Kit of Greenacre Farm Part 9

CHAPTER XII

KIT LOCATES A "FOUNDER"

Peg patted her in a conciliatory manner.

"Now, my child," she said, "curb that swift and rising wrath, and bottle the vials thereof. What is Hecuba to you, or you to Hecuba?"

"Poor little Peggy," Charity murmured, "getting into trim for a Shakespeare drive? You know, Kit, our Peg is president of the Portia Dramatic Club, and the mantle doth not rest lightly on her young shoulders."

But Kit could not be diverted, and the color rose somewhat belligerently in Amy's cheeks, too;

"I don't see," she said, "why you feel that you have to take Marcelle Beaubien's part. If you knew all about her the way we girls do, you'd let her alone."

"I don't see how she ever came up here anyway," Norma remarked. "It's just exactly as if one of her brothers tried to come in. Do you think the boys would stand for that?"

"Why on earth shouldn't they?" demanded Kit, hotly. "And I'd like to know what they've got to say about it anyway. I don't think that's the college spirit. Any one who wants an education and is willing to work for it should be admitted."

"Yes, but if they had any sense at all," responded Norma, placidly, "they wouldn't put themselves into the position of being snubbed. You can talk all you want to about the college spirit from the standpoint of Deans and faculties, but when all's said and done, it's the student spirit that rules. I'll bet that she doesn't stay here a month. She hasn't any one to help her at home, and can't afford tutoring, so she'll just peter out."

"Dear, dear friends of my youth," Charity exclaimed, on her knees before the couch, "here are some wonderful chocolates and cheese straws and pimentoes. Let's have a love feast immediately and bury the hatchet. Kit, your hair isn't red enough to warrant any such exhibitions, and you'll have to cut them out."

The gong sounded in the hall below for afternoon cla.s.ses, and there was just time to s.n.a.t.c.h a little refreshment before they joined the other girls trooping through the corridors. Kit found herself watching Marcelle.

There was a peculiar aloofness about the girl which seemed to put almost a wall of defense around her. She was intensely interested in everything, one could see that plainly, except the other students, and it seemed as if she simply overlooked them. When Kit came down the staircase, she glanced into the library and saw Marcelle in there alone, bending down before the long wall bookcases. Across the wide hall there were groups of boys and girls in the two long double parlors, laughing and talking together, and every couch and settee along the T-shaped hall was occupied, but Marcelle was alone.

Whoever had built Hope College had managed to work out some of his dreams of old world beauty. The library was wainscoted in some dull satin finished wood, with the graining of olive wood. In the west wall was set a deeply embrasured mullioned window of stained gla.s.s, with the figure of a young girl in white in college cap and gown, her face upturned, as she seemed to come towards one through a garden of foxgloves, pale-pink and hyacinth in hue. Beneath was the one word, Hope. Scattered about the room on top of bookcases and shelves were the usual beloved bits of bronze and statuary, Dante's head, the Nike, with widespread wings, busts of Emerson, Longfellow, Lowell, Whitman, Whittier, Mrs. Stowe, Louisa Alcott, and a beautiful bowed head of Mrs; Browning, her curls half-shadowing her face.

Marcelle had a volume of "Treasure Island" in her hand, ill.u.s.trated in color. She turned in surprise at the touch of Kit's hand on her shoulder.

"I thought we could walk down towards the bluff together, because we go the same way," said the latter. "How do you like it here?"

"I like it," responded Marcelle, slowly, with a certain dignified shyness that was characteristic of her. "My mother has told me all about it. She liked the library when she was here. She told me where her room was up-stairs, too, but I did not want to go up while the girls were there."

"Let's go up now, while they're all down-stairs," Kit suggested impulsively. "I'll take you. Which dormitory was she in?"

"Her name was Mary Douglas. It is the Douglas Dormitory. Her father was one of the founders here, Malcolm Douglas."

Kit listened in utter amazement and with a rising sense of joy. Here was Marcelle Beaubien, flouted and disdained by the little crowd of girls who happened to live in a certain restricted district of Delphi, but claiming her grandfather was a founder of the college. At that very moment Kit planned her surprise on the girls.

As they walked through the hall together, Pauline and the other girls followed them with their glances and smiled. The two paused before a big bronze tablet with the name of the founders on it. There it was, third from the last, Malcolm Douglas, and date, 1871.

"He came from Canada," said Marcelle, "and settled here. Later on he went into Minnesota, and on into Dakota as one of the first of the Indian fighters in the Sioux wars there, but he was really seeking gold. The family was very poor after he died, but my mother came here for two years, and even when I was a little bit of a girl, seven or eight, years old, before she died, she used to tell me how she loved it, and that I must come here, too."

"Don't any of your brothers want to come?" asked Kit impulsively. "They're all older than you, aren't they?"

Marcelle shook her head with a curious little smile.

"They are all Beaubien, every one. They eat, and they sleep and fish, that is all."

Kit led the way to the upper floor, where the dormitories were, and meeting Charity, she asked the way to the Douglas.

"Why, you were in that one to-day," replied Charity in surprise. "It's our dormitory, don't you know?"

"Oh, thank you so much," Kit said, with suspicious alacrity, as she guided Marcelle down the corridor, and Charity glanced back at them both, speculatively, wondering just what special business could take two new day girls into the most exclusive dormitory at Hope.

CHAPTER XIII

ENTER THE ROYAL MUMMIES

Kit deliberately planned her campaign for the following week, and the only girl she took into her confidence was Anne Bellamy. It had been the greatest relief, somehow, when Anne returned to Delphi for the fall term.

There was something good-natured and comfortably serene about Anne that made her companions.h.i.+p a relief from that of the other girls. Jean often said back home that Kit was such a bunch of fireworks herself, she always needed the background of a calm silent night or a flaccid temperament, to set her off properly.

"You know, Anne," Kit exclaimed, sinking with a luxurious sigh of content down among the cus.h.i.+ons on the broad couch in Anne's room, "I'd give anything, sometimes, if I'd been an only child; of course, you've got a brother, but you're the only girl. You don't know what it is to be one of four. I share my room with Helen, back home, and all honors with Jean.

Then, of course, Doris is the baby, and while we all love each other devotedly, still you do have to elbow your way through a large family, if you want to keep on being yourself. I read somewhere about old Joaquin Miller, the poet of the Sierras. Know him?"

Anne shook her head, as she combed out her long brown hair, holding one roll with her teeth.

"No, I don't suppose you do," Kit went on happily. "That's one reason why you and I are going to be fearfully good friends, 'cause you don't know everything in creation. It seems to me I can't speak of anything at all at home now that Jean doesn't know more about it than I do, or Helen thinks she does, which is worse. Don't mind me this morning. I just got a family budget, full of don'ts."

"Yes, and you're just as likely as not to be homesick to-morrow," laughed Anne. "Go on about your poet."

"Oh, nothing, except that he didn't believe there should be more than one room in a house, and he built little individual houses all over 'The Heights' out in California. I'd love to do that back home, with a dining-room on one green hill, and the kitchen down in the, valley."

"You'd need a mountain railway on an up grade, when it came meal time."

"Well maybe," Kit a.s.sented, "but at least I'd have my own bower in a pine grove, and each of the royal princesses could go and do likewise. But that isn't what I came over for. You know Marcelle Beaubien? The girls don't like her going to Hope."

"Don't they?" Anne asked, mildly. "Well, what are they going to do about it? I thought that's what colleges were for. Who's against her?"

"I don't think it's exactly anything definite or violent, but you know how mighty uncomfortable they can make her. There's Amy Roberts and Norma and Peggy Porter and the Tony Conyers crowd."

"She won't miss anything special, even if they do try to snub her,"

answered Anne laughingly.

"This is my second year at Hope, and I want to tell you right now that Charity rules in the Douglas Dormitory. If you can get her on Marcelle's side, the other girls will trot along like little lambkins."

"Do you suppose," Kit leaned forward impressively, as she sprang her plan, "do you suppose Charity would loan her room for a Founders' Tea?"

"A Founders' Tea," repeated Anne. "What's that?"

Kit proclaimed grandiloquently: