Clark's Field Part 5

The path of the manager of a fashionable school is by no means an easy one. It is, in fact, as Miss Thompson had found, more difficult than the famous eye of the needle. For if she were so scrupulous as to bar out all the daughters of new wealth, she was in danger of lacking that material support without which Herndon Hall could not be maintained. And if she admitted too freely rich "Western girls" whose parents were "n.o.bodies," but were keenly anxious to have their daughters become "somebodies," she was in danger of watering her wine to the point where it would lose all its potency. A constant equilibrium between the good-family cla.s.s and the merely rich must be maintained if the school was to preserve its position. And so it can be understood why the proprietor and the teachers of Herndon Hall carefully scrutinized Adelle on her first appearance. Would she merely water their precious wine? If so she must be very rich, indeed, to compensate for her diluting presence. Miss Thompson had accepted her on the strength of President West's personal letter, and it did not take her long to discover that she had made a grave mistake. Adelle was all water!

She folded up her napkin at dinner in the thrifty manner of the Church Street house. She ate her soup from the point of her spoon, and the wrong spoon, and she wore her one dress from the time she got up in the morning until she went to bed. If it had not been for the solid social position of President West and the prestige of the trust company, whose ward she was, it is probable that Adelle would have been sent packing by the end of the second day. As it was, the head mistress said to Miss Stevens, with a sigh of commendable Christian resignation,--"We must do our best for the poor little thing--send her in to me after dinner."

When Adelle entered the private sitting-room of the head mistress, she expected to be given directions about her cla.s.ses. Not at all. Miss Thomson, who still seemed to be suffering from the indisposition that Adelle found frequently attacked her, looked her over coldly as she sipped her coffee and remarked that she "must have something fit to wear at once." She put the little girl through a careful examination as to the contents of her trunk, with the result that in a few days Adelle's wardrobe was marvelously increased with a supply of suitable frocks for all occasions, slippers, lingerie, and hats, and the bill was sent to the trust company, which honored it promptly without question, not knowing exactly what a girl ought to cost. Having equipped her pupil "decently," Miss Thompson observed "that she didn't have an idea how to wear her clothes," but she trusted to the spirit of the school to correct that deficiency. Next she sent Adelle to the dentist and had her teeth straightened,--a painful operation that dragged through several years at great cost of time and money, and resulted finally in a set of regular teeth that looked much like false ones. Having provided for her outside, the teachers turned their attention to her manners and "form,"

and here lay Adelle's worst mental torture. That young teacher, "Rosy"

Stevens, who had fetched her from B----, had this task. "Rosy," who was only thirty, was supposed to be having "a desperate affair of the heart"

with an actor, which she discussed with the older girls. She was the most popular chaperone in the school because she was "dead easy" and connived at much that might have resulted scandalously. "Rosy" shared the girls' tastes for sweets, dress, and jewelry, and smuggled into the Hall, not candy--because that was openly permitted in any quant.i.ty--but forbidden "naughty" novels.

Miss Stevens had the deadliest weapon at her command that Adelle had ever encountered--sarcasm. "My dear girl," she would say before a tableful of girls, in the pityingly sweet tone of an experienced woman of the world to a vulgar n.o.body, "how can you speak like that!" (This when Adelle had emitted the vernacular grunt in answer to some question.) "You are not a little ape, my dear." Then she would mimic in her dainty drawl Adelle's habit of speech, which, of course, set all the girls at the table t.i.ttering. Adelle naturally did not love "Rosy," but she was helpless before her darts. The other teachers generally ignored her presence, treating her with the perfect politeness of complete indifference. Once, soon after her arrival, the child was caught talking with one of the housemaids in the upper corridor, and was severely reprimanded. She had merely sought for a ray of human sunlight, but she was told that young women of her station in life were never familiar with servants. In a word, Adelle was more nearly encased in an airproof lining at Herndon Hall than ever before, and remained for another two years the pale, furtive, undeveloped child she was when she first came.

Some cures, it seems, are so radical that they paralyze the nervous system and develop rather than cure the disease. Such was the case of Adelle in Herndon Hall. For nearly two years she sneaked about its comfortable premises, a silent, forlorn, miserable little being, frightened at what she could not understand, ready for a blow, but not keen enough to put up a protecting hand. The verdict of the school was that "the little fright of a Clark girl" was too stupid to learn anything. As one girl said to "Rosy,"--"The Clark girl must have piles of money to be here at all."

And the teacher replied,--"She'll need it all, every cent, she's so deadly common."

Let no reader suppose that Herndon Hall in which Adelle was suffering her martyrdom is typical of all fashionable girls' boarding-schools. In a real sense nothing in this life is sufficiently universal to be considered typical. There are to-day many schools that have some of the characteristics of Herndon Hall, though fortunately fewer than there were when Adelle got her education. But even at that time there were many excellent schools for girls where the teachers made sincere efforts to teach the girls something, where the girls were human and well-bred, and the teachers were kind and sympathetic and would not have tolerated such conduct as went on almost openly in this "exclusive" establishment, nor such brutal treatment as the girls dealt out to Adelle.

Herndon Hall, with its utterly false standards of everything that concerns woman's being, was the fruit of those ideals that have obtained about women, their position and education, for many centuries. And Herndon Hall was Adelle's accident--the fate to which the trust officers in all good will consigned her. There always is and must be, even in our own enlightened age of feminist movements, a Herndon Hall--perhaps more than one. Parents who believe that marriage and "a suitable position in society" are all there is in life for a woman will always create Herndon Halls.

XII

If the history of Clark's Field and those whom it concerned were an idealistic or romantic story, striving to present the world as it ought to be rather than as it often happens to be, our little heroine should at this crisis awaken from her apathy. Her spark of a soul should be touched by some sympathetic agent,--one of the teachers who had lived sadly and deeply, or some generous exception among her school-fellows, who would extend a protecting wing to the persecuted girl. No doubt even in Herndon Hall there were such who might have answered at a pinch to regenerate Adelle and start her forth on a series of physical if not spiritual adventures that would be exhilarating to the reader. But nothing of the sort came into her life at this period. She was too unpromising to arouse the incipient Samaritans.

There was, of course, the religious or rather the church side of the school in which Adelle might have taken refuge. This consisted of attending the small Episcopal Church in the neighboring village, where the excellent rector, a married man and the father of daughters, often directed his discourses at the Hall pews. But Adelle was no more religiously minded than her worldly little a.s.sociates. There was nothing in the service of ritualistic beauty to arouse a latent sensuousness--nothing of color or form or sound. Religion in fact had even less to do with daily life in Herndon Hall, in spite of weekly church and morning prayers, than it had in the Church Street house.

There was more or less talk about "the Church" and "the spiritual life,"

but, as Adelle soon perceived, the girls lied, cheated in their lessons, spoke spitefully of one another--did even worse--quite as people acted in the world outside. Even the teachers, she learned after a time, failed to connect the religious life with their personal conduct.

"Rosy," the teacher with whom she had most to do the first year, aimed to be the companion rather than the guide of the girls in their frequent escapades. Miss Thompson herself, it was whispered among the older girls, suffered from something worse than "neuralgia" in those frequent attacks which incapacitated her. As for the general morale of the school, even more serious things could be said if it were not for fear that the authorities of Herndon Hall and others of a similar mind might ban this tale as unfit for "nice girls" to peruse, although they tolerate the deeds themselves. Of such matters, to be sure, Adelle knew nothing until later, for at first she was so much an outsider that she was not allowed to look beneath the decorous surface, and experienced merely petty attacks of selfishness and sn.o.bbery.

She might never have got completely beneath the surface if she had not been obliged to spend all her vacations at the Hall. The teachers were then off duty, when they were not visiting at the homes of their pupils, and spoke and acted before the silent girl quite freely because they considered her lacking mentally and harmless. And she was allowed to converse occasionally with the house servants, who sometimes spoke openly about Herndon Hall. She knew that the teachers had lively parties where wine was served freely. Adelle was supposed to be in her room on the third floor when these festivities were in progress, but she could not be unaware of them. And once she encountered "Rosy" in a curious state of exaltation that filled her with fear. At that time she did not understand the working of wine upon the spirit....

She was, of course, often dull and lonely, especially the first summer in the empty house above the steaming river. It was too hot much of the time to do more than loll about the porches with a book or some sewing.

She tried to do a little gardening because she liked flowers, and occasionally took walks alone into the country. It was a lazy, unwholesome existence, and she was surprised to find herself looking forward to the day when her tormentors would return and the routine of school life would begin once more. During this first long vacation Mrs.

Gardiner made a feeble effort "to do something" for the trust company's ward. She asked Adelle for a week's visit in the mountains, and shy as she was Adelle longed for that week at the end of August as an escape from prison. But, alas, the Gardiner children inopportunely contracted some minor disease and Mrs. Gardiner wrote to recall her invitation.

Providence seemed determined to do nothing more for Adelle at present.

The only other event of this twelve weeks was the letter she wrote to Mr. Lovejoy, the manager of the livery-stable in Alton. This was the result of an acute attack of loneliness when, after a thorough canva.s.s of her friends, Mr. Lovejoy's name was the only one she could think of.

She told him in her little letter about the school, said she missed the Church Street house, and asked specifically after certain "roomers." But she never received a reply. Whether the teachers suppressed Mr.

Lovejoy's letter, or he had never received Adelle's, or, which was more likely, he was not sufficiently stimulated by the girl's epistle to answer her, she never knew. After that one attempt Adelle made no effort to reach back into her past: she accepted the present with that strange stoicism that young people sometimes exhibit.

At last when she had laboriously completed "Little Dorrit" and was beginning heavily upon the "Christmas Stories," the vacation came to an end and the Herndon girls returned for the fall term. Adelle was now a familiar figure to them, and therefore less interesting to snub. She was merely ignored, which did not hurt her. Whatever might have been her slender expectations of happiness, she must have long since given up any idea of accomplishing them like other girls. She was becoming a perfect small realist, content to take the facts of life for what they seemed.

She watched without conscious pain or envy the flurry of greetings and boastful exchanges of experiences among the girls the first day of their return to school. She was either ignored or pa.s.sed by with a polite nod and a "h.e.l.lo, Adelle! Did you have a good time with Rosy?"--while the other girls gathered into knots and resorted to each others' rooms for deeper confidences. It was an old story now, being an outsider, and the small, un.o.btrusive girl of fifteen was fast sinking into a state of apathy--the most dangerous condition of all.

The new school year, however, brought her something--the arrival of a friend. As she was dawdling with a book in a corner of the drawing-room, watching a circle of "old girls" who were whispering and giggling over some vacation tale, a small voice came to her ears,--

"Is it that you also are strange here?"

Adelle was so surprised at being addressed, also at the foreign-looking girl who had spoken, that she did not answer, and the other continued with a smile on her singularly red lips,--

"I speak English ver--ver badly!"

"What is your name?" Adelle asked bluntly.

"Diane Merelda," the girl said in a liquid tone.

"What?" Adelle asked with puckered brows.

"Di-ane Merel-da," came more slowly in the same soft tone. "See!" She took with a gracious movement the pencil from Adelle's hand and wrote on a piece of paper the name, and added beneath in small letters "F. de M."

"Oh," said Adelle, "what do those mean?" pointing to the letters beneath.

"Fille de Marie--a daughter of the Blessed Virgin," the girl translated sweetly.

Adelle looked at the stranger in bewilderment. She was a dainty person, as small as Adelle, but a perfectly formed young woman. Her black hair was tightly braided over her small head, in a fashion then strange, and her face was very pale, of a natural pallor emphasized by the line of carmine lips. Her eyes were black and wide. She smiled gently, contentedly, upon Adelle. Altogether she was an unusual phenomenon to the young American. She explained herself volubly if not fluently in broken English, pausing every now and then with a charming birdlike toss of her little black head and, "You say so, no?"--waiting for Adelle's nod to dash on into further intricacies of speech.

Miss Diane Merelda, as she told Adelle Clark, was the daughter of a wealthy Mexican whose acquaintance with Americans had so liberalized him that he preferred to educate his children in the States and in schools not under Catholic control. Senorita Diane had left her father's home in Morelos earlier than intended, however, because of the outbreak of an insurrection in the province, in which her father was concerned. As his hacienda near Morelos was not safe on account of brigands, Senor Merelda had sent his wife and daughter abroad to join his sons, and so Diane had reached Herndon Hall by the way of Madrid, Paris, and New York, after a summer spent with relatives in Spain. Her mother had learned of Herndon Hall from a chance traveling companion, and in some way had induced Miss Thompson to waive her strict requirements for admission.

From her way of dressing her hair to her pointed slippers and broken English, the little Mexican was even more markedly different from the Herndon type than Adelle, and though the older girls knew enough of the world to recognize a distinction in differences, Diane did not seem to.

She was gracious to all, and Adelle happened to be the first girl she could speak to while she waited for her mother, who was closeted with Miss Thompson. Here was Adelle's chance, although she did not recognize it as such. They talked for an hour, rather Diane talked and Adelle did her best to understand the rapid, lisping, birdlike notes of the foreigner. She learned that Diane had a brother in a school near St.

Louis, another in a technical college, and still another now in Germany.

The Merelda family seemed much scattered, but that did not disturb the little Mexican.

"We shall all be back in Morelos sometime!" She added sweetly, "Perhaps you will come to Mexico with me, no?"

Adelle soon learned all about Madrid, the Spanish relatives, the sight of the young King of Spain at San Sebastian, the trip to Lourdes which the family had taken in hope that the holy cure might help her mother's lame knee, and too much else to relate here. Senorita Diane was exceedingly loquacious: her little tongue wove in and out of the new idiom with surprising facility, forever wagging in a low, sweet babble of nothings. Adelle, as has been sufficiently indicated, absorbed pa.s.sively the small and the large facts of life. Diane was like a twittering bird on a tiny twig that shook with the vehemence of her expression. She reacted instinctively to every stimulus from a new toothbrush to the sight of a motor-car, and she preferred not to react alone. Thus Adelle did more talking of her blunt, bald kind to her new friend than she had accomplished hitherto all her life. She explained Herndon Hall literally to the stranger, while Diane exclaimed in three languages.

The presence of the little Mexican in the school did much to ameliorate Adelle's lonely lot this second year. She formed a connecting link of a sort between her and the rest of her schoolmates, who liked the foreigner. Diane reported fully to Adelle what the other girls were doing,--how Betty Langton was in love with an actor and for this reason went to New York almost every week on one excuse or another; how the two Californians, Irene and Sadie Paul, had a party in their room the night before, with wine, much wine. Diane shook her head wonderingly over all these doings of "the Americans." American girls seemed to her all "queer," and, though she did not say so, rather vulgar and underbred.

Oddly enough she put Adelle apart in this sweeping judgment, for she was not able to appreciate Adelle's common accent and primitive manners.

Adelle did not snub nor condescend nor do "naughty" things, and so, from the Mexican's standard, a simple and somewhat antiquated one, Adelle was a lady. Diane concluded that she must be poor and for that reason the other girls treated her badly. To be poor was no disgrace in the eyes of the Mexican. Many of the best people she had known, including her Spanish relatives, were dreadfully poor, but none the less to be considered. Poverty was a matter of G.o.d's will in the delightful Latin sense of the word, not a matter of inherited personal disgrace as in a free, Anglo-Saxon democracy.

"I do not like your America," she said gravely to Adelle after she had been a couple of months in the school. "Not to live in always when I am married."

"What's the matter with America?" Adelle asked.

"It is all money, money," the little Mexican replied. "You come to see nothing in your heart but dollars, dollars, dollars. It makes the heart heavy."

Adelle, who had never looked at the world in this light, thought Diane a little "queer." Nevertheless they were good friends as school-girl friendships go and consoled each other for what they lacked in their common environment.

Another event of this new year was perhaps even more momentous to Adelle than the arrival of the little Mexican, and that was the visit paid to her shortly after her sixteenth birthday by one of the trust company's officers. It was Mr. Ashly Crane--the new trust officer, in fact--who rode up the winding avenue from the river road in one of the noisy, new-fangled motors that announced itself from afar. Mr. Gardiner, it seemed, had been retired from his position as trust officer and was no longer to be the human symbol of Adelle's wardship to the trust company.

The new trust officer had not of design chosen the occasion of the ward's birthday to pay her a visit. Happening to be in the neighboring city of Albany with a few hours on his hands before he could make connections for the West, he bethought himself of the trust company's young charge and ran out to look over the school and incidentally Adelle. No one from the Washington Trust Company had ever paid its ward a visit,--Adelle was the only unvisited girl in the school,--but Mr.

Ashly Crane was the kind of vigorous young banker, not yet quite forty, who could be depended upon to "keep in personal touch" with all his clients. That is why, probably, he had superseded Mr. Gardiner, who had a staid habit of relying upon printed forms and the mail.

Mr. Ashly Crane was a good-looking, keen American banker, who paid strict attention to his manners, clothes, and habits. He was ambitious, of course, and had been so busily climbing upwards from his first clerkship in the trust company that he had not yet married. Very likely he felt that with his ever-widening horizon of prospects it would not be wise to anchor himself socially to any woman, who might prove to be a drag upon his future. He was still well within the marriageable limits and looked even younger. Nothing so well preserves youth as Success, and of this tonic Mr. Ashly Crane had had an abundance. Mr. Crane, it should not be thought, had armed himself with a bunch of enormous red roses from the leading florist of Albany and set forth upon his expedition with any formulated plot against the little heiress who was the company's ward. He recalled her in fact as a most unattractive, gawky little girl, who must have changed inconceivably for the better if she were to interest Mr. Ashly Crane personally. But the Clark estate, under the skillful method of treatment for which he was largely responsible, was growing all the time, and thanks to the probate judge's precaution, Adelle would ultimately reap rather more than one half of the earnings of the Clark's Field a.s.sociates. Already her expenses, represented by the liberal checks to Herndon Hall, were a mere nothing in the total of the income that went on rolling up in conservative bonds and stocks that were safely stowed away in the vaults under the Washington Trust Company. It seemed only proper that the sole representative of so much tangible property should be accorded every consideration by those legally const.i.tuted her servants and guardians. Single motives are more rarely found in life than in art, and Mr. Ashly Crane's motives this fine April morning were quite typically hybrid.

Whatever incipient antic.i.p.ations of the girl herself he might have entertained during his ride were immediately dissipated as soon as Adelle entered the drawing-room from the cla.s.s whence she had been summoned. She was a little larger, perhaps, than he remembered her, but essentially the same awkward, homely child, and she was now wearing an ugly harness upon her teeth that further disfigured her. Mr. Ashly Crane was an observant man, and he became at once merely the business man, solely intent upon performing his duty and getting back to Albany in time to catch his train. He presented his roses, which Adelle took from him clumsily and allowed to lie across her lap, while with legs spread apart to sustain their burden she listened to what he had to say. Mr.

Crane explained to her briefly Mr. Gardiner's retirement and his own recent elevation to the post of being her nominal guardian, and then inquired if everything was satisfactory in the school. When Adelle replied, yes, she guessed so, he observed that the Hall was prettily located above the river with a good view and that a girl ought to have a fine time in such a pleasant country.