Kitabı oku: «Ruth Fielding At College: or, The Missing Examination Papers», sayfa 2

CHAPTER III
EXPECTATIONS

"I expect she'll be a haughty, stuck-up thing," declared Edith Phelps, with vigor.

"'Just like that,'" drawled May MacGreggor. "We should worry about the famous authoress of canned drama! A budding lady hack writer, I fancy."

"Oh, dear me, no!" cried Edith. "Didn't you see 'The Heart of a Schoolgirl' she wrote? Why, it was a good photo-play, I assure you."

"And put out by the Alectrion Film Corporation," joined in another of the group of girls standing upon the wide porch of Dare Hall, one of the four large dormitories of Ardmore College.

The college buildings were set most artistically upon the slope of College Hill, each building facing sparkling Lake Remona. Save the boathouse and the bathing pavilions, Dare and Dorrance Halls at the east side of the grounds, and Hoskin and Hemmingway Halls at the west side, were the structures nearest to the lake.

Farther to the east an open grove intervened between the dormitories and the meadows along the Remona River where bog hay was cut, and which were sometimes flooded in the freshet season.

To the west the lake extended as far as the girls on the porch could see, a part of its sparkling surface being hidden by the green and hilly bulk of Bliss Island. The shaded green lawns of the campus between Dare and Hoskin Halls were crossed by winding paths.

A fleshy girl who was near the group but not of it, had been viewing this lovely landscape with pleasure. Now she frankly listened to the chatter of the "inquisitors."

"Well," Edith Phelps insisted, "this Ruth Fielding was so petted at that backwoods' school where she has been that I suppose there will be no living in the same house with her."

Edith was one of the older sophomores – quite old, indeed, to the eyes of the plump girl who was listening. But the latter smiled quietly, nevertheless, as she listened to the sophomore's speech.

"We shall have to take her down a peg or two, of course. It's bad enough to have the place littered up with a lot of freshies – "

"Just as we littered it up last year at this time, Edie," suggested May, with a chuckle.

"Well," Edith said, laughing, "if I don't put this Ruth Fielding, the authoress, in her place in a hurry, it won't be because I sha'n't try."

"Have a care, dearie," admonished one quiet girl who had not spoken before. "Remember the warning we had at commencement."

"About what?" demanded two or three.

"About that Rolff girl, you know," said the thoughtful girl.

"Oh! I know what you mean," Edith said. "But that was a warning to the sororities."

"To everybody," put in May.

"At any rate," Dora Parton said, "Dr. Milroth forbade anything in the line of hazing."

"Pooh!" said Edith. "Who mentioned hazing? That's old-fashioned. We're too ladylike at Ardmore, I should hope, to haze– my!"

"'My heye, blokey!'" drawled May.

"You are positively coarse, Miss MacGreggor," Dora said, severely.

"And Edie is so awfully emphatic," laughed the Scotch girl. "But she will have to take it out in threatenings, I fear. We can't haze this Fielding chit, and that's all there is to it."

"Positively," said the quiet girl, "that was a terrible thing they did to Margaret Rolff. She was a nervous girl, anyway. Do you remember her, May?"

"Of course. And I remember being jealous because she was chosen by the Kappa Alpha as a candidate. Glad I wasn't one if they put all their new members through the same rigmarole."

"That is irreverent!" gasped Edith. "The Kappa Alpha!"

"I see Dr. Milroth took them down all right, all right!" remarked another of the group. "And now none of the sororities can solicit members among either the sophs or the freshies."

"And it's a shame!" cried Edith. "The sorority girls have such fun."

"Half murdering innocents – yes," drawled May. "That Margaret Rolff was just about scared out of her wits, they say. They found her wandering about Bliss Island – "

"Sh! We're not to talk of it," advised Edith, with a glance at the fat girl in the background who, although taking no part in the discussion, was very much amused, especially every time Ruth Fielding's name was brought up.

"Well, I don't know why we shouldn't speak of it," said Dora Parton, who was likewise a sophomore. "The whole college knew it at the time. When Margaret Rolff left they discovered that the beautiful silver vase was gone, too, from the library – "

"Oh, hush!" exclaimed May MacGreggor, sharply.

"Won't hush – so now!" said the other girl, smartly, making a face at the Scotch lassie. "Didn't Miss Cullam go wailing all over the college about it?"

"That's so," Edith agreed. "You'd have thought it was her vase that had been stolen."

"I don't believe the vase was stolen at all," May said. "It was mixed up in that initiation and lost. I know that the Kappa Alpha girls are raising a fund to pay for it."

"Pay for it!" scoffed some one. "Why, they couldn't do that in a thousand years. That was an Egyptian curio – very old and very valuable. Pay for it, indeed! Those Kappa Alphas, as well as the other sororities, are paying for their fun in another way."

"But, anyway," said the quiet girl, "it was a terrible experience for Miss Rolff."

"Unless she 'put it on' and got away with the loot herself," said Edith.

"Oh, scissors! now who's coarse?" demanded May MacGreggor.

But the conversation came back to the expected Ruth Fielding. These girls had all arrived at Ardmore several days in advance of the opening of the semester. Indeed, it is always advisable for freshmen, especially, to be on hand at least two days before the opening, for there is much preparation for newcomers.

The fleshy girl who had thus far taken no part in the conversation recorded, save to be amused by it, had already been on the ground long enough to know her way about. But she was not yet acquainted with any of her classmates or with the sophomores.

If she knew Ruth Fielding, she said nothing about it when Edith Phelps began to discuss the girl of the Red Mill again.

"Miss Cullam spoke to me about this Fielding. It seems she has an acquaintance who teaches at that backwoods' school the child went to – "

"Briarwood a backwoods' school!" said May. "Not much!"

"Well, it's somewhere up in New York State among the yaps," declared Edith. "And Cullam's friend wrote her that Fielding is a wonder. Dear me! how I do abominate wonders."

"Perhaps we are maligning the girl," said Dora. "Perhaps Ruth Fielding is quite modest."

"What? After writing a moving picture drama? Is there anything modest about the motion picture business in any of its branches?"

"Oh, dear me, Edie!" cried one of her listeners, "you're dreadful."

"I presume this canned drama authoress," pursued Edith, "will have ink-stains on her fingers and her hair will be eternally flying about her careworn features. Well! and what are you laughing at?" she suddenly and tartly demanded of the plump girl in the background.

"At you," chuckled the stranger.

"Am I so funny to look at?"

"No. But you are the funniest-talking girl I ever listened to. Let me laugh, won't you?"

Before this observation could be more particularly inquired into, some one shouted:

"Oh, look who's here! And in style, bless us!"

"And see the freight! Excess baggage, for a fact," May MacGreggor said, under her breath. "Who can she be?"

"The Queen of Sheba in all her glory had nothing on this lady," cried Edith with conviction.

It was not often that any of the Ardmore girls, and especially a freshman, arrived during the opening week of the term in a private equipage. This car that came chugging down the hill to the entrance of Dare Hall was a very fine touring automobile. The girl in the tonneau, barricaded with a huge trunk and several bags, besides a huge leather hat-box perched beside the chauffeur, was very gaily appareled as well.

"Goodness! look at the labels on that trunk," whispered Dora Parton. "Why, that girl must have been all over Europe."

"The trunk has, at any rate," chuckled May.

"Hist!" now came from the excited Edith Phelps. "See the initials, 'R. F.' What did I tell you? It is that Fielding girl!"

"Oh, my aunt!" groaned the plump girl in the background, and she actually had to stuff her handkerchief in her mouth to keep from laughing outright again.

The car had halted and the chauffeur got down promptly, for he had to remove some of the "excess baggage" before the girl in the tonneau could alight.

"I guess she must think she belongs here," whispered Dora.

"More likely she thinks she owns the whole place," snapped Edith, who had evidently made up her mind not to like the new girl whose baggage was marked "R. F."

The girl got out and shook out her draperies. A close inspection would have revealed the fact that, although dressed in the very height of fashion (whatever that may mean), the materials of which the stranger's costume were made were rather cheap.

"This is Dare Hall, isn't it?" she asked the group of girls above her on the porch. "I suppose there is a porter to help – er – the man with my baggage?"

"It is a rule of the college," said Edith, promptly, "that each girl shall carry her own baggage to her room. No male person is allowed within the dormitory building."

There was a chorused, if whispered, "Oh!" from the other girls, and the newcomer looked at Edith, suspiciously.

"I guess you are spoofing me, aren't you?" she inquired.

"Help! help!" murmured May MacGreggor. "That's the very latest English slang."

"She's brought it direct from 'dear ol' Lunnon'," gasped one of the other sophomores.

"Dear me!" said Edith, addressing her friends, "wouldn't it be nice to have a 'close up' taken of that heap of luggage? It really needs a camera man and a director to make this arrival a success."

The girl who had just come looked very much puzzled. The chauffeur seemed eager to be gone.

"If I can't help take in the boxes, Miss, I might as well be going," he said to the new arrival.

"Very well," she rejoined, stiffly, and opening her purse gave him a bill. He lifted his cap, entered the car, touched the starter and in a moment the car whisked away.

"I declare!" said May MacGreggor, "she looks just like a castaway on the shore of a desert island, with all the salvage she has been able to recover from the wreck."

And perhaps the mysterious R. F. felt a good deal that way.

CHAPTER IV
FIRST IMPRESSIONS

Greenburg was the station on the N. Y. F. & B. Railroad nearest to Ardmore College. It was a small city of some thirty or forty thousand inhabitants. The people, not alone in the city but in the surrounding country, were a rather wealthy class. Ardmore was a mile from the outskirts of the town.

Ruth Fielding and Helen Cameron, her chum, had arrived with other girls bound for the college on the noon train. Of course, the chums knew none of their fellow pupils by name, but it was easily seen which of those alighting from the train were bound for Ardmore.

There were two large auto-stages in waiting, and Ruth and Helen followed the crowd of girls briskly getting aboard the buses. As they saw other girls do, the two chums from Cheslow gave their trunk checks to a man on the platform, but they clung to their hand-baggage.

"Such a nice looking lot of girls," murmured Helen in Ruth's ear. "It's fine! I'm sure we shall have a delightful time at college, Ruthie."

"And some hard work," observed Ruth, laughing, "if we expect to keep up with them. There are no dunces in this crowd, my dear."

"Goodness, no!" agreed her friend. "They all look as sharp as needles."

There were girls of all the classes at the station, as was easily seen. Ruth and Helen chanced to get into a seat with two of the seniors, who seemed most awfully sophisticated to the recent graduates of Briarwood Hall.

"You are just entering, are you not – you and your friend?" asked the nearest senior of Ruth.

"Yes," admitted the girl of the Red Mill, feeling and looking very shy.

The young women smiled quietly, saying:

"I am Miss Dexter, and am beginning my senior year. I am glad to be the first to welcome you to Ardmore."

"Thank you so much!" Ruth said, recovering her self-possession. Then she told Miss Dexter her own name and introduced Helen.

"You girls have drawn your room numbers, I presume?"

"They were drawn for us," Ruth said. "We are to be in Dare Hall and hope to have adjoining rooms."

"That is nice," said Miss Dexter. "It is so much pleasanter when two friends enter together. I am at Hoskin Hall myself. I shall be glad to have you two freshmen look me up when you are once settled."

"Thank you," Ruth said again, and Helen found her voice to ask:

"Are all the seniors in Hoskin Hall, and all the freshmen at Dare Hall?"

"Oh, no. There are members of each class in all four of the dormitories," Miss Dexter explained.

"I suppose there will be much for us to learn," sighed Ruth. "It is different from a boarding school."

"Do you both come from a boarding school?" asked their new acquaintance.

"We are graduates of Briarwood Hall," Helen said, with pride.

"Oh, indeed?" Miss Dexter looked sharply at Ruth again. "Did you say your name was Ruth Fielding?"

"Yes, Miss Dexter."

"Why, you must be the girl who wrote a picture play to help build a dormitory for your school!" exclaimed the senior. "Really, how nice."

"There, Ruth!" said Helen, teasingly, "see what it is to be famous."

"I – I hope my reputation will not be held against me," Ruth said, laughing. "Let me tell you, Miss Dexter, we all at Briarwood helped to swell that dormitory fund."

"I fancy so," said the senior. "But all of your schoolmates could not have written a scenario which would have been approved by the Alectrion Film Corporation."

"I should say not!" cried Helen, warmly. "And it was a great picture, too."

"It was clever, indeed," agreed Miss Dexter. "I saw it on the screen."

Miss Dexter introduced the girl at the other end of the seat – another senior, Miss Purvis. The two entering freshmen felt flattered – how could they help it? They had expected, as freshmen, to be quite haughtily ignored by the seniors and juniors.

But there were other matters to interest Ruth and Helen as the auto-bus rolled out of the city. The way was very pleasant; there were beautiful homes in the suburbs of Greenburg. And after they were passed, there were lovely fields and groves on either hand. The chums thought they had seldom seen more attractive country, although they had traveled more than most girls of their age.

The road over which the auto-bus rolled was wide and well oiled – a splendid automobile track. But only one private equipage passed them on the ride to Ardmore. That car came along, going the same way as themselves, just as they reached the first of the row of faculty dwellings.

There was but one passenger in the car – a girl; and she was packed around with baggage in a most surprising way.

"Oh!" gasped Helen, in Ruth's ear, "I guess there goes one of the real fancy girls – the kind that sets the pace at college."

Ruth noticed that Miss Dexter and Miss Purvis craned their necks to see the car and the girl, and she ventured to ask who she was.

"I can't tell you," Miss Dexter said briskly. "I never saw her before."

"Oh! Perhaps, then, she isn't going to the college."

"Yes; she must be. This road goes nowhere else. But she is a freshman, of course."

"An eccentric, I fancy," drawled Miss Purvis. "You must know that each freshman class is bound to have numbered with it some most surprising individuals. Rarae aves, as it were."

Miss Dexter laughed. "But the corners are soon rubbed off and their peculiarities fade into the background. When I was a freshman, there entered a woman over fifty, with perfectly white hair. She was a dear; but, of course, she was an anomaly at college."

"My!" exclaimed Helen. "What did she want to go to college for?"

"The poor thing had always wanted to go to college. When she was young there were few women's colleges. And she had a big family to help, and finally a bedridden sister to care for. So she remained faithful to her home duties, but each year kept up with the graduating class of a local preparatory school. She was really a very well educated and bright woman; only peculiar."

"And what happened when she came to Ardmore?" asked Ruth, interested, "is she still here?"

"Oh, no. She remained only a short time. She found, she said, that her mind was not nimble enough, at her age, to keep up with the classes. Which was very probably true, you know. Unless one is constantly engaged in hard mental labor, one's mind must get into ruts by the time one is fifty. But she was very lovely, and quite popular – while she lasted."

Helen was more interested just then in the row of cottages occupied by the members of the faculty, and here strung along the left side of the highway. They were pretty houses, set in pretty grounds.

"Oh, look, Helen!" cried Ruth, suddenly.

"The lake!" responded Helen.

The dancing blue waters of Lake Remona were visible for a minute between two of the houses. Ruth, too, caught a glimpse of the small island which raised its hilly head in the middle of the lake.

"Is that Bliss Island?" she inquired of Miss Dexter.

"Yes. You can see it from here. That doesn't belong to the college."

"No?" said Ruth, in surprise: "But, of course, the girls can go there?"

"It is 'No Man's Land,' I believe. Belongs to none of the estates surrounding the lake. We go there – yes," Miss Dexter told her. "The Stone Face is there."

"What is that, please?" asked Ruth, interested. "What is the Stone Face?"

"A landmark, Miss Fielding. That Stone Face was quite an important spot last May – wasn't it, Purvis?" the senior asked the other girl.

"Oh, goodness me, yes!" said Miss Purvis. "Don't mention it. Think what it has done to our Kappa Alpha."

"What do you suppose ever became of that girl?" murmured Miss Dexter, thoughtfully.

"I can't imagine. It was a sorry time, take it all in all. Let's not talk of it, Merry. Our sorority has a setback from which it will never recover."

All this was literally Greek to Ruth, of course. Nor did she listen with any attention. There were other things for her and Helen to be interested in, for the main building of the college had come into view.

They had been gradually climbing the easy slope of College Hill from the east. The main edifice of Ardmore did not stand upon the summit of the eminence. Behind and above the big, winged building the hill rose to a wooded, rounding summit, sheltering the whole estate from the north winds.

Just upon the edge of the forest at the top was an octagon-shaped observatory. Ruth had read about it in the Year Book. From the balcony of this observatory one could see, on a clear day, to the extreme west end of Lake Remona – quite twenty-five miles away.

The newcomers, however, were more interested at present in the big building which faced the lake, half-way down the southern slope of College Hill, and which contained the hall and classrooms, as well as the principal offices. The beautiful campus was in front of this building.

"All off for Dare and Dorrance," shouted the stage driver, stopping his vehicle.

The driveway here split, one branch descending the hill, while the main thread wound on past the front of the main building. Ruth and Helen scrambled down with their bags.

"Good-bye," said Miss Dexter smiling on them. "Perhaps I shall see you when you come over to the registrar's office. We seniors have to do the honors for you freshies."

Miss Purvis, too, bade them a pleasant good-bye. The chums set off down the driveway. On their left was the great, sandstone, glass-roofed bulk of the gymnasium, and they caught a glimpse of the fenced athletic field behind it.

Ahead were the two big dormitories upon this side of the campus – Dare and Dorrance Halls. The driveway curved around to the front of these buildings, and now the private touring car the girls had before noticed, came shooting around from the lake side of the dormitories, passing Ruth and Helen, empty save for the chauffeur.

"Goodness!" exclaimed Helen. "I wonder if that dressy girl with all the goods and chattels is bunked in our dormitory?"

"'Our' dormitory, no less!" laughed Ruth. "Do you feel as much at home already as that?"

"Goodness! No. I'm only trying to make myself believe it. Ruth, what an e-nor-mous place this is! I feel just as small as – as a little mouse in an elephant's stall."

Ruth laughed, but before she could reply they rounded the corner of the building nearest to the campus and saw the group of girls upon its broad porch, the stranger at the foot of the steps, and the heap of baggage piled where the chauffeur had left it.

"Hello!" May MacGreggor said, aloud, "here are a couple more kittens. Look at the pretty girl with the brown eyes and hair. And the smart-looking, black-eyed one. Now! here are freshies after my own heart."

Edith Phelps refused to be called off from the girl and the baggage, however. She said coolly:

"I really don't know what you will do with all that truck, Miss Fielding. The rooms at Dare are rather small. You could not possibly get all those bags and the trunk – and certainly not that hat-box – into one of these rooms."

"My name isn't Fielding," said the strange girl, paling now, but whether from anger or as a forerunner to tears it would have been hard to tell. Her face was not one to be easily read.

"Your name isn't Fielding?" gasped Edie Phelps, while the latter's friends burst into laughter. "'R. F.'! What does that stand for, pray?"

At this moment the fleshy girl who had been all this time in the background on the porch, flung herself forward, burst through the group, and ran down the steps. She had spied Ruth and Helen approaching.

"Ruthie! Helen! Ruth Fielding! Isn't this delightsome?"

The fleshy girl tried to hug both the chums from Cheslow at once. Edie Phelps and the rest of the girls on the porch gazed and listened in amazement. Edie turned upon the girl with the heap of baggage, accusingly.

"You're a good one! What do you mean by coming here and fooling us all in this way? What's your name?"

"Rebecca Frayne – if you think you have a right to ask," said the new girl, sharply.

"And you're not the canned drama authoress?"

"I don't know what you mean, I'm sure," said Rebecca Frayne. "But I would like to know what I'm to do with this baggage."

Ruth had come to the foot of the steps now with Helen and the fleshy girl, whom the chums had hailed gladly as "Jennie Stone." The girl of the Red Mill heard the speech of the stranger and noted her woebegone accent. She turned with a smile to Rebecca Frayne.

"Oh! I know about that," she said. "Just leave your trunk and bags here and put your card and the number of your room on them. The men will be along very soon to carry them up for you. I read that in the Year Book."

"Thank you," said Rebecca Frayne.

The group of sophomores and freshmen on the porch opened a way for the Briarwood trio to enter the house, and said never a word. Jennie Stone was, as she confessed, grinning broadly.