STORIED WEST ROCK.
When Marion Parke went back to her room the night after Miss Ashton's
entertainment, she was in a great deal of perturbation. The title of
Susan Downer's story, on its announcement, had filled her with
surprise, for since her coming to the school she had never before
heard West Rock mentioned. When she had asked about it, no one seemed
even to have known of it, and that Susan should not only have heard,
but been so interested as to choose it for the subject of her story,
was a puzzle! But when the story was read, and she found it, in all
its details, so exactly like her father's, her surprise changed to a
miserable suspicion, of which she was heartily ashamed, but from which
she could not escape. Sentence after sentence, event after event, were
so familiar to her, nothing was changed but the names of the women who
figured in the story.
The first thing she did after coming to her room was to take the
magazine from under the Bible, and open to the story. There was an
ink-blot on the first page, which some one had evidently been trying
to remove with the edge of a knife. It must have been done hastily,
for the leaf was jagged, and most of the ink left on.
This Marion was sure was not there the last time she had opened the
magazine; some one had dropped it recently. Who was it?
She hastily re-read the story. Yes, she had not been mistaken, Susan
Downer's story was the same!
Was it possible that two people, her father and Susan, who had never
been in New Haven, but might have known about Goff and Whalley from
her study of English history, though not about West Rock as her father
had seen and described it, could have happened upon the same story?
How very, very strange!
Marion dropped the magazine as if it was accountable for her
perplexity; then she sat and stared at it, until she heard the door
opening, when she snatched it up, and hid it away at the bottom of her
trunk.
It was Dorothy who came into the room; and Marion's first impulse was
to go to her and tell her all about it, ask her what she should do,
for do something she felt sure she must.
Dorothy saw her, and called,--
"Marion! isn't it splendid that Sue wrote such a fine piece? I feel
that she is a real honor to our class and to Rock Cove! Her brother
Jerry will be so happy when he hears of it."
"Why, Marion!" catching sight of Marion's pale face, "what is the
matter with you? You look as pale as a ghost. Are you sick?"
"No-o," said Marion slowly. "O Dody! Dody!"
"Marion! there is something the matter with you. Sit down in this
chair. No, lie down on the lounge. No, on your bed. You'd better
undress while I go for the matron. I'll be very quick."
"Don't go, Dody! Don't go," and Marion caught tight hold of Dorothy's
arm, holding her fast. "I'm not sick; I'm frightened."
But in spite of her words, indeed more alarmed by them, Dorothy broke
away and rushed down to the matron's room, who, fortunately, was out.
Then she went for Miss Ashton, but she also had not returned. So
Dorothy, unwilling to leave Marion alone any longer, went back to
her.
While she was gone, Marion had time to resolve what she would do, at
least for the present; she would leave Susan in her own time and way
to make a full confession, which she tried to persuade herself after a
little that she would certainly do. So when Dorothy came back she met
her with a smile, told her not to be troubled, that it was the first
time in her life such a thing had ever happened, and she hoped it
never would again.
"But you said you were frightened," insisted Dorothy, "and you looked
so pale; what frightened you?"
Marion hesitated; to tell any one, even Dorothy, would be to accuse
Susan of such a mean deception. No; her resolve so suddenly made was
the proper one: she would keep her knowledge of the thing until Susan
herself confessed, or assurance was made doubly sure; for suppose,
after all, Susan had written the story, how could she have known about
it in that magazine? She had never lent it to her; she had never read
it to any of her room-mates, or to any one in the school, proud of it
as she was. Indeed, the more she thought of it, the more sure she was
that she ought to be ashamed of herself for such a suspicion, and,
strange as it may seem, the more sure she also was, that almost word
by word Susan had stolen the story.
"I was frightened at a thought I had, a dreadful thought; I wouldn't
have any one know it. Don't ask me, Dody, please don't; let us talk
about something else," she said.
Then she began to talk rapidly over the events of the evening, not, as
Dorothy noticed, mentioning Susan or her success. Dorothy wondered
over it, and an unpleasant thought came into her mind.
"Can it be that Marion is jealous of Sue, and disappointed and vexed
that her piece wasn't taken any more notice of? I'm sure it was an
excellent story, 'How Ben Fought a Prairie Fire.'" Marion had read it
to her before handing it in, and she had been much interested in it,
but it didn't compare with Susan's, and it wasn't like Marion to feel
so. She never had shown such a spirit before.
Neither Susan nor Gladys came to their room until the last moment
allowed for remaining away. Susan was overwhelmed with congratulations
on her success. The teacher of rhetoric told her she felt repaid for
all the hours she had spent in teaching her, by the skill she had
shown in this composition, and if she continued to improve, she saw
nothing to prevent her taking her place, by and by, among the best
writers in the land. Kate Underwood pretended to be vexed, "having her
laurels taken away from her," she said "was not to be borne;" and
Delia Williams, the rival of Kate in the estimation of the school,
made even more fun than Kate over her own disappointment. Some of the
girls made a crown of bright papers and would have put it on Susan's
head, but she testily pushed it away.
Susan's love of prominence was well known in the school, and even this
small rejection of popular applause they wondered over.
And when the girls began to cluster around her, and to ask if she had
ever been to that West Rock, if there was really such a place, and if
all those things she wrote of so beautifully had ever happened? she
was silent and sulky; and in the end, crowned with her new honors, at
the point in her life she had always longed for, and never before
reached, she looked more like a girl who was ashamed of herself, than
like one whose vanity and love of praise had for the first time been
fully gratified.
She dreaded going to her room; she was afraid something to mar her
success was waiting for her there. She wished Marion Parke had never
come from the West, that Gladys had never been weak enough to take her
in for a room-mate. In short, Susan was more unhappy than she had ever
been before. Gladys, full of frolic with a large clique of girls in
another part of the room, had not given her a thought.
To have Susan write so good a story had been the same surprise to her
that it was to every one; but the reading was no sooner over, than she
had forgotten it, and if the teacher had not told her it was time she
went to her room, she would also have forgotten there was any room to
go to.
When she saw Susan she said, "Come on if you don't want to get
reported. I say, Sue, haven't we had a real jolly time?" but much to
Susan's relief not a word about "Storied West Rock."
Dorothy had been waiting for Susan, and when the gas was out and they
were all in bed, she whispered to her,--
"O Sue! I'm so glad for you." Dorothy thought a moment after she heard
a sound like a smothered sob, but Susan not answering or moving, she
concluded she had fallen quickly asleep, and that was a half snore; so
she went to sleep herself, but not without some troubled thoughts
about Marion and her unusual behavior.
When Marion and Susan met the next morning, Marion noticed that Susan
avoided her, never even looked at her; and when Dorothy and Gladys
went away to a recitation, leaving them alone, Susan hastily gathered
up her books, and going into her bedroom, shut the door.
Marion thought this over. To her it looked as if Susan felt guilty and
was afraid; but she had determined not to watch her, not even to seem
to suspect her. "How should she know that I remember the story?" she
thought, "or, indeed, that I have ever so much as read it? I will put
it off my mind; I will! I _will!_"
But, in spite of her resolutions, Marion could not; and as days went
on she took to wondering whether by thus concealing what she knew, she
was not making herself a partner in the deception.
Susan, not being at once accused by Marion, came slowly but
comfortably to the conclusion that she had not even the vaguest
suspicion that anything was wrong; still, she sedulously avoided her,
and when Dorothy noticed and asked her about it, answered crossly,
"She never had liked that girl, and she never should to the longest
day of her life."
"And Marion certainly does not approve of Susan. How unfortunate!"
thought this kind Dorothy.