie, the maritime one, took Beth to her room and displayed for her admiration much of the wedding finery she had been preparing with her own hands through a series of heart-hungering years, against the time when her captain should come home and settle down.

“John has not had his own ship very long. He must first lay aside a competence—and for years he had a father and a mother to support. But this voyage to the East and one more will ‘complete the tally,’ he says,” and she blushed very prettily, for she was a sweet maiden lady with all the modesty of a girl.

On a teakwood table in a corner of her room—a present from the captain, of course—was a mariner’s chart on which every day was faithfully pricked the possible course of the shipRollingsgate—a huge fourmaster.

“I correct it by John’s letters,” Aunt Carrie said. “And really, it is quite surprising to see how close I come to it—sometimes.”

She had learned the elements of navigation, too, so as to know more about John’s calling. To Beth’s mind this romance of the maiden lady was the very sweetest of which she had ever heard.

Aunt Charlotte, the plump, capable aunt, was housekeeper, and was of a much more practical nature than the other “Granger girls,” as Hambropeople knew them. Aunt Cassie actually had an attack of croup while Beth was in the house.

“And if you can beat that in August, I wish you’d tell me!” Molly exclaimed.

Aunt Cassie’s whole existence, it seemed, had been one series of coughs and colds. Aunt Cyril was very kind to Beth, but rather aloof. She could not wholly approve of a girl who did housework for her school tuition. Yet she was too sweet and lovable to snub her niece’s chum.

“They are just the sweetest, lovingest dears that ever lived—all of them!” Beth Baldwin declared to her mother, when she returned from this visit. “And the house is full of cats—both living ones and those Jolly Molly has drawn. The aunts are too tender-hearted to have a single kitten drowned, or to destroy even one of Molly’s attempts at feline portraiture.”

Beth was not in Hudsonvale long this time. The semester would soon open at Rivercliff, and she took the boat again for the twenty-four hour journey up the river.

Beth bade Larry good-bye the evening before she departed for school, and in full family assembled. The heart-high courage and happiness that had attended her first departure for school was lacking when theWater Wagtailleft the Hudsonvale landing.

But Beth had many things to think of now that she had not dreamed of the year previous. She was much older, too—much more than a year older! And hers was not a nature that “hugged sorrow to its bosom.” She had too many plans for the future.

She wished to get to Rivercliff, get settled, and put out her “hospital” sign. Molly had painted a new one with an added line:

“First Aid to Lingerie”

She had counted on Mrs. Severn’s work as a solid asset for her school campaign. Arriving at Rivercliff on Friday, Saturday afternoon Beth called at Severn Lodge at her usual hour.

The gorgeously liveried footman let her in—but she thought his look was doubtful. Before she could mount the stairs the foreign maid appeared at the top of the flight.

“Miz Baldwig iz to vait below,” she hissed.

Beth stepped back in surprise. The foreign person disappeared—then reappeared again. She brought a folded note downstairs and extended it at arm’s length to Beth.

“Ze compliments of madam,” said the maid. Beth unfolded and looked at the note, quite stunned. It read:

“Mrs. Severn will not again require Miss Baldwin’s assistance.”

It was written and signed in the upright, old-fashioned hand of the lady herself.

As Beth left the house she almost thought she heard the parrot shrieking after her:

“I don’t care if younevercome back!”

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