I
“The Elms” school for girls consisted of a trio of high-pillared Colonial buildings on the main street of Mount Hadley, Massachusetts. They stood behind lofty arches of towering trees that were old when Washington passed through to inspect Ticonderoga.
Mount Hadley had an atmosphere possessed by many scholastic, hilltop New England towns,—wide-verandahed, leisurely, sharply colored, exclusive. From its diminutive brownstone Memorial library to its chaste white churches, it expressed simplicity, asceticism, grace and dignified charm. The nasturtium-flavored individuality of the town stood in clearly defined contrast to the clash and clatter of muddy-guttered, smoky-scented, foreign-populated paper cities farther down the Connecticut. A ninety-minute suburban trolley service connected it with Springfield, Massachusetts.
Madelaine Theddon was entering her second year at “The Elms” when, upon emerging from the college store-and-postoffice early one September evening, she saw a motor-car draw to the near-by curb and a man leap out. He blocked her way with easy self-confidence. She recognized Gordon Ruggles.
Physically, Gordon seemed to have attained maturity in a year. He had gained in height at an expense of girth. His auto togs made him look still taller and older. But his twisted front tooth was as prominent and his eyelid flopped as badly as ever.
“Hello, Madge!” he cried. “Still sore?”
“I’ve never been ‘sore’ at you, Gordon. That’s a coarse and unkind thing to say!”
“Well, you swallowed all the guff Aunt Grace handed you about me.”
“Please don’t talk so, Gordon. If you haven’t been—well, interesting, it’s because you haven’t seemed to me to live up to the best that’s in you.”
“You didn’t talk that way the first time we met, Madge—when Aunt Grace was showing me the gate. You seemed like a regular girl, for a time. Then right off you got stiff—stiff as froze mutton.”
“You didn’t act very gentlemanly around my home afterward, Gordon. Your behavior displeased my mother. I couldn’t help charging that displeasure against you.”
“You made me feel for a time, Madge, as if you’d give a fellow a chance. Then you turned the glassy stare on me like—like—all the rest.” Gordon said this in a hard, dry self-pity which he knew intuitively how to employ with deadly effect on Madelaine’s type of femininity.
“Mother asked you not to try to see me or find out where I’d started in school. She begged you to go away and leave me alone. And you haven’t paid the slightest regard to her. Is that honorable? What ‘chance’ do you want?”
“What right did she have to ask it? She flung me a dare. Because I took it and smoked you out, she’s sore. And she’s gypping my game—with you.”
“Just what is your ‘game,’ Gordon?”
“Aw, you know what I want. You could show you were a good sport once in a while. At least, be human. But instead of acting like a cousin, you act—and Aunt Grace acts—as if I were a pestilence. I want to be friends and neither of you will let me.”
Gordon had planted himself in front of Madelaine in such a manner that she was unable to pass easily. But she was not afraid, merely annoyed. She was willowy and fragile beside him but her calm, dark eyes searched his own bravely.
“We can be friends, if that’s all you wish. But so long as you annoy mother, you annoy me. And that’s all I have to say.”
“You think I am a hell-buster, don’t you, Madge? You—even you!—won’t give me the benefit of the doubt.”
Along this attack, Gordon knew he could always score, if he acted sufficiently persistent and apparently sincere. The quick gleam in those expressive dark eyes showed when he had scored now.
“Gordon,” cried the girl, “why do you persist in coming up here, week after week and month after month, talking and acting as you do? What is it you want?”
“You’re the only girl who ever made me feel that if she were friendly, really friendly, I could pull up and amount to something. Is it any wonder I should be interested in sticking around? When a guy has met that kind of girl, he’s on the outs with every one unless he can have her to play with. And that’s you! And the truth!”
“But I can’t play around with any one. I’m attending school. And next spring mother and I are going abroad——”
“Every one plays ’round part of the time, Madge!” Gordon came closer as the girl shrank back. “I’ve been thinking about you nearly every day since I met you, Madge. I’m in a rotten way. Instead of helping me, you make it worse. Is that fair? When a fellow might go square if he had the chance, is it fair to make it as hard as you can?”
“I don’t want to make it hard for any one, Gordon. But mother made me promise I wouldn’t encourage you and I should keep that promise.”
“A bad promise is better broken than kept, Madge. And what kind of a promise is it anyway, when it injures and hurts somebody?”
This sort of argument, harped upon long enough, would have the girl’s defenses down.
“Please, Gordon, let me pass. People are watching.”
“Madge, are you afraid of me?”
“Of course I’m not afraid of you!”
“Get into the car then. For an hour let me talk to you—while we’re driving, I mean. I’ll have you back by eight o’clock. I promise it, faithfully. You’ve never heard my side of the story, Madge. Until you do, it’s not fair to condemn me. Not on your mother’s say-so.”
“I can’t! I just can’t!”
Gordon’s face assumed the proper recklessness.
“All right, if that’s the way you feel about it. But next time you hear of me raising hell don’t blame anybody but yourself. Didn’t you ever have the feeling that no one care about you—what you did, or what became of you? No, of course you haven’t——”
“Gord! Come back! Don’t go off feeling so!”
“I can’t help the way I feel. I’m getting to the place where I don’t give a hang. I thought for a time you might help me. I see, as usual, I’m out o’ luck!”
It hurt the girl to have the lad talk so, especially as he appeared sincere. Suppose Mrs. Theddon were wrong! Suppose she were prejudiced! She, Madelaine, had known that horrible feeling of nobody caring. Was it square of her mother to put such restrictions upon her? The girl was a queer mixture of half woman, half child. The “child” was always the orphan child, wondering to whom it belonged, why life had been “different.”
“Where do you want to drive?” she asked.
“Oh, up to Amherst and back, or Greenfield; what does it matter so long as I have a good chance to talk, and get you back by eight o’clock?”
“Well, I’ll have to tell Mrs. Anderson over to the House. And you may have to assure her you’re my cousin. It’s against the rules otherwise, you know.”
“Fair enough! Hustle! We’ve a couple of hours yet before dark.”