CHAPTER XVIII.

A TELLING VALEDICTORY.

The Adelphi was transformed.

Upholsterers, florists, caterers had been so busy in all the main rooms that when Jessica stepped into them, on her return from hospital, she scarcely believed she had come to the right place.

Yet she could not be mistaken, for a bevy of happy girls, headed by Helen Rhinelander herself, had been watching from the upper windows for the arrival of the carriage that brought her; and these now swooped down upon her with all the extravagance of greeting natural to warm-hearted maidens.

“Jessie, you darling! So they did let you come in time for Commencement, after all! Only last night Madame bade us be prepared for disappointment, for one of the hospital surgeons said he feared the effect upon you of so much excitement. So you mustn’t get excited. Not the least bit in the world!” And as a soothing measure, Aubrey Huntington caught her recovered friend around the waist and gave her a wild whirl.

Jessica laughed, caught her breath, began to declare that she wasn’t--she wouldn’t be “excited,” and had her sentence finished, or smothered, by a frantic hug from somebody else.

Then came Natalie with the message that:

“Madame wants Jessica in her own private room at once. She’s afraid to trust her with us, I suppose, and I think it’s real mean to snatch her away the very minute she gets home.”

“Ah; it does seem like home, really, to be among you all again. Only what’s been done to the rooms? They are so beautiful, and what a lovely, lovely world it is, to-day! Seems if there were so many places to be happy in, so many one can call a sort of home--This, the hospital, Ephy’s flat, and precious Sobrante. I wish--Oh! how I wish every girl in all the world could be as happy as I am this minute! Yes, Natalie, I’m going to Madame right away. But I must say I wish I’d thought to ask her to have a thin white dress made for me, too. You all look so sweet and dainty.”

They escorted her to the schoolmistress, Helen herself slipping her strong arm about the other’s waist, and clasping Jessica’s hand, that had been so brown and was now so thin and white, with a fervor which told how deep her own emotion.

Then Madame Mearsom took her from them with a motherly kiss and the remark:

“Exercises do not begin until ten o’clock. For the time between, Jessie must rest quietly right here with me. Ah! how well you all look. I am certainly proud of my girls, to-day.”

Yet there was a ring of sadness in the teacher’s voice. Some of these would leave her soon, to return no more. They had been with her for years. She had done, or tried to do, a mother’s part by them and she loved them. They loved her, too, of that she was sure; but--the young go away and forget, the old remain and remember.

However, it was not this wise woman’s way to cast any shadows over other people’s sunshine; and it was now with a gay smile that she waved them all away and shut the door upon herself and her restored pupil. Then she led Jessica directly to her own capacious lounge, made her lie down, covered her lightly with a silken spread, and bade her go to sleep.

“Sleep, dear Madame? When it’s only morning and I’ve just come home? Why, I can’t!”

“Yes, you can. I command it; but first drink this bit of bouillon that the maid has brought. Commencement day is always an exciting one, even for the perfectly well and strong. You are well, too, now, but not yet strong. After your nap you shall be dressed and go to join your mates. This is the first Commencement you have ever attended. You will find much to interest.”

Jessica sat up and sipped the bouillon: then lay down and at a fresh command obediently turned her face to the wall. Within five minutes she was asleep; and the next she knew, Madame was saying:

“It is almost ten o’clock. I must leave you. Maid Maria will help you in your toilet. All your things are ready in my room.”

Jessica rose and entered the bedroom, where so few of the Adelphians were ever admitted, and stared in astonishment at Maria, holding up an exquisite frock of sheerest white, lace-trimmed and blue-ribboned in a bewildering fashion that showed the touch of some master modiste.

“Oh! how pretty? Which of the girls’ is that? And what am I to wear? My white muslin, with the two tucks--Oh! dear! I forgot. That was left mussed last time I wore it, at a rehearsal. But----”

“This is your own, Miss Trent. Madame said I was to dress you in it. It was made from the measure of your old frock and looks as if it would just fit. Now, if you please. It’s getting on to time.”

This seemed too good to be true. All her schoolmates had appeared before her, garbed in white, with the colored ribbons of each class adorning them. These blue ones meant that she had been promoted and must be--

“Why, Maria, if I’m to wear this pale blue that must mean I’m now a third-former! Oh, oh, oh!”

“I reckon ’tis, Miss Trent. Promotions always are at the end of the year, which seems funny to be called Commencement when ’tis just the other way. Ah! such soft pretty hair you have. A pity they had to cut it short, at that there hospital!”

“I don’t think it a pity. Hair will grow and it’s lots easier brushed when short. Ah! it does fit, doesn’t it? What a dear, dear Madame! How sweet and thoughtful of her to have it all ready without my having to ask or wait. It is pretty, Maria! I do look nice in it, don’t I? I mean--I’m not vain about it, but I’m so glad to look like the rest.”

“Sure; and Madame Mearsom’s not the one to let anybody look different from their mates. Not she. Even the charity scholars have new things----”

“Charity scholars, Maria? Are there such in this rich school?”

“Course. Several, or some. I don’t know how many. I only know there are, account of paying bills for Madame, times.”

“Which are they?”

“Ah! there, Miss Trent! _I_ don’t know, nor nobody, not even the charity ones themselves. Nobody knows except Madame and the folks they belong to. Madame says to have them and to teach them is her great privilege. She’s found the world a place of kindness and she’s been successful; so she just sort of passes it on. A good woman is Madame; and now you’re ready, and here come a lot of the girls to take you with them. Be careful, Miss Trent. Remember you’re but just getting well.”

What a day that followed!

In the big hall, or largest class-room, a temporary platform had been erected and banked with the roses of that sunny June. Behind the roses sat the Faculty. Jessica had not known how large this was nor of how notable presence till she saw this body of gentlemen arrayed in a group before her. In the very place of honor sat Madame, herself richly gowned, and far more imposing in appearance than she had seemed in her ordinary attire.

All her assistants were near her, Miss Montaigne with the rest, smiling a tender welcome to her “special.” There, too, a little apart from the rest, where the roses were heaped highest, their own arms filled with flowers, sat the seniors, the first form girls, who were to be graduated from this school of text-books, this day, and enter upon the larger school of life.

There was music, there was prayer, there was a brief address. But the latter was delivered in the perfunctory way common to such occasions and listened to with an attention equally perfunctory.

It was the row of “sweet girl graduates” themselves that alone claimed and retained the interest of everybody in that crowding audience. Rosalie Thorne was salutatorian, and Helen, valedictorian.

Rosalie acquitted herself well, with her own native modesty and sympathetic manner, and to her, at least, this leave taking of her old associates was a trying ordeal.

It was not until the President of the Adelphi Association had presented the diplomas that Helen Rhinelander arose to perform her part. In the traditional manner of valedictories, she went over many of the incidents of the last few years, during which her own residence at the Adelphi had continued, and brought her essay to a close by a few telling sentences.

“The Adelphi has always been known as a center of great social influence for good, but it has never before cherished in its midst a life-saver. Now it does. There has come to dwell among us a girl who did not hesitate for the fraction of a second to offer her own life to preserve that of another, that other not her friend.”

Helen paused and looked over the sea of faces yet saw but one: the flushed, embarrassed, distressed face of Jessica Trent; who felt that if the speaker added another word to those which had gone before she would surely sink in mortification. Helen, who, had now professed to love her! Helen to do this horrid thing! To hold her up to the gaze of all these strangers because she had done--Well, what anybody would have done, in the same moment and danger!

But she need not have feared. Helen was neither unkind nor indelicate, but she had a purpose in her speech and kept on her way to disclose it, without so much as once again glancing Jessica’s way. Neither, to that young person’s infinite relief, did anybody else. The orator’s reference had been too impersonal, Jessica looked so exactly like all the other maidens in their fine attire, that nobody not in the secret suspected who was meant nor what was coming.

“When one has a heroine for a neighbor, one naturally looks up to that person and wishes to please her. Our life-saving, life-sacrificing heroine had often expressed a certain wish. We have all heard it, ignored it, or forgotten it, until her brave act reawakened a desire to gratify her.

“Once, it seems, she visited a certain poor quarter of this city where little children swarmed in the gutters and wretched mothers were forced by ill-paid toil to neglect these helpless little ones. They have been forgotten by the rest of us; their desperate poverty has mocked at our abundance; there has been none to give them a thought, except our young heroine whose repeated assertion has been: ‘When I grow up, if I can in any way get the money, I will build homes for such poor babies. They shall have big airy rooms with kind nurses to attend them. They shall have plenty of toys, _plenty_ of toys, plenty of everything to make them grow up good and not wicked. How can they help being wicked, living as they do?’ So she has often talked and we have listened, as to the dreams of a child, unknowing whereof she spoke.

“All that is changed. The girl who would lay down her life for another is not a dreamer, she is a practical Christian. And now I, whose life was that one saved, desire to gratify her wish, her dream, if you please, to make it happy reality. I will be one to start a home for those gutter babies, regretting only that I cannot accomplish the work without asking help from others, and I do it for love of this dear, dreaming heroine.

“To build a home and equip it for the children of Avenue A and its swarming tenements I now open a subscription list and head the same with five thousand dollars. Who comes next?”

Jessica was no longer abashed nor self-conscious. All her heart was in the scene that ensued, when Madame followed that eloquent appeal with her own subscription of five thousand. She was well-known as a fairly rich woman and, in proportion to her means, for an extremely liberal one. Therefore, nobody except the “heroine” herself was greatly surprised by her action: but there were others in that rose-adorned hall who loved Madame and had been trained by her. Old pupils that were now, some of them, growing gray-headed women, but who still reverenced their old instructress and followed where she led.

“Two thousand,” said one.

“Ten. Put me down for ten thousand, Miss Rhinelander,” another.

“Even one thousand will help. It takes a heap of money to build a substantial ‘home’ in this city and I’d like to make it more. But my subscription is, for the present, one thousand dollars. Have you my name correct, Miss Rhinelander,” cried still a third.

Experienced persons say that sympathy goes in waves. Many a big sum has been raised by the sympathetic wave set in motion just as this one has been; and, before the benediction was pronounced over that assembly, sufficient money had been guaranteed to make the dream of Jessica Trent a future reality.

As for that happy girl, she could not at all realize this fact, though her fancy had again returned to the pitiful small faces which she had never forgotten and always hoped to help. Not till Helen sought her and drew her into a quiet spot did she begin to understand.

“You see, Jessica dear, I thought, well I thought you were a ‘charity’ and I told Madame that I wanted to pay for all your stay in the hospital. Then she told me that you were, or would be, a great deal richer than any of us; and she suggested that if I wanted to please you I could best do it by furthering some of your ‘dreams’ about other people. Then I remembered hearing the girls talk of your being so touched by the Avenue A babies, and I hoped that since I couldn’t do anything for you, personally, I might for them. That’s all. My part is a thank-offering. I think all the rest is pure charity. Are you glad?”

“Glad, Helen? I’m so glad I can hardly breathe. And I can almost hear my mother saying: ‘Just a link in life’s chain, Jessica.’ I, Buster I mean, ran away and I went to Avenue A. Just a little thing like that, yet out of it came--all this! Oh! isn’t it grand? isn’t it beautiful just to be alive, helping in the ‘chain,’ seeing the happiness grow! Oh! I thank you, Helen, more than words can tell. And--and how soon do you think that home can be built? Do you suppose I’ll see it done before I, too, graduate? I can hardly wait till I get a chance to write home to my mother and ask her to put her own name down on that list. She will, she’ll help. O Helen! What a happy day this is!”

“Yes. But a sad one, too. Just as I begin to know you I must lose you. Even now, within this hour. My mother is waiting--Good-by, good-by!”