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 associates. 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 snobbery.
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 canvass
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 passed by with a polite nod
and a "Hello, 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, unobtrusive 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
passively 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 God'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 Associates. 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 constituted 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 anticipations of the girl herself he might have
entertained during his ride were immediately dissipated as soon as
Adelle entered the drawing-room from the class 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.
"What do you do with yourself when you are not studying?" he concluded
in a patronizing tone.
"Oh," Adelle responded vaguely, "I don't know. Nothing much--read some
and take walks."
The new trust officer was enough of a human being to realize the
emptiness of this reply, and for a few moments was puzzled. This was a
woman's job, rather than a man's, he reflected sagely. However, being a
man he must do the best he could to win the girl's confidence, and after
all Herndon Hall had the highest reputation.
"They treat you right?" he inquired bluntly.
The girl murmured something in assent, because she could think of
nothing better to say. It was quite impossible for her to phrase the
sense of misery and indignity that was nearly constant in her mind.
"The teachers are kind?" the trust officer pursued.
"I guess so," she said, with a dumb look that made him uncomfortable.
He rose nervously and walked across the room. As he gazed out of the
open window at the distant prospect across the "Noble River" (so
described in the dainty leaflet sent forth by the school) "from the
ivy-shrouded old stone Hall," he caught sight of a party of girls riding
off on horseback for their daily excursion. That gave him an idea.
"You ride, too?" he inquired, turning again to the girl.
"No, I haven't any horse," she replied simply. "You have to have your
own horse."
"But you can have a horse if you want to ride," the trust officer
hastily remarked. "Riding is a very good exercise, and I should think it
would be fine in this country."
Here was something tangible that a man could get hold of. The girl
looked pale and probably needed healthful exercise. If other girls had
their own horses, she could have one. It was really ridiculous how
little she was spending of her swelling income. And he proceeded at once
to take up this topic with Miss Thompson, who presently arrived upon the
scene. Mr. Ashly Crane was much more successful in impressing the head
mistress of Herndon Hall with the importance of the ward of the
Washington Trust Company than in probing the heart of the lonely little
girl. He gave the elegant Miss Thompson to understand clearly that Miss
Adelle Clark was to have every advantage that money could buy, not
merely music and art as extras, but horses,--he even put it in the
plural,--a groom, and if she wanted it a private maid, which he was told
was never permitted. Miss Thompson quickly gathered from his tone and
his words that Miss Adelle Clark's expectations were such as to insure
her the most careful consideration in every respect, and if Herndon Hall
could not provide her with all the advantages to which wealth was
entitled, her guardians would quickly remove her from the school. Miss
Thompson accompanied the trust officer to the door out of earshot of
Adelle and assured him haughtily that Herndon Hall which sheltered a
Steigman of Philadelphia, a Dyboy of Baltimore, not to mention a Miss
Saltonsby from his own city, knew quite as well as he what was fitting
under the circumstances. However, they shook hands as two persons from
the same world and parted in complete understanding. Adelle had already
slipped off with her armful of roses.