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 99 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 100 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. 101 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 102 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 103 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 104 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.