Betty Wales, Freshman Part 27

To her consternation Betty felt a hot flush creeping up her neck and over her cheeks. It had been the one consolation in the trouble with Eleanor that none of the Chapin house girls had asked any questions or even appeared to notice that anything was wrong.

"Oh, I don't know Miss Eastman much," she said quickly. "And as for subst.i.tuting on the subs, that was a great privilege. That wasn't anything to make me an usher for."

"Well, all the other girls who did it much ushered," persisted Katherine. "Christy Mason and Kate Denise and that little Ruth Ford. And you'd have made such a stunning one."

"Goosie!" said Betty, rising abruptly. "I know you girls want to go to bed. We'll talk it all over to-morrow."

As she closed the door, Rachel and Katherine exchanged glances. "I told you there was trouble," said Katherine, "and mark my words, Eleanor Watson is at the bottom of it somehow."

"Don't let's notice it again, though," answered the considerate Rachel.

"She evidently doesn't want to tell us about it."

Betty undressed almost in silence. Her exhilaration had left her all at once and her ambition; life looked very complicated and unprofitable. As she went over to turn out the light, she noticed a sheet of paper, much erased and interlined, on Helen's desk. "Have you begun your song already?" she asked.

"Oh, no, I wrote a theme," said Helen with what seemed needless embarra.s.sment. But the theme was a little verse called "Happiness." She got it back the next week heavily under-scored in red ink, and with a succinct "Try prose," beneath it; but she was not discouraged. She had had one turn; she could afford to wait patiently for another, which, if you tried long enough and cared hard enough must come at last.

CHAPTER XVI

A CHANCE TO HELP

Eleanor Watson had gotten neither cla.s.s spirit nor personal ambition from 19--'s "glorious old defeat," as Katherine called it. The Sat.u.r.day afternoon of the game she had spent, greatly to the disgust of her friends, on the way to New York, whither she went for a Sunday with Caroline Barnes. Caroline's mother had been very ill, and the European trip was indefinitely postponed, but the family were going for a shorter jaunt to Bermuda. Caroline begged Eleanor to join them. "You can come as well as not," she urged. "You know your father would let you--he always does. And we sail the very first day of your vacation too."

"But you stay three weeks," objected Eleanor, "and the vacation is only two."

"What's the difference? Say you were ill and had to stay over,"

suggested Caroline promptly.

Eleanor's eyes flashed. "Once for all, Cara, please understand that's not my way of doing business nowadays. I should like to go, though, and I imagine my father wouldn't object. I'll write you if I can arrange it."

She had quite forgotten her idle promise when, on the following Monday morning, she stood in the registrar's office, waiting to get a record card for chapel attendance in place of one she had lost. The registrar was busy. Eleanor waited while she discussed the pedagogical value of chemistry with a soph.o.m.ore who had elected it, and now, after a semester and a half of gradually deteriorating work, wished to drop it because the smells made her ill.

"Does the fact that we sent you a warning last week make the smells more unendurable?" asked the registrar suggestively, and the soph.o.m.ore retreated in blus.h.i.+ng confusion.

Next in line was a nervous little girl who inquired breathlessly if she might go home right away--four days early. Some friends who were traveling south in their private car had telegraphed her to meet them in Albany and go with them to her home in Charleston.

"My dear, I'm sorry," began the registrar sympathetically, "but I can't let you go. We're going to be very strict about this vacation. A great many girls went home early at Christmas, and it's no exaggeration to say that a quarter of the college came back late on various trivial excuses.

This time we're not going to have that sort of thing. The girls who come back at all must come on time; the only valid excuse at either end of the vacation will be serious illness. I'm sorry."

"So am I," said the little girl, with a pathetic quiver in her voice. "I never rode in a private car. But--it's no matter. Thank you, Miss Stuart."

Eleanor had listened to the conversation with a curl of her lip for the stupid child who proffered her request in so unconvincing a manner, and an angry resentment against the authorities who should presume to dictate times and seasons. "They ought to have a system of cuts," she thought. "That's the only fair way. Then you can take them when you please, and if you cut over you know it and you do it at your peril.

Here everything is in the air; you are never sure where you stand----"

"What can I do for you, Miss Watson?" asked the registrar pleasantly.

Eleanor got her chapel card and hurried home to telegraph her father for permission to go to Bermuda, and, as she knew exactly what his answer would be, to write Caroline that she might expect her. "You know I always take a dare," she wrote. "My cuts last semester amounted to twice as much as this trip will use up, and if they make a fuss I shall just call their attention to what they let pa.s.s last time. Please buy me a steamer-rug, a blue and green plaid one, and meet me at the Forty-second Street station at two on Friday."

Betty knew nothing about Eleanor's plans, beyond what she had been able to gather from chance remarks of the other girls; and that was not much, for every time the subject came up she hastened to change it, lest some one should discover that Eleanor had told her nothing, and had scarcely spoken to her indeed for weeks. When Eleanor finally went off, without a sign or a word of good-bye, Betty discovered that she was dreadfully disappointed. She had never thought of the estrangement between them as anything but a temporary affair, that would blow over when Eleanor's mortification over the debate was forgotten. She had felt sure that long before the term ended there would come a chance for a reconciliation, and she had meant to take the chance at any sacrifice of her pride. She was still fond of Eleanor in spite of everything, and she was sorry for her too, for her quick eyes detected signs of growing unhappiness under Eleanor's ready smiles. Besides, she hated "schoolgirl fusses." She wanted to be on good terms with every girl in 19--. She wanted to come back to a spring term unclouded by the necessity for any of the evasions and subterfuges that concealment of the quarrel with Eleanor and Jean Eastman's strange behavior had brought upon her. And now Eleanor was gone; the last chance until after vacation had slipped through her fingers.

At home she told Nan all about her troubles, first exacting a solemn pledge of secrecy. "Hateful thing!" said Nan promptly. "Drop her. Don't think about her another minute."

"Then you don't think I was to blame?" asked Betty anxiously.

"To blame? No, certainly not. To be sure," Nan added truthfully, "you were a little tactless. You knew she didn't know that you were in the secret of her having to resign, and you didn't intend to tell her, so it would have been better for you to let some one else help Miss Eastman out."

"But I thought I was helping Eleanor out."

"In a way you were. But you see it wouldn't seem so to her. It would look as though you disapproved of her appointment."

"But Nan, she knows now that I knew."

"Then I suppose she concludes that you took advantage of knowing. You say that it made you quite prominent for a while. You see, dear, when a person isn't quite on the square herself----"

But Betty had burst into a storm of tears. "I am to blame," she sobbed.

"I am to blame! I knew it, only I couldn't quite see how. Oh, what shall I do? What shall I do?"

"Don't cry, dear," said Nan in distress, at the unprecedented sight of Betty in tears. "I tell you, you were not to blame. You were a little unwise perhaps at first, but Miss Watson has refused your apologies and explanations and only laughs at you when you try to talk to her about it. I should drop her at once and forever; but, if you are bound to bring her around, the only way I can think of is to look out for some chance to serve her and so prove your real friends.h.i.+p--though what sort of friend she can be I can't imagine."

"Nan, she's just like the girl in the rhyme," said Betty seriously.

"'When she was good she was very, very good, And when she was bad she was horrid.'

"Eleanor is a perfect dear most of the time. And Nan, there's something queer about her mother. She never speaks of her, and she's been at boarding school for eight years now, though she's not seventeen till May. Think of that!"

"It certainly makes her excusable for a good deal," said Nan. "How is my friend Helen Chase Adams coming on?"

"Why Nan, she's quite blossomed out. She's really lots of fun now. But I had an awful time with her for a while," and she related the story of Helen's winter of discontent. "I suppose that was my fault too," she finished. "I seem to be a regular blunderer."

"You're a dear little sister, all the same," declared Nan.

"I say girls, come and play ping-pong," called Will from the hall below, and the interview ended summarily.

But the memory of Eleanor Watson seemed fated to pursue Betty through her vacation. A few days later an old friend of Mrs. Wales, who had gone to Denver to live some years before and was east on a round of visits, came in to call. The moment she heard that Betty was at Harding, she inquired for Eleanor. "I'm so glad you know her," she said. "She's quite a protege of mine and she needs nice friends like you if ever a girl did. Don't mention it about college, Betty, but she's had a very sad life. Her mother was a strange woman--but there's no use going into that. She died when Eleanor was a tiny girl, and Eleanor and her brother Jim have been at boarding schools ever since. In the summers, though, they were always with their father in Denver. They wors.h.i.+ped him, particularly Eleanor, and he has always promised her that when she was through school he would open the old Watson mansion and she should keep house for him and Jim. Then last year a pretty little society girl, only four or five years older than Eleanor, set her cap for the judge and married him. Jim liked her, but Eleanor was heart-broken, and the judge, seeing storms ahead, I suppose, and hoping that Eleanor would get interested and want to finish the course, made her promise to go to Harding for a year. Now don't betray my confidence, Betty, and do make allowances for Eleanor. I hope she'll be willing to stay on at college.

It's just what she needs. Besides, she'd be very unhappy at home, and her aunt in New York isn't at all the sort of person for her to live with."

So it came about that Betty returned to college more than ever determined to get back upon the old footing with Eleanor, and behold, Eleanor was not there! The Chapin house was much excited over her absence, for tales of the registrar's unprecedented hardness of heart had gone abroad, and almost n.o.body else had dared to risk the mysterious but awful possibilities that a late return promised. As Betty was still supposed by most of the house to be in Eleanor's confidence, she had to parry question after question as to her whereabouts. To, "Did she tell you that she was coming back late?" she could truthfully answer "No."

But the girls only laughed when she insisted that Eleanor must be ill.

"She boasts that she's never been ill in her life," said Mary Brooks.

And Adelaide Rich always added with great positiveness, "It's exactly like her to stay away on purpose, just to see what will happen."

Unfortunately Betty could not deny this, and she was glad enough to drop the argument. She had too many pleasant things to do to care to waste time in profitless discussion. For it was spring term. n.o.body but a Harding girl knows exactly what that means. The freshman is very likely to consider the much heralded event only a pretty myth, until having started from home on a cold, bleak day that is springtime only by the calendar, she arrives at Harding to find herself confronted by the genuine article. The sheltered situation of the town undoubtedly has something to do with its early springs, but the att.i.tude of the Harding girl has far more. She knows that spring term is the beautiful crown of the college year, and she is bound that it shall be as long as possible.

So she throws caution and her furs to the winds and dons a muslin gown, plans drives and picnics despite April showers, and takes twilight strolls regardless of lurking germs of pneumonia. The gra.s.s grows green perforce and the buds swell to meet her wishes, while the sun, finding a creature after his brave, warm heart, does his gallant best for her.