CHAPTER V
THE “WATER WAGTAIL”
“I obtained the money from a friend. Payment of the loan need not be considered until your education at Rivercliff is finished, Beth. This sum will carry you through your first year in comfort. Meanwhile, as you say yourself, a way may be opened for you to continue your course there. ‘Sufficient unto the day.’ Ask no questions.”
Thus said Mrs. Baldwin, in family assembled, when the outcry was made regarding the suddenly and mysteriously acquired funds with which Beth was to storm the heights of Rivercliff School.
Mr. Baldwin looked at his wife oddly, but he asked no question—then or at any subsequent time. When Mrs. Baldwin was as firm as she looked now, the others dared not be inquisitive.
But as delighted as Beth was at the sudden opening of her prospects, she felt that a sacrifice of some kind had been made. She feared her mother and father had done some hard thing for which they might be troubled all through her school years. She had no suspicion of the truth—not for a moment.
“But I will learn from other girls at school how to earn money to pay my way. And I’ll pay mamma back, too,” Beth thought, with but faint appreciation, after all, of how huge a sum four hundred dollars is, and how long it would take to earn and save it in any way open to a girl of fifteen.
Of course, the whole of it did not have to go for tuition and board. There would be a small sum for what Ella called her older sister’s “trousseau,” and for pocket-money and incidentals. Rivercliff was a more expensive school than one or two others Beth had thought of and she wished she could gain the advantages she craved in some other institution.
However, a girl with a diploma from Rivercliff had a distinct advantage over applicants from other schools with the State Board of Education. And for good reason. Rivercliff was more than a preparatory school in the usual acceptation of the term. A girl who faithfully took the courses laid down by Miss Hammersly, the principal, was well fitted for most places in life.
The summer was not spent idly by Beth. She had not merely resolved to obtain an education at her parents’ expense. She was ready and willing to do all in her power to help bring the much desired thing to pass.
She obtained the opportunity of posing on several occasions for an illustrator for the magazines, who came each summer to a rustic studio she had built near Hudsonvale. Beth had done this work before, and the artist paid her fifty cents an hour. It was not an easily won fifty cents by any means. Retaining the poses as was desired strained the muscles and tired the mind more than most other work Beth had ever done.
She could crochet, too; but the payment she received for a baby’s bootees “a fly would starve to death on,” Ella declared—and with some apparent truth. However, Beth kept busy and happy. That is, she told herself she was quite, quite happy. But there was one thing that troubled her mind in secret. Larry Haven had never come to the little cottage on Bemis Street to see her.
From Mary Devine Beth heard much about Larry. He had established himself in the office next to Dr. Coldfoot, and——
“Such scrumptious furniture, Beth, you never did see. They say his mother made him a present of it all—furnished his office right up to the minute. And he’s got a very splendid sign,” added Mary, with enthusiasm.
Beth had seen the sign.
“And he comes downtown as brisk as a drug clerk every morning,” giggled Mary, “and shuts himself into that office—oh, dreadfully busy, he is!”
“I hope he will be,” said Beth, laughing.
Nobody said anything to her about Larry’s not coming to the house. The children were all busy, and had become so used to his absence that they did not note its continuance after Larry returned from the law school.
That her old playmate was busy might be an excuse for his seldom calling; but there was absolutely no excuse, that Beth could imagine, for his never coming to see them. After the first fortnight following his party, Beth ceased to mention Larry in the family’s hearing. She was a girl who could hide her deeper feelings if she so chose; and she chose now to lead her mother to believe that thought of Larry never troubled her mind.
However, it did. More than once tears wet her pillow at night while she lay and wondered why Larry had forsaken her. She did not believe it could be the seven years’ difference in their ages.
“I don’t care if he does think me a little girl,” she told herself; “he might, at least, be polite.”
But, in truth, she laid the defection of Larry Haven to his mother. The why of this was no more clear to her girlish mind than Larry’s neglect; but she had felt Mrs. Haven’s antagonism so deeply that she could not fail to take it into consideration now.
Beth was one of those loyal souls who seldom make friends save after due consideration, and who cling to their friendships, once made, through fair weather and foul. She felt about Larry just as she would have felt about an older brother. He was just as necessary to her complete happiness as Marcus was.
After their intimate talk at the party, Beth felt that her mind and Larry’s were a good deal in accord—especially on the question of the advancement of her schooling. So she hoped he would continue to show his interest in the wonderful (to her) prospect of Rivercliff. She had no assurance that Larry even knew she was surely going to school until the afternoon came for her departure from Hudsonvale.
It was an event, indeed, for one of the Baldwins to go away by the river boat. The Water Wagtail was one of the finest of the fleet plying up and down the Nessing River, and Mr. Baldwin had obtained for Beth one of the staterooms for the trip.
The county paper, which ran a page of Hudsonvale news (“in spite of Mary Devine,” Mr. Baldwin said), had printed a note of Beth’s proposed departure for school, and the date. Was that how Larry knew? For when Beth went down to the dock and aboard the Water Wagtail, the steward had just taken a box of cut flowers to her stateroom.
“I declare for’t, Missy,” said the shining-faced negro, “yo’ friend suttenly has sent yo’ a heap o’ posies.”
“Let me see the card, steward,” she said quickly.
It was Larry’s, and Beth knew that flowers like these grew only in his mother’s garden—in Hudsonvale, at least.
Her family had trooped aboard after her—with Mary Devine and a dozen other girls who had been Beth’s friends at the high school. They made a noisy and jolly party. And how they wondered and exclaimed over the flower-filled stateroom.
“Why!” cried Mary Devine, “it’s just like a bridal tour you’re starting on. Aren’t you lucky, B. B.?”
“I surely am,” admitted Beth, smiling.
“But where’s the groom?” asked one of the other girls, slily. “Did he send the flowers?”
“How ridiculous!” rejoined Mary, scornfully. “It’s the best man who sends the flowers, not the groom. He has to help smell ’em!”
The party remained on deck while the freight was being run aboard below. Beth’s glance often swept the littered dock as she talked gaily to her friends or to the children or to her mother and father. Suddenly her eyes fixed their gaze upon a tall figure striding down to the dock from Water Street.
It was Larry. Beth’s heart leaped and the color came and went in her cheeks. Had there not been so much going on, her excitement must have been noticed. As it happened, however, not even the girls chanced to see Larry till he was aboard the boat and was approaching the group.
By that time Beth had quite regained her self-control. She welcomed Larry with just the degree of warmth her mother displayed—by no means as joyfully as did Mary Devine. He had to be introduced to the other girls—re-introduced in some cases. With Mr. and Mrs. Baldwin he was delightfully cordial. The children—even the twins—welcomed Larry nicely. Nothing was said about his previous neglect.
When the warning whistle sounded and the party arose to leave, Larry manoeuvered to get Beth by herself for a moment. They took the outer deck on one side of the glass-enclosed cabin, while the rest of the party went the other way to the stair-well.
“Go to it, Beth. I glory in your resolve,” Larry said, in reference to her plunge into boarding-school life. “Get all there is for you at Rivercliff.”
“I mean to, Larry,” she said composedly. “And thank you for the flowers—they are beautiful.”
“Oh, they were the Mater’s idea,” he said hurriedly. “But I have something here——”
He fumbled in his pocket and brought forth a little box—a jeweler’s box, Beth knew.
“You won’t want to wear those jolly old corals that belonged to your Great-grandmother Lomis at every party you go to up there,” Larry said, more boyish in his confusion than ever, Beth thought. “Here’s something you can wear right along—to remember me by.”
He thrust the box into her hand. The children came racing to join them. Beth hid the box quickly in her bag—she knew not why.
She pressed Larry’s hand in farewell. She kissed her mother, her father, and “all the tribe,” as Ella called the family. The girls waved their handkerchiefs from the shore.
Larry did not wait as the Water Wagtail pulled out into the stream. It was his tall form, however, striding up the dock when the steamboat was really under way that Beth last saw.