There was some movement downstairs
now. Ruth Fielding heard a door open and a voice
speak in the lower corridor. Perhaps it was Miss
Scrimp, the matron. But every one of the skylarkers
had cut to bed, and the dormitories were as still
as need be.
“Oh, Ruth!” gasped Helen,
from her muffling bed clothes. “Did you
hear it?”
“Did I hear what?” panted Ruth.
“Oh! I was so frightened.
There is something dreadful about that fountain.
I heard whisperings and rustlings there; but the harp ”
“They did it to scare us,”
declared Ruth, in both anger and relief. She
had been badly frightened, but she was getting
control of herself now.
“Then they frightened themselves,”
declared Helen, sitting up in bed. “You
heard the harp?”
“I should say so!”
“We were all at the window listening
to hear if you would be frightened and run,”
whispered Helen. “Oh, Ruthie!”
“What’s the matter, now?” demanded
her chum.
“I I tried to help
them. It was mean. I knew they were trying
to scare you, and I helped them. I wasn’t
so scared myself as I appeared when I came in.”
“WHAT?”
“I don’t know what’s
made me act so mean to you this evening,” sobbed
Helen. “I’m sure I love you, Ruth.
And I know you wouldn’t have treated me so.
But they said they were just going to have some fun
with you ”
“Who said?” demanded Ruth.
“Mary Cox and and the
others.”
“They told you they were coming to haze us?”
“The Upedes ye-es,”
admitted Helen. “And of course, it wouldn’t
have amounted to anything if that
Oh, Ruth! was it truly the harp that sounded?”
“How could that marble harp make any sound?”
demanded Ruth, sharply.
“But I know the girls were scared just
as scared as I was. They expected nothing of
the kind. And the twang of the strings sounded
just as loud as as well, as loud
as that fat man’s playing on the boat sounded.
Do you remember?”
Ruth remembered. And suddenly
the thought suggested by her frightened chum entered
her mind and swelled in it to vast proportions.
She could, in fact, think of little else than this
new idea. She hushed Helen as best she could.
She told her she forgave her but she said
it unfeelingly and more to hush her chum than aught
else. She wanted to think out this new train
of thought to its logical conclusion.
“Hush and go to sleep, Helen,”
she advised. “We shall neither of us be
fit to get up at rising bell. It is very late.
I I wish those girls had remained in their
own rooms, that I do!”
“But there is one thing about
it,” said Helen, with half a sob and half a
chuckle. “They were more frightened than
we were when they scuttled out of this room before
you returned. Oh! you should have seen them.”
Ruth would say no more to her.
There had been no light lit in all this time, and
now she snuggled down into her own bed. The excitement
of the recent happenings did not long keep Helen awake;
but her friend and room-mate lay for some time studying
out the mystery of the campus.
Miss Picolet was out of her room.
The old Irishman, Tony Foyle, had
mentioned chasing itinerant musicians off the grounds
that very evening among them a harpist.
The evil-looking man who played the
harp on board the steamship, and who had so frightened
little Miss Picolet, had followed the French teacher
ashore.
Had he followed her to Briarwood Hall?
Was he an enemy who plagued the little French teacher perhaps
blackmailed her?
These were the various ideas revolving
in Ruth Fielding’s head. And they revolved
until the girl fell asleep from sheer exhaustion, and
they troubled her sleep all through the remainder of
the night. For that the man with the harp and
Miss Picolet had a rendezvous behind the marble figure
on the campus fountain was the sum and substance of
the conclusion which Ruth had come to.
In the morning Ruth only mentioned
these suppositions to Helen, but discussed them not
at all with the other girls, her new school-fellows.
Indeed, those girls who had set out to haze the two
Infants, and had been frightened by the manifestation
of the sounding harp upon the campus, were not likely
to broach the subject to Ruth or Helen, either.
For they had intended to surround their raid upon the
new-comers’ peace of mind with more or less
secrecy.
However, sixteen frightened girls
(without counting Ruth and Helen) could not be expected
to keep such a mystery as this a secret among themselves.
That the marble harp had been sounded that
the ghost of the campus had returned to haunt the
school was known among the students of
Briarwood Hall before breakfast time. Jennie
Stone was quite full of it, although Ruth knew from
the unimpeachable testimony of Jennie’s nose
that she was not among the hazers; and the sounding
of the mysterious harp-strings in the middle of the
night really endangered Heavy’s appetite for
breakfast.
The members of the Upedes who had
been so pleasant with them at the evening meeting
seemed rather chary of speaking to Ruth and Helen how;
and, anyway, the chums had enough to do to get their
boxes unpacked and their keepsakes set about the room,
and to complete various housekeeping arrangements.
They enjoyed setting up their “goods and chattels”
quite as much as they expected to; and really their
school life began quite pleasantly despite the excitement
and misunderstanding on the first night of their arrival.
If the crowd that Ruth was so sure
had hazed them were slow about attending on the two
Infants in the West Dormitory (as their building was
called) there were plenty of other nice girls who looked
into the duet in a friendly way, or who spoke to Ruth
and Helen on the campus, or in the dining room.
Miss Polk and Madge Steele were not the only Seniors
who showed the chums some attention, either; and Ruth
and Helen began secretly to count the little buttons
marked “F. C.” which they saw, as
compared with the few stars bearing the intertwined
“U” and “D” of the Upedes.
Just the same, Helen Cameron’s
leaning toward the lively group or girls in their
house who had (it seemed) formed their club in protest
against the Forward Club, was still marked.
The friends heard that the last named association
was governed by the Preceptress and teachers almost
entirely. That it was “poky” and
“stuffy.” That some girls (not altogether
those who formed the membership of the Upedes) considered
it “toadying” to join the Forward Club.
And on this second day Ruth and Helen saw that the
rivalry for membership between the clubs was very
keen indeed. A girl couldn’t have friends
among the members of both the F. C.’s and the
Upedes that was plain.
Many new girls arrived on this day mostly
from the Lumberton direction. That was another
reason, perhaps, why Ruth and Helen were shown so
little attention by the quartette of girls next door
o them. They were all busy even Heavy
herself in herding the new girls whom they
had entangled in the tentacles of the Upedes.
The chums found themselves untroubled by the F. C.’s;
it seemed to be a settled fact among the girls that
Ruth and Helen were pledged to the Upedes.
“But we are not,”
Ruth Fielding said, to her friend. “I don’t
like this way of doing business at all, Helen do
you?”
“Well but what does
it matter?” queried Helen, pouting. “We
want to get in with a lively set; don’t we?
I’m sure the Upedes are nice girls.”
“I don’t like the leadership
of them,” said Ruth, frankly.
“Miss Cox?”
“Miss Cox exactly,” said the
girl from the Red Mill.
“Oh well she isn’t
everything,” cried Helen.
“She comes pretty near being
the boss of that club you can see that.
Now, the question is, do we want to be bossed by a
girl like her?”
“Then, do you want to be under
the noses of the teachers, and toadying to them all
the time?” cried Helen.
“If that is what is meant by
belonging to the Forward Club, I certainly do not,”
admitted Ruth.
“Then I don’t see but
you will have to start a secret society of your own,”
declared Helen, laughing somewhat ruefully.
“And perhaps that wouldn’t
be such a bad idea,” returned Ruth, slowly.
“I understand that there are nearly thirty new
girls coming to Briarwood this half who will enter
the Junior classes. Of course, the Primary pupils
don’t count. I talked with a couple of
them at dinner. They feel just as I do about
it there is too much pulling and hauling
about these societies. They are not sure that
they wish to belong to either the Upedes or the F.
C.’s.”
“But just think!” wailed
Helen. “How much fun we would be cut out
of! We wouldn’t have any friends ”
“That’s nonsense.
At least, if the whole of us thirty Infants, as they
call us, flocked together by ourselves, why wouldn’t
we have plenty of society? I’m not so
sure that it wouldn’t be a good idea to suggest
it to the others.”
“Oh, my! would you dare?”
gasped Helen. “And we’ve only just
arrived ourselves?”
“Self-protection is the first
selfish law of nature,” paraphrased Ruth, smiling;
“and I’m not sure that it’s a bad
idea to be selfish on such an occasion.”
“You’d just make yourself
ridiculous,” scoffed Helen. “To think
of a crowd of freshies getting up an order a
secret society.”
“In self-protection,” laughed Ruth.
“I guess Mrs. Tellingham would
have something to say about it, too,” declared
Helen.
It was not the subject of school clubs
that was the burden of Ruth Fielding’s thought
for most of that day, however. Nor did the arrival
of so many new scholars put the main idea in her mind
aside. This troubling thought was of Miss Picolet
and the sound of the harp on the campus at midnight.
The absence of the French teacher from the dormitory,
the connection of the little lady with the obese foreigner
who played the harp on the Lanawaxa, and the
sounding of harp-strings on the campus in the middle
of the night, were all dovetailed together in Ruth
Fielding’s mind. She wondered what the
mystery meant.
She saw Tony Foyle cleaning the campus
lanterns during the day, and she stopped and spoke
to him.
“I heard you tell Jennie Stone
last night that you had to drive street musicians
away from the school grounds, sir?” said Ruth,
quietly. “Was there a man with a harp
among them?”
“Sure an’ there was,”
declared Tony, nodding. “And he was a sassy
dago, at that! ’Tis well I’m a mon
who kapes his temper, or ’twould ha’ gone
har-r-rd wid him.”
“A big man, was he, Mr. Foyle?” asked
Ruth.
“What had that to do wid it?”
demanded the old man, belligerently. “When
the Foyles’ dander is riz it ain’t
size that’s goin’ to stop wan o’
that name from pitchin’ into an’ wallopin’
the biggest felly that iver stepped. He was
big,” he added; “but I’ve seen bigger.
Him an’ his red vest and jabberin’
like the foreign monkey he was. I’ll show
him!”
Ruth left Tony shaking his head and
muttering angrily as he pursued his occupation.
Ruth found herself deeply interested in the mystery
of the campus; but if she had actually solved the
problem of the sounding of the harp at midnight, the
reason for the happening, and what really brought
that remarkable manifestation about, was as deep a
puzzle to her as before.