The girls of Rivercliff School; or, Beth Baldwin's resolve

“Beth! Beth Baldwin! Oh, B. B.! Do, for pity’s sake, stop! Do you expect me to chase you all over town such a hot day as this? It’s cruelty to animals to make me run in this awful sun,” and Mary Devine finally reached Elizabeth Baldwin’s side, and clung to her school friend’s arm, panting.

“Cruelty to how many animals, Mary?” asked Beth, laughing. “Are you a whole menagerie? You remind me of our Marcus when he was a little fellow. There was a ‘cat concert’ in our back yard one night, and Marcus put his head out of the door to see the participants.

“‘Oh, Mamma!’ he called, ‘there’s a million cats out here,’ and when mamma reproved him for exaggerating, he defended himself by saying: ‘Well, anyway, there’s our old cat and another one!’”

Mary had regained her breath now, and giggled over Beth’s little story, but was not to be sidetracked. She had something to tell. News was Mary Devine’s over-mastering passion. To know what went on all over Hudsonvale, and to distribute her information generously, “free, gratis, for nothing,” was the height of her enjoyment.

Mr. Baldwin said one evening, after Mary had been calling on Beth: “They did think some of starting a local paper here in Hudsonvale; but they heard of that Devine girl and gave it up. No need of a newspaper with her in town.”

Now Mary gasped to her friend:

“Oh, Beth! I’ve got something to tell you. You’d never guess!”

“That’s good of you, dear,” Beth said, her black eyes dancing. “I hate conundrums. Tell me.”

“Larry Haven has hired an office in the Hudsonvale block.”

“Why, Mary! that certainly is news,” Beth cried. “I never would have guessed that. Has he hung out his shingle?”

“He’s going to,” declared Mary, who knew all about it, for her father was janitor of Hudsonvale’s one brick office building. “He’s taken the room next to Dr. Coldfoot’s, the dentist’s, suite. Larry told father that the screams of the dentist’s patients would not bother him, for he expected his clients would scream quite as loud when he separated them from their money,” and Mary giggled again. “And oh, Beth! he’s just as handsome!”

“Who is—Dr. Coldfoot?” asked her friend, innocently.

“Goodness no! You are well aware, Beth Baldwin, that I meant the village pride, Mr. Lawrence Haven, just returned from the law school with his sheepskin.”

Beth laughed again. “I do hope he’ll be successful,” she said. “His father was a prominent lawyer, you know.”

“Goodness! I hope he can dance,” responded Mary. “There’s a great dearth of good dancers among the boys here in Hudsonvale. You know, Beth, at graduation last month we girls had to dance together at our party. Oh dear! I wish we were going to have it over again! What fun!”

“Larry Haven is no longer a boy,” Beth said slowly.

Mary laughed. “Of course not. He’s an old man,” she said saucily. “He’s twenty-two.”

“That is seven years our senior,” said Beth, reflectively.

“Six, in my case, if you please,” said Mary, smartly. “And what’s six years in a boy? He could be a lawyer forty times over and I wouldn’t be afraid of him.”

“You have more assurance than most, Mary,” said Beth, smiling. “I don’t know that I shall dare even speak to Larry now.”

“Humph! you and he used to be as ‘sticky’ on each other as two molasses cocoanut balls—you know you used. He was the white-headed little boy who used to pull you to school on his sled,” said Mary, airily.

“But that was a long time ago,” said Beth, with laughter. “I haven’t seen Larry since last winter’s holidays—and then scarcely more than to wave my hand to him. He’s grown quite away from us Hudsonvale girls and boys since his sophomore year at college.”

“My! how he did puff himself and walk turkey his first two years at college,” said the slangy Mary. “The only boy from Hudsonvale who ever went to a real, big school, I guess.”

“But Larry wasn’t spoiled,” Beth hastened to say. “He’s so sweet-tempered.”

“Oh! you know how sweet he is if anybody does,” chuckled Mary. “Well! I must turn off here. Where are you going, Beth?”

“Just across town on an errand,” her friend said evasively; for it was the gossipy girl’s nature to repeat to the next person she talked with anything she had learned from her previous companion, no matter how trivial.

“Not that I would mind if the whole town knew I was going to old Mrs. Crummit’s for a dozen fresh eggs,” thought Beth, with inward laughter. “But I do wish Mary Devine was not such a ‘Babbling Bess.’”

The girl’s mind, however, was filled with thoughts springing from the bit of news her school friend had told her. She and Mary had but recently graduated from the high school. And Larry Haven, the only son of the widowed Mrs. Euphemia Haven, had recently returned to his home with his diploma as a lawyer. Beth knew he had already been admitted to the county bar.

Beth’s mother and Euphemia Griswold had been bosom friends in girlhood. At first, after Euphemia Griswold had married Mr. Haven, the leading lawyer of the county and a scion of one of the oldest, if not one of the wealthiest, families in the State, she and Priscilla Baldwin, who had married a foreman in the Locomotive Works, remained very good friends.

The Haven baby carriage was often pushed along the pleasantly shaded walks of Hudsonvale side by side with the more plebian carriage containing the Baldwins’ first little one, who later had died. The two young women remained inseparable friends for some years.

Then had come the death of her first child, and for a long period of time after this Mrs. Baldwin mingled but little with her friends. This was followed by a long illness. But, after a few years, Beth, now the oldest of her brood, came to give the foreman’s wife a new and better interest in life.

Meanwhile, her old-time chum had grown away from her. Mr. Haven had become a corporation lawyer and was fast growing rich. He and his family had always had entrance into the most exclusive society of the State. Had he not died suddenly when Larry was ten years old, he might have been a national figure in politics.

In dying, he had left Mrs. Euphemia Haven and her only child fairly well-to-do. The property had to be conserved with some shrewdness, perhaps; but the widow lived in one of the finest old houses in Hudsonvale, entertained well, and seemed to have everything her heart desired. Larry was given an excellent education; and it was understood that he was to follow in his father’s footsteps, for he must earn his own living now that he was of age, his mother having full rights in the property as long as she lived.

Mrs. Haven was not a snob. Although now the acknowledged leader of such society as there was in Hudsonvale (which was really a sprawling river-town surrounding the Locomotive Works and coal-tar Dye Factory), she had often come to see her old friend, Mrs. Baldwin, while Larry was still small. So it was that the soft-spoken, gentle boy, with the watchful gray eyes and firm mouth, came to be a companion of Beth Baldwin’s while she was little.

He took her to school on her first day; and sat beside her and held her plump little hand for an hour, too, because she was afraid. He had drawn Beth to school on his sled, as Mary Devine said. Larry was as much at home in the Baldwin house when a child as he was in his own. Perhaps more at home, for there was more gaiety in the little cottage on Bemis Street, which soon began to be crowded with young life after Beth was born.

There was Marcus, two years Beth’s junior; Ella, now a flyaway child of eleven; Prissy—named after her mother—as sweet and loving as a child could be; and Fred and Ferd, the twins, six years old. They had all looked on Larry Haven as almost an elder brother.

For two years, however, as Beth had intimated to Mary Devine, Larry had not been much at the Baldwin home. Indeed, he had been in Hudsonvale but seldom. His summers had been spent in preparing for the law school, for he was very desirous to get ahead. His exceeding industry had brought results. He was a very young man, indeed, to have succeeded in securing his diploma and entering upon public life as he now had.

As Beth Baldwin went her way, these thoughts weaved through her mind. And, too, she compared her own lot to that of her whilom playmate and confidant. When Beth learned that Larry was to go to college and finally enter the law school, she had expressed her intention of getting the maximum amount of education to be secured by a girl—and Larry had encouraged her to try for it.

Beth had stood well in her classes all through her high-school course. She had graduated among the first ten pupils in the class. She possessed a deep longing to continue her course. But——

“There’s about as much chance of my going to Rivercliff as there is of my getting an aeroplane and soaring in it to the Heights of Parnassus,” Beth told herself, with a little laugh and a little sigh. She was not of a melancholy disposition, and even the seriousness of her desire to learn and to achieve, in her way, as much as Larry had achieved in his, could not make her gloomy.

Mr. Baldwin earned three dollars and seventy-five cents a day as foreman of the erecting shop in the Hudsonvale Locomotive Works. The family had often “figured and refigured” that sum; but they could not make it come to more than twenty-two dollars and fifty cents a week.

Marcus, although but thirteen, was already talking bravely about going to work. In another half year he could get his certificate and become an aid in the family’s support.

“While I,” thought Beth, shaking her head, “am desirous of adding to its burdens for three years to come. But then—if I only could—I know I could pay them all back,” she sighed.

It was Beth’s desire to take a normal and teacher’s course in a very thorough boarding school up the river. Having a diploma from Rivercliff would enable her to obtain a certificate to teach in the State schools. That was her aim—to be self-supporting, as well as to obtain an education the equal of that Larry Haven had secured.

She had surreptitiously dipped into Larry’s college textbooks when he was at home during his freshman and sophomore years, and she was sure that such studies were not beyond her comprehension.

“Dear me,” thought Beth, “the grapes that hang highest are always the sweetest. How am I ever going to get admission to Rivercliff School; or, once admitted, how am I to remain there the necessary three years? Dear me! if Larry——”

Just then she looked up before crossing the street and gazed directly into the calm, rather proud face of Larry’s mother who, in her little electric runabout, was just drawing in to the opposite curb.

Mrs. Euphemia Haven was tall, of good figure, with beautiful hair, beginning to be touched with gray, that her maid dressed more becomingly than was any other woman’s hair in Hudsonvale. She had a good complexion, with a tinge of natural pink in the cheeks and lips. Her teeth were even and white, without the defects of gold showing the handiwork of the dentist. She dressed exquisitely, Beth thought.

Mrs. Haven drove her runabout with the assurance of a boy. She had steady nerves, a cordial laugh, a smile that was charming, and knew always how to put one at his ease. She beckoned now to Beth as the latter crossed the street, crying:

“Elizabeth! Beth! Come here, please! You are just the person I must see.”