Clark's Field Part 4

The Clark's Field a.s.sociates was, therefore, incorporated and made an offer to the trust company for Clark's Field,--a fair offer in the neighborhood of a million dollars for the fifty-acre tract of city land.

An obstacle, however, presented itself at this point, which in the end forced the a.s.sociates to modify their plan materially. The sale had to be approved by the probate judge, the same Judge Orcutt who had once before befriended the unknown little girl. This time the judge examined the scheme carefully, even asked for a list of the a.s.sociates, which was an innocent collection of dummy names, and finally after conference with the trust officers insisted that the ward should reserve for herself one half the shares of the Clark's Field a.s.sociates, thus obtaining an interest in the possible benefits to be derived from their transactions.

This was accordingly done, and the subscription to the stock of the new corporation by some of the capitalists who had been invited to "partic.i.p.ate" in this juicy melon was cut down one half. They were not pleased by the act of the probate judge, but they accepted half the melon with good grace, a.s.suring the judge through Mr. Crane that it was a highly speculative venture anyhow to put Clark's Field on the market, and the a.s.sociates might lose every penny they risked on it. The judge merely smiled. Poet that he was, he was by no means a fool in the affairs of this life.

When Adelle made her second visit to the Washington Trust Company, the scheme outlined above had not been perfected, but the legal process was far enough along to show promise of a brilliant fulfillment. The "queer little piece," as Mr. Gardiner described Adelle to his wife, had thus grown in importance within a brief year to such dignified persons as President West of the trust company and the wealthy stockholders who under various disguises were embarking upon the venture of the Clark's Field a.s.sociates. She was no longer merely the heiress of a legal mess: she was the means by which a powerful modern banking inst.i.tution hoped to make for its inner circle of patrons a very profitable investment. So these gentlemen examined with curiosity the shy little person who slowly advanced across the carpeted floor of Mr. Gardiner's private office. The president himself rose from his chair and extended to Adelle a large, handsome, white hand with the polite greeting,--

"I am very glad to meet you, Miss Clark."

Adelle was more than ordinarily dumb. She had expected to see the trust officer alone as she had the other time, and in the presence of these strangers she took her one means of defense,--silence. The president, however, did the talking, and he talked more humanly than stuffy Mr.

Gardiner. After expressing a deep sympathy with Adelle for the death of her aunt (of whose existence he had not been aware before this week), he easily shifted to the topic of Adelle's future. She must, of course, continue her education. Adelle replied that she should like to keep on with school, by which she meant the Alton Girls' High.

"Of course, of course," the president said easily. "Every girl should have the proper sort of education, and it is all the more important when her responsibilities and opportunities in life are likely to be increased by the possession of property."

But Adelle did not see how she could continue at the high school, now that her aunt had died and there was no one but herself to look after the roomers.

"Oh, very easily, very easily," the president thought. "How would you like to go to boarding-school, my dear?"

Adelle did not know all at once. She had read something about boarding-schools in story-books, but her conception of them was hazy.

And she ventured to say out loud that they must take a "sight of money."

The president of the trust company smiled for the benefit of his fellow-officers and proceeded to break the news of the rich expectations awaiting the timid little girl.

"I think we shall find enough money somehow to send you to a good school," he said gayly. "You know we have some money in the bank that will be yours,--oh, not a great deal at present, but enough to give you a good education, provided you don't spend too much on clothes, young lady."

This was a cruel jest, considering the quality of Adelle's one poor little serge dress which she had on, and she took it quite literally.

While absorbing the idea that she must make her clothes go as far as possible, she made no remark.

"The property that we hold in trust for you until you shall become of age," the president resumed more seriously, "is not yet in such condition that we can tell you exactly how much it will amount to. But it is safe to say that all your reasonable needs will be provided for.

You'll never have to worry about money!"

He congratulated himself upon the happy phrasing of his announcement. It was cautiously vague, and yet must relieve the little girl of all apprehension or worry. Adelle made no response. For a Clark to be told that there was no need to worry over money was too astounding for belief.

"Now," said the president, who felt that he had done everything called for in the situation, "I will leave Mr. Gardiner to explain all the details to you. I hope you will enjoy your new school.... Whenever you are in the city, come in and see us!"

He shook the little girl's hand and went off with his good-looking young a.s.sistant, whose sharp glances had made Adelle shyer than ever. The two men smiled as they went out, as though they were saying to themselves,--"Queer little piece to have all that money!"

Mr. Gardiner took a great many words to explain to Adelle that her guardians had thought it best "after due consideration" to send her to an excellent boarding-school for young ladies--Herndon Hall. He rolled the name with an unction he had learned from his wife. Herndon Hall, it seemed, was in a neighboring State, not far from the great city of New York, and Adelle must prepare herself for her first long railroad journey. She would not have to take this alone, however, for Miss Thompson, the head teacher, had telephoned the trust company that she herself would be in B---- on the following Friday and would escort Miss Clark to the Hall. Adelle could be ready, of course, by Friday.

Here Adelle demurred. There were the roomers--what would happen to them?

And the old Church Street house--what was to become of the house? The banker waved aside these practical woman's considerations with a smile.

Some one would be sent out from the trust company to look after all such unimportant matters. So, intimidated rather than persuaded, Adelle left the trust company building to prepare herself for her new life that was to begin on the following Friday noon.

They were accustomed to doing large things in the Washington Trust Company, and of course they did small things in a large way. But the little orphan's fate had really been the subject of more consideration than might possibly be inferred from the foregoing. The school matter had been carefully canva.s.sed among the officers of the company. Mr.

Gardiner had expressed some doubts as to the wisdom of sending Adelle at once to a large, fashionable school, even if she had the money to pay for it. Vague glimmerings of reason as to what really might make for the little girl's happiness in life troubled him, even after his wife's unhesitating verdict. But President West had no doubts whatever and easily bore down his scruples. He belonged to a slightly superior cla.s.s socially and did not hold Herndon Hall in the same awe in which it was regarded in the Gardiner household. His daughters had friends who had got what education they had under Miss Annette Thompson and had married well afterwards and "taken a good position in society," which was really the important thing. Miss Thompson herself was of a very good New York family,--he had known her father who had been something of a figure in finance until the crash of ninety-three,--and the head of Herndon Hall was reputed to have an excellent "formative" influence upon her girls.

And certainly that raw little specimen who had presented herself in his office needed all the "formative influence" she could get!

"We must give her the best," he p.r.o.nounced easily, "for she is likely to be a rich woman some day."

It may be seen that President West agreed with Mrs. Gardiner's practical interpretation of the catechism. After his interview with Adelle he said to the trust officer,--"She needs--everything! Herndon Hall will be the very thing for her--will teach her what a girl in her position ought to know."

These remarks reveal on his part a special philosophy that will become clearer as we get to know better Miss Annette Thompson and Herndon Hall.

The officers of the trust company felt that in sending their ward to this fashionable girls' school, they were doing their duty by her not only safely but handsomely, and thenceforth dismissed her from their thoughts, except when a subordinate brought them at regular intervals a voucher to sign before issuing a check on behalf of Adelle....

"Terribly crude little piece," the president of the trust company said of Adelle, thinking of his own vivacious daughters, who at her age had been complete little women of the world, and of all the other pretty, confident, voluble girls he met in his social life. "She has seen nothing of life," he said in extenuation, by which he meant naturally that Adelle Clark had never known how "nice people live," had never been to dancing-school or parties, or country clubs or smart dressmakers, and all the rest of what to him const.i.tuted a "suitable education" for a young girl who was to inherit money.

Meanwhile the "crude little piece" returned to her old home, somewhat shaken in mind by what had happened to her. It never entered her little head to argue with the august officers of the trust company, who stood to her as the sacred symbol of Authority. She must buy a trunk, pack it, and be at the Eclair Hotel in B---- by noon on the following Friday.

Those were her orders. She looked wonderingly at the two hundred dollar check which Mr. Gardiner had given her for the expense of making herself ready. She had never before seen two hundred dollars. She knew only abstractly by the way of her arithmetic that such vast sums of money existed. And now she was expected to spend this fortune in the s.p.a.ce of three days upon herself. She folded up the slip of paper and tucked it carefully into her purse. When she presented it at one of the shops in the Square in payment for the cheap trunk she had selected, she started a local sensation. By the time the check had traveled from the clerk to the proprietor and thence to the River National Bank, which did not take long, it was known in that busy neighborhood that Clark's Field had made good at last! Here was ready money from it as evidence. Adelle Clark was in fact the heiress that her mother Addie had been in fancy.

The manager of the livery-stable may have had his regrets for the light manner in which he had treated old Pike's suggestion. He drove the girl himself into B---- on Friday with her new trunk strapped behind the closed carriage and touched his high hat when she dismounted before the flunky-guarded doors of the hotel. Adelle did not notice the hat business: she gave her old friend and best "roomer" her hand as she said good-bye, then slowly mounted the stone steps of the hotel. And that was the last that Church Street saw of the Clarks.

The liveryman, slowly retracing his way across the bridge to Alton, mused upon the picture that the little girl presented in her blue school suit, going up the steps of the Eclair Hotel. It was all like a stage story, he felt, and he thought long about the Clarks, whom he had known for two generations and about human fate generally. He summed up his reflections in one enigmatic exclamation,--"That blamed old pasture!"

Adelle was an "heiress." Already she had been whisked away from Church Street to her new life. And all because of "that blamed old pasture"--otherwise Clark's Field.

XI

The civilized inhabitants of our twentieth-century world are acquainted with many more kinds of torture than the ingenious managers of the Inquisition ever dreamed of in their most lurid nightmares. And of all these peculiarly modern forms of torture, perhaps the fashionable girls'

school such as Herndon Hall takes first rank. A boys' school of the same order--conducted under the patronage of some holy saint's name--is often pretty bad, but it cannot rival the girls' school because women are more skillful in applying social torture and have a thousand ways of doing it to a man's or boy's one. Even among the softest and sn.o.bbiest of boys and masters there will always remain a residuum of male self-respect. If the newcomer, no matter how wrongly cla.s.sed, proves that he has physical courage, or an apt.i.tude for sports, or even a sunny, common-sense disposition, he will quickly escape from his probationary period of torture and become tolerated; while if a girl appears among her future schoolmates with an ill-made, unfashionable frock, or has manners that betray less sophistication than is to be expected, she may never survive the torture that begins on the instant and follows her relentlessly, in the schoolroom and out, until she either adapts herself to her environment, becoming in turn a torturer, or is removed to a more congenial environment.

Adelle Clark presented to the little world of Herndon Hall a very vulnerable appearance when she arrived at the school on that Friday evening. She was still wearing the blue serge school dress that she and her aunt had made for her high-school debut, also some coa.r.s.e, faded brown stockings, and stout cheap shoes, not to mention an unmentionable hat of no style at all. She had taken that unfortunate joke of the trust company's president literally: she must not waste her substance upon clothes. Even without this inhibition she had scarcely the skill and the courage necessary to spend her two hundred dollars to advantage in three days. So she had bought herself a trunk, a few suits of much-needed heavy underwear, some handkerchiefs, and a coat that she had desired all winter, a thick, clumsy affair that completely enveloped her slight figure. Then her imagination of wants had given out.

The young teacher, who had taken Miss Thompson's place because of a sudden indisposition that attacked the head mistress, had made Adelle uncomfortably aware that something was wrong, but she put down her coolness and unsympathetic silence during their brief journey to the fact that Miss Stevens was a "teacher" and therefore felt "superior,"

"Rosy," as the older Hall girls called Miss Stevens, was not at all "superior" in her att.i.tude to the girls. She dressed quite smartly and youthfully and was their best confidante. But she had received a shock when she saw "that little fright" (as she reported to Miss Thompson) timidly sitting on the edge of her chair in the parlor of the Eclair Hotel. "Where can she come from?" she had said to herself; and later she had supplemented this query by thinking, "wherever it was, she had better go back to it as fast as she can--the little fright!"

Fortunately Adelle did not understand the glances that the elegant young women who were chattering in the Hall drawing-room before dinner cast upon her when she was introduced to her schoolmates. Nor did she immediately comprehend the intention of the insults and tortures to which she was submitted during the ensuing year. She felt lonely: she missed her aunt and even the "roomers" more than she had expected to.

But gradually even into her dumb mind there penetrated a sense of undeserved ignominy, not clearly localized, because she did not possess a sufficient knowledge of sophisticated manners to realize the refined nature of her torture. She had merely an acc.u.mulating sense of pain and outrage. She was not happy in Herndon Hall: she did not know it until afterwards, but that was the plain truth. n.o.body wanted her there, and she knew enough to understand it. Even a cat or a dog has sufficient social sense for that!

Externally Herndon Hall was all that was charming and gracious--a much more beautiful and refined home than Adelle had ever seen. It occupied one of those s.p.a.cious old manorial houses above the Hudson, where the river swept in a gracious curve at the foot of the long lawn. An avenue of old trees led up to the large stone house from the high road half a mile away. There were all sorts of dependencies,--stables, greenhouses, and ornamental gardens of the old-fashioned kind,--which were carefully kept up so that the Hall resembled a large private estate, such as it was meant to be, rather than a school. It was popularly supposed that Herndon Hall had once been the country-place of Miss Thompson's people, which was not true; but that shrewd woman of the world, recognizing all the advantages of an aristocratic background, kept up the place on a generous footing, with gardeners, stablemen, and many inside servants, for which, of course, the pupils paid liberally. The Hall was run less as a school than as a private estate. Many of the girls had their own horses in the stable, and rode every pleasant afternoon under the care of an old English riding-master, who was supposed to have been "Somebody in England" once. (Later on, when the motor became popular the girls had their own machines, but that was after Adelle's time.) There was lawn tennis on the ample lawns, and this with the horseback riding and occasional strolls was the only concession to the athletic spirit of the day.

The schoolrooms were not the feature of the Hall that one might expect.

They were confined to a small wing in the rear, or the bas.e.m.e.nt, and there were no laboratories or other paraphernalia of modern education.

The long drawing-room, with its recessed windows facing the river, was hung with "old masters"--a few faded American protraits and some recent copies of the Italian school. It was also furnished luxuriously and had books in handsome bindings. But educationally, in any accepted sense of the word, Herndon Hall was quite negligible, as all such inst.i.tutions for the care of the daughters of the rich must be, as long as the chief concern of its patrons is to see their daughters properly married and "taking a good position in society." Adelle quickly perceived that, though she had been reckoned a dull pupil in the Alton Girls' High School, she had much more than enough book knowledge to hold her own in the cla.s.ses of her new school. If it is difficult to say what is a good education for a boy whose parents can afford to give him "the best," it is almost impossible to solve the educational riddle for his sister. She must have good manners, an attractive person, and, less clearly, some acquaintance with literature, music, and art, and one modern language to enable her to hold her own in the social circles that it is presumed she will adorn. At least that was the way Miss Thompson looked at the profound problem of girls' education. She herself was accounted "accomplished," a "brilliant conversationalist," and "broadly cultured,"

with the confident air that the best society is supposed to give, and her business was to impart some of this polish to her pupils.

"Conversation," it may be added, was one of the features of Herndon Hall.

Art, music, and literature did not seem to awaken Adelle's dormant mind any more than had the rigorous course of the public schools. She did as most of the girls did,--nothing,--coming unprepared day after day to her recitations to be helped through the lessons by the obliging teachers, who professed to care little for "mere scholarship" and strove rather to "awaken the intelligence" and "stir the spirit," "educate the taste,"

and all the rest of the fluff with which an easy age excuses its laziness. The girls at Herndon Hall impudently bluffed their teachers or impertinently replied that they "didn't remember," just like their papas and future husbands when they were cornered on the witness stand by inconvenient questions about shady transactions.

The tone of the school was distinctly fashionable, also idle and luxurious, which was what its patrons desired. Many of the mothers and other female relatives of the girls, besides the "old girls" themselves, ran up to the school from New York, which was not far away, bringing with them a rich atmosphere of jewels, clothes, and gossip that seemed to hang about the large drawing-room of the stately stone mansion. The more fortunate pupils found frequent excuses for getting down to the gay city for the theater and parties, and there were besides boys from a neighboring college, with parties to the races, all discreetly chaperoned, of course.

Miss Thompson was at great pains to maintain what the "old Hall girls"

called the "tone of Herndon," so that careful mothers and fathers should have no hesitation in confiding to it their daughters from fear that they might encounter "undesirable a.s.sociates." In all the years of its existence Miss Thompson had never admitted a member of a certain religious creed. Yet latterly there had been rumors that the Hall was not what it once had been. There were too many "Western" girls: some said Herndon was getting "Pittsburghy." There were certain lively daughters of Western millionaires, two in especial from the great State of California whom Adelle later on was thrown with, who did not add to the exclusive atmosphere of the Hall.