CHAPTER XXVIROUNDING OUT ANOTHER YEAR
Itmay have been well for Beth Baldwin’s advancement in her studies and for her financial prosperity, that the foregoing incidents had taken place. It shut the young girl more within herself and left her mind freer for study and work.
Those girls who were sorry and ashamed because of countenancing a mean act, even to a slight degree, tried at first to shower favors upon the occupant of Number Eighty, South Wing; at least, they all brought her work for her needle. But Beth knew her friends now—there was no question of that. They were few, and they were loyal, but they took up very little of Beth’s time.
As the term progressed she secured other and better paying occupation for her free hours, and outside of school. But she heard nothing more from Mrs. Ricardo Severn nor of the lost sunburst.
Molly and she sometimes talked about it. The mystery, if not the suspicion, still overhung Beth. She was inclined to believe that the foreign maidmight know more about the disappearance of the sunburst than anybody else.
“She may not have stolen it because she wished to profit financially by the deed,” Beth said to Molly. “But for some reason she always showed her dislike for me, and she may have done this deliberately to ruin me in Mrs. Severn’s estimation.”
“I don’t know who else would have done it—unless it was that parrot you tell about,” Molly said, laughing shortly.
Beth did not go home for the Christmas holidays because of her outside work, and at Easter, the intermission was too short to make a visit to Hudsonvale worth while.
News from home continued to be encouraging throughout the school year. Mr. Baldwin steadily improved in health, for he worked out of doors. He never went back to the Locomotive Works, but the family managed very well, indeed. There was hope of something being done with one of his inventions. Larry Haven had an interest in that, and Beth knew that Larry had supplied the funds for the patent fees and other necessary expenses connected with the matter.
On her part, Beth was doing splendidly. Miss Hammersly was vastly pleased with her standing in her classes. From the time they had visited Mrs. Ricardo Severn—and Mr. Montague—together,Beth and the school principal had been very good friends, indeed. Miss Hammersly seldom displayed so much affection for any pupil as she did for Beth.
Molly was doing well, too, and at the close of the second year in June Beth stood first in her class and Molly was not far down on the roster.
“But it neverwouldhave happened, Bethesda, if it hadn’t been for you. I was ashamed to be left so far behind a girl who had so much on her hands when I had so little. But I am afraid it has made me very serious-minded,” and she shook her head gloomily.
“Oh, nonsense, Jolly Molly!” laughed Beth. “You will never be a ‘grave and reverend seignior’—and because of more than the disbarment of sex. Asenioryou will be; but always a jolly one.”
“Nay, nay, my child!” quoth Molly. “When I come back to Rivercliff next autumn, I shall begin signing myself, ‘J. Molly Granger.’ I shall abandon my full name, and let my jocundity be represented by an initial only.”
When Beth went to Hambro that second summer, however, for a brief visit with Molly and the aunts, she could not descry much change in her chum.
The summer was a busy one and a happy one for Beth. Her mother had held together the customersBeth had obtained the year previous. Indeed, there was a neat sign on the front door of the Bemis Street cottage, and almost daily carriages and automobiles from the better residential section of the town stopped before the house. Ella was learning to help in the work, too, and little Prissy was becoming a perfect housewife. The twins, Ferd and Fred, were sturdy youngsters, going to school and being helpful in vacation time in the garden. Marcus was a manly fellow and—whisper!—he had actually bought a safety razor!
That summer Beth found that she was more popular than ever in her home town. Mr. Lomax asked her to meet his class of girls who would graduate from the high school the next year, and tell them something about what it meant to attend a boarding school. It was at a lawn party, and a good many older people were present.
Beth did her best to inspire the girls with a desire to do as she had done. Some of them would have to follow her methods to a certain extent, for their parents were too poor to pay their full tuition at any school or seminary.
“I believe the prize is worth the work entailed, however,” Beth said, in the course of her simple address. “If I could not go back for my final year at Rivercliff I should feel well repaid for my struggle thus far. But if I am allowed to finishmy course, I know I shall be better able to face the world and make my own way in it than I possibly could do if I had been prepared by any other means.
“The business college course is cheap and quickly gained; but the classical and English courses in a properly conducted school which confers an academic degree fit one for a better and higher position in business or professional life.”
Rather to her chagrin, but to Ella’s great delight, the county paper printed Beth’s speech in part. The flyaway sister went around repeating extracts from it, and proclaiming to all who would listen that Beth was bound to be an orator.
“A lecturer, anyway,” she insisted. “Our Beth will soon adorn the platform. In spectacles and a cap and gown, she will lead her sisters in charges for women’s rights, lecture on the noise nuisance, plead before legislatures for freedom from the trammels of fashion——
“By the way, B. B., Larry says that frock of yours is just stunning.”
“Oh, does he?” returned her sister, placidly.
“Yes. I think you are snubbing Larry.”
“I have no time for boys,” responded Beth.
“Boys! No less!”
“Larry is a boy to me,” Beth declared, in her very haughtiest way.
“I don’t care,” said Ella, mischievously. “He is beginning to come to me for comfort when you throw him down.”
It really did seem as though Larry Haven was striving to show Beth that he had not lost his interest in her or in her career. When Beth first came home that second summer, Larry was frequently at the Baldwin cottage. Whether Beth actually snubbed him, or not, as Ella said, he disappeared soon after, going away for a long outing with Mrs. Haven; so the Baldwins did not see him again until Beth had gone back to Rivercliff in September.
Rather to Beth’s surprise, Larry wrote to her soon after she reached school—something he had not done for fully a year and a half. The letter sounded just as though their old intimacy had never been broken, and that the young lawyer was still quite as much her friend and well-wisher as ever.
She was, for some time, undecided whether to answer or not, and how to answer. But finally she replied in a pleasant, brief letter. Larry’s epistle was like himself—exuberant:
“The Mater lugged me around from one watering place to another this summer—there was no getting away from her, poor dear!—and kept meat it so late that you had flitted from the home nest on Bemis Street when I got back to Hudsonvale and my clamoring clients. I never go away on a vacation without expecting to find the heaped-up bodies of exhausted and desperate clients before my office door in the Hudsonvale Block. However, all I found were several insistent roaches from the bakery downstairs and heaps of dust, for I declare, Devine had not been in to clean up for a month!“What I started to tell you about, Beth, was a girl I met at Saratoga. Fact is, it was the second time I had met her. I am almost tempted to declare it was the third. I spoke to you once of Miss Emeline Freylinghausen. Do you remember the girl who passed me coming out of Rivercliff School when I was going in the day I called to see you? Do you remember her? You said she was a servant, just discharged.“Well, if you could once see Miss Freylinghausen, you’d say she was the speaking image of that person—that maid-servant! I had met Miss Freylinghausen in New York; and now I have seen a good bit of her at Saratoga. She is an odd girl—frank, I should say, and rather blunt in speech—but not at all the sort of girl that one could put this question to: ‘Have you ever been a servant-maid?’ Ha! ha! Ho! ho! and likewiseHe! he! Fancy asking that of one of the Freylinghausens of Philadelphia!“Yet, to tell the truth, Beth, that was exactly what I was tempted to ask. Not particularly because Miss Freylinghausen looks so much like that discharged maid I saw at Rivercliff, but because the Philadelphia heiress has taken up what she calls a serious work in life. It’s quite the fad, I believe, nowadays for girls like her to do social work and the like. She has a hobby, and has interested the Mater in it, too. At least, I hear that Miss Freylinghausen is to appear at Hudsonvale some time this coming winter to prance a little on her hobby-horse for the delectation of the Hudsonvale ladies.”
“The Mater lugged me around from one watering place to another this summer—there was no getting away from her, poor dear!—and kept meat it so late that you had flitted from the home nest on Bemis Street when I got back to Hudsonvale and my clamoring clients. I never go away on a vacation without expecting to find the heaped-up bodies of exhausted and desperate clients before my office door in the Hudsonvale Block. However, all I found were several insistent roaches from the bakery downstairs and heaps of dust, for I declare, Devine had not been in to clean up for a month!
“What I started to tell you about, Beth, was a girl I met at Saratoga. Fact is, it was the second time I had met her. I am almost tempted to declare it was the third. I spoke to you once of Miss Emeline Freylinghausen. Do you remember the girl who passed me coming out of Rivercliff School when I was going in the day I called to see you? Do you remember her? You said she was a servant, just discharged.
“Well, if you could once see Miss Freylinghausen, you’d say she was the speaking image of that person—that maid-servant! I had met Miss Freylinghausen in New York; and now I have seen a good bit of her at Saratoga. She is an odd girl—frank, I should say, and rather blunt in speech—but not at all the sort of girl that one could put this question to: ‘Have you ever been a servant-maid?’ Ha! ha! Ho! ho! and likewiseHe! he! Fancy asking that of one of the Freylinghausens of Philadelphia!
“Yet, to tell the truth, Beth, that was exactly what I was tempted to ask. Not particularly because Miss Freylinghausen looks so much like that discharged maid I saw at Rivercliff, but because the Philadelphia heiress has taken up what she calls a serious work in life. It’s quite the fad, I believe, nowadays for girls like her to do social work and the like. She has a hobby, and has interested the Mater in it, too. At least, I hear that Miss Freylinghausen is to appear at Hudsonvale some time this coming winter to prance a little on her hobby-horse for the delectation of the Hudsonvale ladies.”
A good deal more there was in the same strain in Larry’s sprightly letter; and it was all interesting to Beth. But this about Miss Freylinghausen and her resemblance to Cynthia Fogg, was what impressed Beth the most; for she chanced to remember now that it was Maude Grimshaw who had first noticed that resemblance between Cynthia and the heiress to the Freylinghausen millions.
Beth had not heard from Cynthia since the year before. That odd girl seemed to have quite dropped out of her life; yet somehow Beth had a feeling that they would meet again. MadamHammersly had told Beth once that no holiday went by but that she received a card or some little remembrance from Cynthia; but an address was never added to the strange girl’s signature.
As for Maude Grimshaw, she did not appear at Rivercliff at the opening of this fall semester. It was whispered that her marks had been so low the spring previous that she could not have gone on with her class without many conditions, and would have been dropped before Christmas.
So there passed out of Beth’s school life a very unpleasant and annoying influence. Yet, who was to say that Maude Grimshaw’s treatment of the girl from Hudsonvale had not been good discipline for the latter?