Mercy Curtis came in a week.
For Helen of course was only too delighted to fall
in with Mrs. Tellingham’s suggestion. Duet
Number 2, West Dormitory, was amply large enough for
three, and Ruth gave up her bed to the cripple and
slept on a couch. Helen herself could not do
too much for the comfort of the newcomer.
Dr. Davidson and Dr. Cranfew came
with her; but really the lame girl bore the journey
remarkably well. And how different she looked
from the thin, peaked girl that Ruth and Helen remembered!
“Oh, you didn’t expect
to see so much flesh on my bones; did you?” said
Mercy, noting their surprise, and being just as sharp
and choppy in her observations as ever. “But
I’m getting wickedly and scandalously fat.
And I don’t often have to repeat Aunt Alviry’s
song of ’Oh, my back and oh, my bones!’”
Mercy went to bed on her arrival.
But the next day she got about in the room very nicely
with the aid of two canes. The handsome ebony
crutches she saved for “Sunday-Best.”
Ruth arranged a meeting of the Sweetbriars
to welcome the cripple, and Mercy seemed really to
enjoy having so many girls of her own age about her.
Helen did not bring in many members of the Upedes;
indeed, just then they all seemed to keep away from
Duet Two, and none of them spoke to Ruth. That
is, none save Jennie Stone. The fat girl was
altogether too good-natured and really
too kind at heart to treat Ruth Fielding
as Jennie’s roommates did.
“They say you went and told
Picolet we were going to have the party in your room,”
Heavy said to Ruth, frankly, “and that’s
how you got out of it so easily. But I tell
them that’s all nonsense, you know. If
you’d wanted to make us trouble, you would have
let Helen have the party in our room, as she wanted
to, and so you could have stayed home and not been
in it at all.”
“As she wanted to?” repeated
Ruth, slowly. “Did Helen first plan to
have the supper in your quartette?”
“Of course she did. It
was strictly a Upede affair or would have
been if you hadn’t been in it. But you’re
a good little thing, Ruth Fielding, and I tell them
you never in this world told Picolet.”
“I did not indeed, Jennie,” said Ruth,
sadly.
“Well, you couldn’t make
The Fox believe that. She’s sure about
it, you see,” the stout girl said. “When
Mary Cox wants to be mean, she can be, now I tell
you!”
Indeed, Heavy was not like the other
three girls in the next room. Mary, Belle and
Lluella never looked at Ruth if they could help it,
and never spoke to her. Ruth was not so much
hurt over losing such girls for friends, for she could
not honestly say she had liked them at the start;
but that they should so misjudge and injure her was
another matter.
She said nothing to Helen about all
this; and Helen was as firmly convinced that Mary
Cox and the other Upedes were jolly girls, as ever.
Indeed, they were jolly enough; most of their larks
were innocent fun, too. But it was a fact that
most of those girls who received extra tasks during
those first few weeks of the half belonged to the Up
and Doing Club.
That Helen escaped punishment was
more by good fortune than anything else. In
the study, however, she and Ruth and Mercy had many
merry times. Mercy kept both the other girls
up to their school tasks, for all lessons seemed to
come easy to the lame girl and she helped her two
friends not a little in the preparation of their own.
“The Triumvirate” the
other girls in the dormitory building called the three
girls from Cheslow. Before Thanksgiving, Ruth,
Helen, and Mercy began to stand high in their several
classes. And Ruth was booked for the Glee Club,
too. She sang every Sunday in the chorus, while
Helen played second violin in the orchestra, having
taken some lessons on that instrument before coming
to Briarwood.
Dr. Cranfew came often at first to
see Mercy; but he declared at last that he only came
socially there was no need of medical attendance.
The cripple could not go to recitations without her
crutches, but sometimes in the room she walked with
only Ruth’s strong arm for support. She
was getting rosy, too, and began to take exercise in
the gymnasium.
“I’ll develop my biceps,
if my back is crooked and my legs queer,” she
declared. “Then, when any of those Miss
Nancy Seniors make fun of me behind my back, I
can punch ’em!” for there were times when
Mercy’s old, cross-grained moods came upon her,
and she was not so easily borne with.
Perhaps this fact was one of the things
that drove the wedge deeper between Ruth and Helen.
Ruth would never neglect the crippled girl.
She seldom left her in the room alone. Mercy
had early joined the Sweetbriars, and Ruth and she
went to the frequent meetings of that society together,
while Helen retained her membership in the Up and
Doing Club and spent a deal of her time in the quartette
room next door.
Few of the girls went home for Thanksgiving,
and as Mercy was not to return to Cheslow then, the
journey being considered too arduous for her, Ruth
decided not to go either. There was quite a feast
made by the school on Thanksgiving, and frost having
set in a week before, skating on Triton Lake was in
prospect. There was a small pond attached to
the Briarwood property and Ruth tried Helen’s
skates there. She had been on the ice before,
but not much; however, she found that the art came
easily to her as easily as tennis, in which,
by this time, she was very proficient.
For the day following Thanksgiving
there was a trip to Triton Lake planned, for that
great sheet of water was ice-bound, too, and a small
steamer had been caught ’way out in the middle
of the lake, and was frozen in. The project
to drive to the lake and skate out to the steamer
(the ice was thick enough to hold up a team of horses,
and plenty of provisions had been carried out to the
crew) and to have a hot lunch on the boat originated
in the fertile brain of Mary Cox; but as it was not
a picnic patronized only by the Upedes, Mrs. Tellingham
made no objection to it. Besides, it was vacation
week, and the Preceptress was much more lenient.
Of course, Helen was going; but Ruth
had her doubts. Mercy could not go, and the
girl of the Red Mill hated to leave her poor little
crippled friend alone. But Mercy was as sharp
of perception as she was of tongue. When Helen
blurted out the story of the skating frolic, Ruth
said “she would see” about going; she said
she wasn’t sure that she would care to go.
“I’m such a new skater,
you know,” she laughed. “Maybe I’d
break down skating out to the steamboat, and wouldn’t
get there, and while all you folks were eating that
nice hot lunch I’d be freezing to death poor
little me! ’way out there on the ice.”
But Mercy, with her head on one side
and her sharp blue eyes looking from Helen to Ruth,
shot out:
“Now, don’t you think
you’re smart, Ruth Fielding? Why, I can
see right through you just as though you
were a rag of torn mosquito netting! You won’t
go because I’ll be left alone.”
“No,” said Ruth, but flushing.
“Yes,” shot back Mercy.
“And I don’t have to turn red about
it, either. Oh, Ruthie, Ruthie! you can’t
even tell a white one without blushing about
it.”
“I don’t know ”
“I do know!” declared
Mercy. “You’re going. I’ve
got plenty to do. You girls can go on and freeze
your noses and your toeses, if you like. Me for
the steam-heated room and a box of bonbons.
But I hope the girls who go will be nicer to you
than some of those Upedes have been lately, Ruthie.”
Helen blushed now; but Ruth hastened
to say: “Oh, don’t you fuss about
me, Mercy. Some of the Sweetbriars mean to go.
This isn’t confined to one club in particular.
Madge Steele is going, too, and Miss Polk. And
Miss Reynolds, Mrs. Tellingham’s first assistant,
is going with the party. I heard all about it
at supper. Poor Heavy was full of it; but she
says she can’t go because she never could skate
so far. And then the ice might break
under her.”
“Whisper!” added Helen,
her eyes dancing. “I’ll tell you
something else and this I know you don’t
know!”
“What is it?”
“Maybe Tom will be there.
Good old Tom! Just think I haven’t
seen him since we left home. Won’t it
be just scrumptious to see old Tom again?”
And Ruth Fielding really thought it would be.