THE TRIUMVIRATE
Mercy Curtis came in a week. For Helen of course was only too
delighted to fall in with Mrs. Tellingham's suggestion. Duet Number 2,
West Dormitory, was amply large enough for three, and Ruth gave up her
bed to the cripple and slept on a couch. Helen herself could not do
too much for the comfort of the newcomer.
Dr. Davidson and Dr. Cranfew came with her; but really the lame girl
bore the journey remarkably well. And how different she looked from
the thin, peaked girl that Ruth and Helen remembered!
"Oh, you didn't expect to see so much flesh on my bones; did you?" said
Mercy, noting their surprise, and being just as sharp and choppy in her
observations as ever. "But I'm getting wickedly and scandalously fat.
And I don't often have to repeat Aunt Alviry's song of 'Oh, my back and
oh, my bones!'"
Mercy went to bed on her arrival. But the next day she got about in
the room very nicely with the aid of two canes. The handsome ebony
crutches she saved for "Sunday-Best."
Ruth arranged a meeting of the Sweetbriars to welcome the cripple, and
Mercy seemed really to enjoy having so many girls of her own age about
her. Helen did not bring in many members of the Upedes; indeed, just
then they all seemed to keep away from Duet Two, and none of them spoke
to Ruth. That is, none save Jennie Stone. The fat girl was altogether
too good-natured--and really too kind at heart--to treat Ruth Fielding
as Jennie's roommates did.
"They say you went and told Picolet we were going to have the party in
your room," Heavy said to Ruth, frankly, "and that's how you got out of
it so easily. But I tell them that's all nonsense, you know. If you'd
wanted to make us trouble, you would have let Helen have the party in
our room, as she wanted to, and so you could have stayed home and not
been in it at all."
"As she wanted to?" repeated Ruth, slowly. "Did Helen first plan to
have the supper in your quartette?"
"Of course she did. It was strictly a Upede affair--or would have been
if you hadn't been in it. But you're a good little thing, Ruth
Fielding, and I tell them you never in this world told Picolet."
"I did not indeed, Jennie," said Ruth, sadly.
"Well, you couldn't make The Fox believe that. She's sure about it,
you see," the stout girl said. "When Mary Cox wants to be mean, she
can be, now I tell you!"
Indeed, Heavy was not like the other three girls in the next room.
Mary, Belle and Lluella never looked at Ruth if they could help it, and
never spoke to her. Ruth was not so much hurt over losing such girls
for friends, for she could not honestly say she had liked them at the
start; but that they should so misjudge and injure her was another
matter.
She said nothing to Helen about all this; and Helen was as firmly
convinced that Mary Cox and the other Upedes were jolly girls, as ever.
Indeed, they were jolly enough; most of their larks were innocent fun,
too. But it was a fact that most of those girls who received extra
tasks during those first few weeks of the half belonged to the Up and
Doing Club.
That Helen escaped punishment was more by good fortune than anything
else. In the study, however, she and Ruth and Mercy had many merry
times. Mercy kept both the other girls up to their school tasks, for
all lessons seemed to come easy to the lame girl and she helped her two
friends not a little in the preparation of their own.
"The Triumvirate" the other girls in the dormitory building called the
three girls from Cheslow. Before Thanksgiving, Ruth, Helen, and Mercy
began to stand high in their several classes. And Ruth was booked for
the Glee Club, too. She sang every Sunday in the chorus, while Helen
played second violin in the orchestra, having taken some lessons on
that instrument before coming to Briarwood.
Dr. Cranfew came often at first to see Mercy; but he declared at last
that he only came socially--there was no need of medical attendance.
The cripple could not go to recitations without her crutches, but
sometimes in the room she walked with only Ruth's strong arm for
support. She was getting rosy, too, and began to take exercise in the
gymnasium.
"I'll develop my biceps, if my back is crooked and my legs queer," she
declared. "Then, when any of those _Miss Nancy_ Seniors make fun of me
behind my back, I can punch 'em!" for there were times when Mercy's
old, cross-grained moods came upon her, and she was not so easily borne
with.
Perhaps this fact was one of the things that drove the wedge deeper
between Ruth and Helen. Ruth would never neglect the crippled girl.
She seldom left her in the room alone. Mercy had early joined the
Sweetbriars, and Ruth and she went to the frequent meetings of that
society together, while Helen retained her membership in the Up and
Doing Club and spent a deal of her time in the quartette room next door.
Few of the girls went home for Thanksgiving, and as Mercy was not to
return to Cheslow then, the journey being considered too arduous for
her, Ruth decided not to go either. There was quite a feast made by
the school on Thanksgiving, and frost having set in a week before,
skating on Triton Lake was in prospect. There was a small pond
attached to the Briarwood property and Ruth tried Helen's skates there.
She had been on the ice before, but not much; however, she found that
the art came easily to her--as easily as tennis, in which, by this
time, she was very proficient.
For the day following Thanksgiving there was a trip to Triton Lake
planned, for that great sheet of water was ice-bound, too, and a small
steamer had been caught 'way out in the middle of the lake, and was
frozen in. The project to drive to the lake and skate out to the
steamer (the ice was thick enough to hold up a team of horses, and
plenty of provisions had been carried out to the crew) and to have a
hot lunch on the boat originated in the fertile brain of Mary Cox; but
as it was not a picnic patronized only by the Upedes, Mrs. Tellingham
made no objection to it. Besides, it was vacation week, and the
Preceptress was much more lenient.
Of course, Helen was going; but Ruth had her doubts. Mercy could not
go, and the girl of the Red Mill hated to leave her poor little
crippled friend alone. But Mercy was as sharp of perception as she was
of tongue. When Helen blurted out the story of the skating frolic,
Ruth said "she would see" about going; she said she wasn't sure that
she would care to go.
"I'm such a new skater, you know," she laughed. "Maybe I'd break down
skating out to the steamboat, and wouldn't get there, and while all you
folks were eating that nice hot lunch I'd be freezing to death--poor
little me!--'way out there on the ice."
But Mercy, with her head on one side and her sharp blue eyes looking
from Helen to Ruth, shot out:
"Now, don't you think you're smart, Ruth Fielding? Why, I can see
right through you--just as though you were a rag of torn mosquito
netting! You won't go because I'll be left alone."
"No," said Ruth, but flushing.
"Yes," shot back Mercy. "And _I_ don't have to turn red about it,
either. Oh, Ruthie, Ruthie! you can't even tell a _white one_ without
blushing about it."
"I--don't--know----"
"I do know!" declared Mercy. "You're going. I've got plenty to do.
You girls can go on and freeze your noses and your toeses, if you like.
Me for the steam-heated room and a box of bonbons. But I hope the
girls who go will be nicer to you than some of those Upedes have been
lately, Ruthie."
Helen blushed now; but Ruth hastened to say: "Oh, don't you fuss about
me, Mercy. Some of the Sweetbriars mean to go. This isn't confined to
one club in particular. Madge Steele is going, too, and Miss Polk.
And Miss Reynolds, Mrs. Tellingham's first assistant, is going with the
party. I heard all about it at supper. Poor Heavy was full of it; but
she says she can't go because she never could skate so far. And
then--the ice might break under _her_."
"Whisper!" added Helen, her eyes dancing. "I'll tell you something
else--and this I know you don't know!"
"What is it?"
"Maybe Tom will be there. Good old Tom! Just think--I haven't seen
him since we left home. Won't it be just scrumptious to see old Tom
again?"
And Ruth Fielding really thought it would be.