Rebecca Of Sunnybrook Farm by Kate Douglas Wiggin (page 4)

worldly wisdom, and he, concluding that she must be a youthful pillar of the church, called upon her with the utmost simplicity.

Rebecca’s plight was pathetic. How could she refuse; how could she explain she was not a “member;” how could she pray before all those elderly women! John Rogers at the stake hardly suffered more than this poor child for the moment as she rose to her feet, forgetting that ladies prayed sitting, while deacons stood in prayer. Her mind was a maze of pictures that the Rev. Mr. Burch had flung on the screen. She knew the conventional phraseology, of course; what New England child, accustomed to Wednesday evening meetings, does not? But her own secret prayers were different. However, she began slowly and tremulously:–

“Our Father who art in Heaven, . . . Thou art God in Syria just the same as in Maine; . . . over there to-day are blue skies and yellow stars and burning suns . . . the great trees are waving in the warm air, while here the snow lies thick under our feet, . . . but no distance is too far for God to travel and so He is with us here as He is with them there, . . . and our thoughts rise to Him `as doves that to their windows fly.’. . .

“We cannot all be missionaries, teaching people to be good, . . . some of us have not learned yet how to be good ourselves, but if thy kingdom is to come and thy will is to be done on earth as it is in heaven, everybody must try and everybody must help, . . . those who are old and tired and those who are young and strong. . . . The little children of whom we have heard, those born under Syrian skies, have strange and interesting work to do for Thee, and some of us would like to travel in far lands and do wonderful brave things for the heathen and gently take away their idols of wood and stone. But perhaps we have to stay at home and do what is given us to do . . . sometimes even things we dislike, . . . but that must be what it means in the hymn we sang, when it talked about the sweet perfume that rises with every morning sacrifice. . . . This is the way that God teaches us to be meek and patient, and the thought that He has willed it so should rob us of our fears and help us bear the years. Amen.”

Poor little ignorant, fantastic child! Her petition was simply a succession of lines from the various hymns, and images the minister had used in his sermon, but she had her own way of recombining and applying these things, even of using them in a new connection, so that they had a curious effect of belonging to her. The words of some people might generally be written with a minus sign after them, the minus meaning that the personality of the speaker subtracted from, rather than added to, their weight; but Rebecca’s words might always have borne the plus sign.

The “Amen” said, she sat down, or presumed she sat down, on what she believed to be a bench, and there was a benediction. In a moment or two, when the room ceased spinning, she went up to Mrs. Burch, who kissed her affectionately and said, “My dear, how glad I am that we are going to stay with you. Will half past five be too late for us to come? It is three now, and we have to go to the station for our valise and for our children. We left them there, being uncertain whether we should go back or stop here.”

Rebecca said that half past five was their supper hour, and then accepted an invitation to drive home with Mrs. Cobb. Her face was flushed and her lip quivered in a way that aunt Sarah had learned to know, so the homeward drive was taken almost in silence. The bleak wind and aunt Sarah’s quieting presence brought her back to herself, however, and she entered the brick house cheerily. Being too full of news to wait in the side entry to take off her rubber boots, she carefully lifted a braided rug into the sitting-room and stood on that while she opened her budget.

“There are your shoes warming by the fire,” said aunt Jane. “Slip them right on while you talk.”

XIX

DEACON ISRAEL’S SUCCESSOR

It was a very small meeting, aunt Miranda,” began Rebecca, “and the missionary and his wife are lovely people, and they are coming here to stay all night and to-morrow with you. I hope you won’t mind.”

“Coming here!” exclaimed Miranda, letting her knitting fall in her lap, and taking her spectacles off, as she always did in moments of extreme excitement. “Did they invite themselves?”

“No,” Rebecca answered. “I had to invite them for you; but I thought you’d like to have such interesting company. It was this way”–

“Stop your explainin’, and tell me first when they’ll be here. Right away?”

“No, not for two hours–about half past five.”

“Then you can explain, if you can, who gave you any authority to invite a passel of strangers to stop here over night, when you know we ain’t had any company for twenty years, and don’t intend to have any for another twenty,–or at any rate while I’m the head of the house.”

“Don’t blame her, Miranda, till you’ve heard her story,” said Jane. “It was in my mind right along, if we went to the meeting, some such thing might happen, on account of Mr. Burch knowing father.”

“The meeting was a small one,” began Rebecca “I gave all your messages, and everybody was disappointed you couldn’t come, for the president wasn’t there, and Mrs. Matthews took the chair, which was a pity, for the seat wasn’t nearly big enough for her, and she reminded me of a line in a hymn we sang, `Wide as the heathen nations are,’ and she wore that kind of a beaver garden-hat that always gets on one side. And Mr. Burch talked beautifully about the Syrian heathen, and the singing went real well, and there looked to be about forty cents in the basket that was passed on our side. And that wouldn’t save even a heathen baby, would it? Then Mr. Burch said, if any sister would offer entertainment, they would pass the night, and have a parlor meeting in Riverboro to-morrow, with Mrs. Burch in Syrian costume, and lovely foreign things to show. Then he waited and waited, and nobody said a word. I was so mortified I didn’t know what to do. And then he repeated what he said, an explained why he wanted to stay, and you could see he thought it was his duty. Just then Mrs. Robinson whispered to me and said the missionaries always used to go to the brick house when grandfather was alive, and that he never would let them sleep anywhere else. I didn’t know you had stopped having them. because no traveling ministers have been here, except just for a Sunday morning, since I came to Riverboro. So I thought I ought to invite them, as you weren’t there to do it for yourself, and you told me to represent the family.”

“What did you do–go up and introduce yourself as folks was goin’ out?”

“No; I stood right up in meeting. I had to, for Mr. Burch’s feelings were getting hurt at nobody’s speaking. So I said, `My aunts, Miss Miranda and Miss Jane Sawyer would be happy to have you visit at the brick house, just as the missionaries always did when their father was alive, and they sent their respects by me.’ Then I sat down; and Mr. Burch prayed for grandfather, and called him a man of God, and thanked our Heavenly Father that his spirit was still alive in his descendants (that was you), and that the good old house where so many of the brethren had been cheered and helped, and from which so many had gone out strengthened for the fight, was still hospitably open for the stranger and wayfarer.”

Sometimes, when the heavenly bodies are in just the right conjunction, nature seems to be the most perfect art. The word or the deed coming straight from the heart, without any thought of effect, seems inspired.

A certain gateway in Miranda Sawyer’s soul had been closed for years; not all at once had it been done, but gradually, and without her full knowledge. If Rebecca had plotted for days, and with the utmost cunning, she could not have effected an entrance into that forbidden country, and now, unknown to both of them, the gate swung on its stiff and rusty hinges, and the favoring wind of opportunity opened it wider and wider as time went on. All things had worked together amazingly for good. The memory of old days had been evoked, and the daily life of a pious and venerated father called to mind; the Sawyer name had been publicly dignified and praised; Rebecca had comported herself as the granddaughter of Deacon Israel Sawyer should, and showed conclusively that she was not “all Randall,” as had been supposed. Miranda was rather mollified by and pleased with the turn of events, although she did not intend to show it, or give anybody any reason to expect that this expression of hospitality was to serve for a precedent on any subsequent occasion.

“Well, I see you did only what you was obliged to do, Rebecca,” she said, “and you worded your invitation as nice as anybody could have done. I wish your aunt Jane and me wasn’t both so worthless with these colds; but it only shows the good of havin’ a clean house, with every room in order, whether open or shut, and enough victuals cooked so ‘t you can’t be surprised and belittled by anybody, whatever happens. There was half a dozen there that might have entertained the Burches as easy as not, if they hadn’t ‘a’ been too mean or lazy. Why didn’t your missionaries come right along with you?”

“They had to go to the station for their valise and their children.”

“Are there children?” groaned Miranda.

“Yes, aunt Miranda, all born under Syrian skies.”

“Syrian grandmother!” ejaculated Miranda (and it was not a fact). “How many?”

“I didn’t think to ask; but I will get two rooms ready, and if there are any over I’ll take ’em into my bed,” said Rebecca, secretly hoping that this would be the case. “Now, as you’re both half sick, couldn’t you trust me just once to get ready for the company? You can come up when I call. Will you?”

“I believe I will,” sighed Miranda reluctantly. “I’ll lay down side o’ Jane in our bedroom and see if I can get strength to cook supper. It’s half past three–don’t you let me lay a minute past five. I kep’ a good fire in the kitchen stove. I don’t know, I’m sure, why I should have baked a pot o’ beans in the middle of the week, but they’ll come in handy. Father used to say there was nothing that went right to the spot with returned missionaries like pork ‘n’ beans ‘n’ brown bread. Fix up the two south chambers, Rebecca.”

Rebecca, given a free hand for the only time in her life, dashed upstairs like a whirlwind. Every room in the brick house was as neat as wax, and she had only to pull up the shades, go over the floors with a whisk broom, and dust the furniture. The aunts could hear her scurrying to and fro, beating up pillows and feather beds, flapping towels, jingling crockery, singing meanwhile in her clear voice:–

“In vain with lavish kindness
The gifts of God are strown;
The heathen in his blindness
Bows down to wood and stone.”

She had grown to be a handy little creature, and tasks she was capable of doing at all she did like a flash, so that when she called her aunts at five o’clock to pass judgment, she had accomplished wonders. There were fresh towels on bureaus and washstands, the beds were fair and smooth, the pitchers were filled, and soap and matches were laid out; newspaper, kindling, and wood were in the boxes, and a large stick burned slowly in each air- tight stove. “I thought I’d better just take the chill off,” she explained, “as they’re right from Syria; and that reminds me, I must look it up in the geography before they get here.”

There was nothing to disapprove, so the two sisters went downstairs to make some slight changes in their dress. As they passed the parlor door Miranda thought she heard a crackle and looked in. The shades were up, there was a cheerful blaze in the open stove in the front parlor, and a fire laid on the hearth in the back room. Rebecca’s own lamp, her second Christmas present from Mr. Aladdin, stood on a marble-topped table in the corner, the light that came softly through its rose-colored shade transforming the stiff and gloomy ugliness of the room into a place where one could sit and love one’s neighbor.

“For massy’s sake, Rebecca,” called Miss Miranda up the stairs, “did you think we’d better open the parlor?”

Rebecca came out on the landing braiding her hair.

“We did on Thanksgiving and Christmas, and I thought this was about as great an occasion,” she said. “I moved the wax flowers off the mantelpiece so they wouldn’t melt, and put the shells, the coral, and the green stuffed bird on top of the what-not, so the children wouldn’t ask to play with them. Brother Milliken’s coming over to see Mr. Burch about business, and I shouldn’t wonder if Brother and Sister Cobb happened in. Don’t go down cellar, I’ll be there in a minute to do the running.”

Miranda and Jane exchanged glances.

“Ain’t she the beatin’est creetur that ever was born int’ the world!” exclaimed Miranda; “but she can turn off work when she’s got a mind to!”

At quarter past five everything was ready, and the neighbors, those at least who were within sight of the brick house (a prominent object in the landscape when there were no leaves on the trees), were curious almost to desperation. Shades up in both parlors! Shades up in the two south bedrooms! And fires–if human vision was to be relied on–fires in about every room. If it had not been for the kind offices of a lady who had been at the meeting, and who charitably called in at one or two houses and explained the reason of all this preparation, there would have been no sleep in many families.

The missionary party arrived promptly, and there were but two children, seven or eight having been left with the brethren in Portland, to diminish traveling expenses. Jane escorted them all upstairs, while Miranda watched the cooking of the supper; but Rebecca promptly took the two little girls away from their mother, divested them of their wraps, smoothed their hair, and brought them down to the kitchen to smell the beans.

There was a bountiful supper, and the presence of the young people robbed it of all possible stiffness. Aunt Jane helped clear the table and put away the food, while Miranda entertained in the parlor; but Rebecca and the infant Burches washed the dishes and held high carnival in the kitchen, doing only trifling damage–breaking a cup and plate that had been cracked before, emptying a silver spoon with some dishwater out of the back door (an act never permitted at the brick house), and putting coffee grounds in the sink. All evidences of crime having been removed by Rebecca, and damages repaired in all possible cases, the three entered the parlor, where Mr. and Mrs. Cobb and Deacon and Mrs. Milliken had already appeared.

It was such a pleasant evening! Occasionally they left the heathen in his blindness bowing down to wood and stone, not for long, but just to give themselves (and him) time enough to breathe, and then the Burches told strange, beautiful, marvelous things. The two smaller children sang together, and Rebecca, at the urgent request of Mrs. Burch, seated herself at the tinkling old piano and gave “Wild roved an Indian girl, bright Alfarata” with considerable spirit and style.

At eight o’clock she crossed the room, handed a palm-leaf fan to her aunt Miranda, ostensibly that she might shade her eyes from the lamplight; but it was a piece of strategy that gave her an opportunity to whisper, “How about cookies?”

“Do you think it’s worth while?” sibilated Miss Miranda in answer.

“The Perkinses always do.”

“All right. You know where they be.”

Rebecca moved quietly towards the door, and the young Burches cataracted after her as if they could not bear a second’s separation. In five minutes they returned, the little ones bearing plates of thin caraway wafers,–hearts, diamonds, and circles daintily sugared, and flecked with caraway seed raised in the garden behind the house. These were a specialty of Miss Jane’s, and Rebecca carried a tray with six tiny crystal glasses filled with dandelion wine, for which Miss Miranda had been famous in years gone by. Old Deacon Israel had always had it passed, and he had bought the glasses himself in Boston. Miranda admired them greatly, not only for their beauty but because they held so little. Before their advent the dandelion wine had been served in sherry glasses.

As soon as these refreshments–commonly called a “colation” in Riverboro–had been genteelly partaken of, Rebecca looked at the clock, rose from her chair in the children’s corner, and said cheerfully, “Come! time for little missionaries to be in bed!”

Everybody laughed at this, the big missionaries most of all, as the young people shook hands and disappeared with Rebecca.

XX

A CHANGE OF HEART

That niece of yours is the most remarkable girl I have seen in years,” said Mr.
Burch when the door closed.

“She seems to be turnin’ out smart enough lately, but she’s consid’able heedless,” answered Miranda, “an’ most too lively.”

“We must remember that it is deficient, not excessive vitality, that makes the greatest trouble in this world,” returned Mr. Burch.

“She’d make a wonderful missionary,” said Mrs. Burch; “with her voice, and her magnetism, and her gift of language.”

“If I was to say which of the two she was best adapted for, I’d say she’d make a better heathen,” remarked Miranda curtly.

“My sister don’t believe in flattering children,” hastily interpolated Jane, glancing toward Mrs. Burch, who seemed somewhat shocked, and was about to open her lips to ask if Rebecca was not a “professor.”

Mrs. Cobb had been looking for this question all the evening and dreading some allusion to her favorite as gifted in prayer. She had taken an instantaneous and illogical dislike to the Rev. Mr. Burch in the afternoon because he called upon Rebecca to “lead.” She had seen the pallor creep into the girl’s face, the hunted look in her eyes, and the trembling of the lashes on her cheeks, and realized the ordeal through which she was passing. Her prejudice against the minister had relaxed under his genial talk and presence, but feeling that Mrs. Burch was about to tread on dangerous ground, she hastily asked her if one had to change cars many times going from Riverboro to Syria. She felt that it was not a particularly appropriate question, but it served her turn.

Deacon Milliken, meantime, said to Miss Sawyer, “Mirandy, do you know who Rebecky reminds me of?”

“I can guess pretty well,” she replied.

“Then you’ve noticed it too! I thought at first, seein’ she favored her father so on the outside, that she was the same all through; but she ain’t, she’s like your father, Israel Sawyer.”

“I don’t see how you make that out,” said Miranda, thoroughly astonished.

“It struck me this afternoon when she got up to give your invitation in meetin’. It was kind o’ cur’ous, but she set in the same seat he used to when he was leader o’ the Sabbath-school. You know his old way of holdin’ his chin up and throwin’ his head back a leetle when he got up to say anything? Well, she done the very same thing; there was more’n one spoke of it.”

The callers left before nine, and at that hour (an impossibly dissipated one for the brick house) the family retired for the night. As Rebecca carried Mrs. Burch’s candle upstairs and found herself thus alone with her for a minute, she said shyly, “Will you please tell Mr. Burch that I’m not a member of the church? I didn’t know what to do when he asked me to pray this afternoon. I hadn’t the courage to say I had never done it out loud and didn’t know how. I couldn’t think; and I was so frightened I wanted to sink into the floor. It seemed bold and wicked for me to pray before all those old church members and make believe I was better than I really was; but then again, wouldn’t God think I was wicked not to be willing to pray when a minister asked me to?”

The candle light fell on Rebecca’s flushed, sensitive face. Mrs. Burch bent and kissed her good- night. “Don’t be troubled,” she said. “I’ll tell Mr. Burch, and I guess God will understand.”

Rebecca waked before six the next morning, so full of household cares that sleep was impossible. She went to the window and looked out; it was still dark, and a blustering, boisterous day.

“Aunt Jane told me she should get up at half past six and have breakfast at half past seven,” she thought; “but I daresay they are both sick with their colds, and aunt Miranda will be fidgety with so many in the house. I believe I’ll creep down and start things for a surprise.”

She put on a wadded wrapper and slippers and stole quietly down the tabooed front stairs, carefully closed the kitchen door behind her so that no noise should waken the rest of the household, busied herself for a half hour with the early morning routine she knew so well, and then went back to her room to dress before calling the children.

Contrary to expectation, Miss Jane, who the evening before felt better than Miranda, grew worse in the night, and was wholly unable to leave her bed in the morning. Miranda grumbled without ceasing during the progress of her hasty toilet, blaming everybody in the universe for the afflictions she had borne and was to bear during the day; she even castigated the Missionary Board that had sent the Burches to Syria, and gave it as her unbiased opinion that those who went to foreign lands for the purpose of saving heathen should stay there and save ’em, and not go gallivantin’ all over the earth with a passel o’ children, visitin’ folks that didn’t want ’em and never asked ’em.

Jane lay anxiously and restlessly in bed with a feverish headache, wondering how her sister could manage without her.

Miranda walked stiffly through the dining-room, tying a shawl over her head to keep the draughts away, intending to start the breakfast fire and then call Rebecca down, set her to work, and tell her, meanwhile, a few plain facts concerning the proper way of representing the family at a missionary meeting.

She opened the kitchen door and stared vaguely about her, wondering whether she had strayed into the wrong house by mistake.

The shades were up, and there was a roaring fire in the stove; the teakettle was singing and bubbling as it sent out a cloud of steam, and pushed over its capacious nose was a half sheet of note paper with “Compliments of Rebecca” scrawled on it. The coffee pot was scalding, the coffee was measured out in a bowl, and broken eggshells for the settling process were standing near. The cold potatoes and corned beef were in the wooden tray, and “Regards of Rebecca” stuck on the chopping knife. The brown loaf was out, the white loaf was out, the toast rack was out, the doughnuts were out, the milk was skimmed, the butter had been brought from the dairy.

Miranda removed the shawl from her head and sank into the kitchen rocker, ejaculating under her breath, “She is the beatin’est child! I declare she’s all Sawyer!”

The day and the evening passed off with credit and honor to everybody concerned, even to Jane, who had the discretion to recover instead of growing worse and acting as a damper to the general enjoyment. The Burches left with lively regrets, and the little missionaries, bathed in tears, swore eternal friendship with Rebecca, who pressed into their hands at parting a poem composed before breakfast.

TO MARY AND MARTHA BURCH

Born under Syrian skies,
‘Neath hotter suns than ours;
The children grew and bloomed,
Like little tropic flowers.

When they first saw the light,
‘T was in a heathen land.
Not Greenland’s icy mountains,
Nor India’s coral strand,

But some mysterious country
Where men are nearly black
And where of true religion,
There is a painful lack.

Then let us haste in helping
The Missionary Board,
Seek dark-skinned unbelievers,
And teach them of their Lord.
Rebecca Rowena Randall.

It can readily be seen that this visit of the returned missionaries to Riverboro was not without somewhat far-reaching results. Mr. and Mrs. Burch themselves looked back upon it as one of the rarest pleasures of their half year at home. The neighborhood extracted considerable eager conversation from it; argument, rebuttal, suspicion, certainty, retrospect, and prophecy. Deacon Milliken gave ten dollars towards the conversion of Syria to Congregationalism, and Mrs. Milliken had a spell of sickness over her husband’s rash generosity.

It would be pleasant to state that Miranda Sawyer was an entirely changed woman afterwards, but that is not the fact. The tree that has been getting a twist for twenty years cannot be straightened in the twinkling of an eye. It is certain, however, that although the difference to the outward eye was very small, it nevertheless existed, and she was less censorious in her treatment of Rebecca, less harsh in her judgments, more hopeful of final salvation for her. This had come about largely from her sudden vision that Rebecca, after all, inherited something from the Sawyer side of the house instead of belonging, mind, body, and soul, to the despised Randall stock. Everything that was interesting in Rebecca, and every evidence of power, capability, or talent afterwards displayed by her, Miranda ascribed to the brick house training, and this gave her a feeling of honest pride, the pride of a master workman who has built success out of the most unpromising material; but never, to the very end, even when the waning of her bodily strength relaxed her iron grip and weakened her power of repression, never once did she show that pride or make a single demonstration of affection.

Poor misplaced, belittled Lorenzo de Medici Ran- dall, thought ridiculous and good-for-naught by his associates, because he resembled them in nothing! If Riverboro could have been suddenly emptied into a larger community, with different and more flexible opinions, he was, perhaps, the only personage in the entire population who would have attracted the smallest attention. It was fortunate for his daughter that she had been dowered with a little practical ability from her mother’s family, but if Lorenzo had never done anything else in the world, he might have glorified himself that he had prevented Rebecca from being all Sawyer. Failure as he was, complete and entire, he had generously handed down to her all that was best in himself, and prudently retained all that was unworthy. Few fathers are capable of such delicate discrimination.

The brick house did not speedily become a sort of wayside inn, a place of innocent revelry and joyous welcome; but the missionary company was an entering wedge, and Miranda allowed one spare bed to be made up “in case anything should happen,” while the crystal glasses were kept on the second from the top, instead of the top shelf, in the china closet. Rebecca had had to stand on a chair to reach them; now she could do it by stretching; and this is symbolic of the way in which she unconsciously scaled the walls of Miss Miranda’s dogmatism and prejudice.

Miranda went so far as to say that she wouldn’t mind if the Burches came every once in a while, but she was afraid he’d spread abroad the fact of his visit, and missionaries’ families would be underfoot the whole continual time. As a case in point, she gracefully cited the fact that if a tramp got a good meal at anybody’s back door, ‘t was said that he’d leave some kind of a sign so that all other tramps would know where they were likely to receive the same treatment.

It is to be feared that there is some truth in this homely illustration, and Miss Miranda’s dread as to her future responsibilities had some foundation, though not of the precise sort she had in mind. The soul grows into lovely habits as easily as into ugly ones, and the moment a life begins to blossom into beautiful words and deeds, that moment a new standard of conduct is established, and your eager neighbors look to you for a continuous manifestation of the good cheer, the sympathy, the ready wit, the comradeship, or the inspiration, you once showed yourself capable of. Bear figs for a season or two, and the world outside the orchard is very unwilling you should bear thistles.

The effect of the Burches’ visit on Rebecca is not easily described. Nevertheless, as she looked back upon it from the vantage ground of after years, she felt that the moment when Mr. Burch asked her to “lead in prayer” marked an epoch in her life.

If you have ever observed how courteous and gracious and mannerly you feel when you don a beautiful new frock; if you have ever noticed the feeling of reverence stealing over you when you close your eyes, clasp your hands, and bow your head; if you have ever watched your sense of repulsion toward a fellow creature melt a little under the exercise of daily politeness, you may understand how the adoption of the outward and visible sign has some strange influence in developing the inward and spiritual state of which it is the expression.

It is only when one has grown old and dull that the soul is heavy and refuses to rise. The young soul is ever winged; a breath stirs it to an upward flight. Rebecca was asked to bear witness to a state of mind or feeling of whose existence she had only the vaguest consciousness. She obeyed, and as she uttered words they became true in the uttering; as she voiced aspirations they settled into realities.

As “dove that to its window flies,” her spirit soared towards a great light, dimly discovered at first, but brighter as she came closer to it. To become sensible of oneness with the Divine heart before any sense of separation has been felt, this is surely the most beautiful way for the child to find God.

XXI

THE SKY LINE WIDENS

The time so long and eagerly waited for had come, and Rebecca was a student at
Wareham. Persons who had enjoyed the social bewilderments and advantages of foreign courts, or had mingled freely in the intellectual circles of great universities, might not have looked upon Wareham as an extraordinary experience; but it was as much of an advance upon Riverboro as that village had been upon Sunnybrook Farm. Rebecca’s intention was to complete the four years’ course in three, as it was felt by all the parties concerned that when she had attained the ripe age of seventeen she must be ready to earn her own living and help in the education of the younger children. While she was wondering how this could be successfully accomplished, some of the other girls were cogitating as to how they could meander through the four years and come out at the end knowing no more than at the beginning. This would seem a difficult, well-nigh an impossible task, but it can be achieved, and has been, at other seats of learning than modest little Wareham.

Rebecca was to go to and fro on the cars daily from September to Christmas, and then board in Wareham during the three coldest months. Emma Jane’s parents had always thought that a year or two in the Edgewood high school (three miles from Riverboro) would serve every purpose for their daughter and send her into the world with as fine an intellectual polish as she could well sustain. Emma Jane had hitherto heartily concurred in this opinion, for if there was any one thing that she detested it was the learning of lessons. One book was as bad as another in her eyes, and she could have seen the libraries of the world sinking into ocean depths and have eaten her dinner cheerfully the while; but matters assumed a different complexion when she was sent to Edgewood and Rebecca to Wareham. She bore it for a week– seven endless days of absence from the beloved object, whom she could see only in the evenings when both were busy with their lessons. Sunday offered an opportunity to put the matter before her father, who proved obdurate. He didn’t believe in education and thought she had full enough already. He never intended to keep up “blacksmithing” for good when he leased his farm and
came into Riverboro, but proposed to go back to it presently, and by that time Emma Jane would have finished school and would be ready to help her mother with the dairy work.

Another week passed. Emma Jane pined visibly and audibly. Her color faded, and her appetite (at table) dwindled almost to nothing.

Her mother alluded plaintively to the fact that the Perkinses had a habit of going into declines; that she’d always feared that Emma Jane’s complexion was too beautiful to be healthy; that some men would be proud of having an ambitious daughter, and be glad to give her the best advantages; that she feared the daily journeys to Edgewood were going to be too much for her own health, and Mr. Perkins would have to hire a boy to drive Emma Jane; and finally that when a girl had such a passion for learning as Emma Jane, it seemed almost like wickedness to cross her will.

Mr. Perkins bore this for several days until his temper, digestion, and appetite were all sensibly affected; then he bowed his head to the inevitable, and Emma Jane flew, like a captive set free, to the loved one’s bower. Neither did her courage flag, although it was put to terrific tests when she entered the academic groves of Wareham. She passed in only two subjects, but went cheerfully into the preparatory department with her five “conditions,” intending to let the stream of education play gently over her mental surfaces and not get any wetter than she could help. It is not possible to blink the truth that Emma Jane was dull; but a dogged, unswerving loyalty, and the gift of devoted, unselfish loving, these, after all, are talents of a sort, and may possibly be of as much value in the world as a sense of numbers or a faculty for languages.

Wareham was a pretty village with a broad main street shaded by great maples and elms. It had an apothecary, a blacksmith, a plumber, several shops of one sort and another, two churches, and many boarding-houses; but all its interests gathered about its seminary and its academy. These seats of learning were neither better nor worse than others of their kind, but differed much in efficiency, according as the principal who chanced to be at the head was a man of power and inspiration or the reverse. There were boys and girls gathered from all parts of the county and state, and they were of every kind and degree as to birth, position in the world, wealth or poverty. There was an opportunity for a deal of foolish and imprudent behavior, but on the whole surprisingly little advantage was taken of it. Among the third and fourth year students there was a certain amount of going to and from the trains in couples; some carrying of heavy books up the hill by the sterner sex for their feminine schoolmates, and occasional bursts of silliness on the part of heedless and precocious girls, among whom was Huldah Meserve. She was friendly enough with Emma Jane and Rebecca, but grew less and less intimate as time went on. She was extremely pretty, with a profusion of auburn hair, and a few very tiny freckles, to which she constantly alluded, as no one could possibly detect them without noting her porcelain skin and her curling lashes. She had merry eyes, a somewhat too plump figure for her years, and was popularly supposed to have a fascinating way with her. Riverboro being poorly furnished with beaux, she intended to have as good a time during her four years at Wareham as circumstances would permit. Her idea of pleasure was an ever-changing circle of admirers to fetch and carry for her, the more publicly the better; incessant chaff and laughter and vivacious conversation, made eloquent and effective by arch looks and telling glances. She had a habit of confiding her conquests to less fortunate girls and bewailing the incessant havoc and damage she was doing; a damage she avowed herself as innocent of, in intention, as any new-born lamb. It does not take much of this sort of thing to wreck an ordinary friendship, so before long Rebecca and Emma Jane sat in one end of the railway train in going to and from Riverboro, and Huldah occupied the other with her court. Sometimes this was brilliant beyond words, including a certain youthful Monte Cristo, who on Fridays expended thirty cents on a round trip ticket and traveled from Wareham to Riverboro merely to be near Huldah; sometimes, too, the circle was reduced to the popcorn-and-peanut boy of the train, who seemed to serve every purpose in default of better game.

Rebecca was in the normally unconscious state that belonged to her years; boys were good comrades, but no more; she liked reciting in the same class with them, everything seemed to move better; but from vulgar and precocious flirtations she was protected by her ideals. There was little in the lads she had met thus far to awaken her fancy, for it habitually fed on better meat. Huldah’s school- girl romances, with their wealth of commonplace detail, were not the stuff her dreams were made of, when dreams did flutter across the sensitive plate of her mind.

Among the teachers at Wareham was one who influenced Rebecca profoundly, Miss Emily Maxwell, with whom she studied English literature and composition. Miss Maxwell, as the niece of one of Maine’s ex-governors and the daughter of one of Bowdoin’s professors, was the most remarkable personality in Wareham, and that her few years of teaching happened to be in Rebecca’s time was the happiest of all chances. There was no indecision or delay in the establishment of their relations; Rebecca’s heart flew like an arrow to its mark, and her mind, meeting its superior, settled at once into an abiding attitude of respectful homage.

It was rumored that Miss Maxwell “wrote,” which word, when uttered in a certain tone, was understood to mean not that a person had command of penmanship, Spencerian or otherwise, but that she had appeared in print.

“You’ll like her; she writes,” whispered Huldah to Rebecca the first morning at prayers, where the faculty sat in an imposing row on the front seats. “She writes; and I call her stuck up.”

Nobody seemed possessed of exact information with which to satisfy the hungry mind, but there was believed to be at least one person in existence who had seen, with his own eyes, an essay by Miss Maxwell in a magazine. This height of achievement made Rebecca somewhat shy of her, but she looked her admiration; something that most of the class could never do with the unsatisfactory organs of vision given them by Mother Nature. Miss Maxwell’s glance was always meeting a pair of eager dark eyes; when she said anything particularly good, she looked for approval to the corner of the second bench, where every shade of feeling she wished to evoke was reflected on a certain sensitive young face.

One day, when the first essay of the class was under discussion, she asked each new pupil to bring her some composition written during the year before, that she might judge the work, and know precisely with what material she had to deal. Rebecca lingered after the others, and approached the desk shyly.

“I haven’t any compositions here, Miss Maxwell, but I can find one when I go home on Friday. They are packed away in a box in the attic.”

“Carefully tied with pink and blue ribbons?” asked Miss Maxwell, with a whimsical smile.

“No,” answered Rebecca, shaking her head decidedly; “I wanted to use ribbons, because all the other girls did, and they looked so pretty, but I used to tie my essays with twine strings on purpose; and the one on solitude I fastened with an old shoelacing just to show it what I thought of it!”

“Solitude!” laughed Miss Maxwell, raising her eyebrows. “Did you choose your own subject?”

“No; Miss Dearborn thought we were not old enough to find good ones.”

“What were some of the others?”

“Fireside Reveries, Grant as a Soldier, Reflections on the Life of P. T. Barnum, Buried Cities; I can’t remember any more now. They were all bad, and I can’t bear to show them; I can write poetry easier and better, Miss Maxwell.”

“Poetry!” she exclaimed. “Did Miss Dearborn require you to do it?”

“Oh, no; I always did it even at the farm. Shall I bring all I have? It isn’t much.”

Rebecca took the blank-book in which she kept copies of her effusions and left it at Miss Maxwell’s door, hoping that she might be asked in and thus obtain a private interview; but a servant answered her ring, and she could only walk away, disappointed.

A few days afterward she saw the black-covered book on Miss Maxwell’s desk and knew that the dreaded moment of criticism had come, so she was not surprised to be asked to remain after class.

The room was quiet; the red leaves rustled in the breeze and flew in at the open window, bearing the first compliments of the season. Miss Maxwell came and sat by Rebecca’s side on the bench.

“Did you think these were good?” she asked, giving her the verses.

“Not so very,” confessed Rebecca; “but it’s hard to tell all by yourself. The Perkinses and the Cobbs always said they were wonderful, but when Mrs. Cobb told me she thought they were better than Mr. Longfellow’s I was worried, because I knew that couldn’t be true.”

This ingenuous remark confirmed Miss Maxwell’s opinion of Rebecca as a girl who could hear the truth and profit by it.

“Well, my child,” she said smilingly, “your friends were wrong and you were right; judged by the proper tests, they are pretty bad.”

“Then I must give up all hope of ever being a writer!” sighed Rebecca, who was tasting the bitterness of hemlock and wondering if she could keep the tears back until the interview was over.

“Don’t go so fast,” interrupted Miss Maxwell. “Though they don’t amount to anything as poetry, they show a good deal of promise in certain direc- tions. You almost never make a mistake in rhyme or metre, and this shows you have a natural sense of what is right; a `sense of form,’ poets would call it. When you grow older, have a little more experience,–in fact, when you have something to say, I think you may write very good verses. Poetry needs knowledge and vision, experience and imagination, Rebecca. You have not the first three yet, but I rather think you have a touch of the last.”

“Must I never try any more poetry, not even to amuse myself?”

“Certainly you may; it will only help you to write better prose. Now for the first composition. I am going to ask all the new students to write a letter giving some description of the town and a hint of the school life.”

“Shall I have to be myself?” asked Rebecca.

“What do you mean?”

“A letter from Rebecca Randall to her sister Hannah at Sunnybrook Farm, or to her aunt Jane at the brick house, Riverboro, is so dull and stupid, if it is a real letter; but if I could make believe I was a different girl altogether, and write to somebody who would be sure to understand everything I said, I could make it nicer.”

“Very well; I think that’s a delightful plan,” said Miss Maxwell; “and whom will you suppose yourself to be?”

“I like heiresses very much,” replied Rebecca contemplatively. “Of course I never saw one, but interesting things are always happening to heiresses, especially to the golden-haired kind. My heiress wouldn’t be vain and haughty like the wicked sisters in Cinderella; she would be noble and generous. She would give up a grand school in Boston because she wanted to come here where her father lived when he was a boy, long before he made his fortune. The father is dead now, and she has a guardian, the best and kindest man in the world; he is rather old of course, and sometimes very quiet and grave, but sometimes when he is happy, he is full of fun, and then Evelyn is not afraid of him. Yes, the girl shall be called Evelyn Abercrombie, and her guardian’s name shall be Mr. Adam Ladd.”

“Do you know Mr. Ladd?” asked Miss Maxwell in surprise.

“Yes, he’s my very best friend,” cried Rebecca delightedly. “Do you know him too?”

“Oh, yes; he is a trustee of these schools, you know, and often comes here. But if I let you `suppose’ any more, you will tell me your whole letter and then I shall lose a pleasant surprise.”

What Rebecca thought of Miss Maxwell we already know; how the teacher regarded the pupil may be gathered from the following letter written two or three months later.

Wareham, December 1st

My Dear Father,–As you well know, I have not always been an enthusiast on the subject of teaching. The task of cramming knowledge into these self-sufficient, inefficient youngsters of both sexes discourages me at times. The more stupid they are, the less they are aware of it. If my department were geography or mathematics, I believe I should feel that I was accomplishing something, for in those branches application and industry work wonders; but in English literature and composition one yearns for brains, for appreciation, for imagination! Month after month I toil on, opening oyster after oyster, but seldom finding a pearl. Fancy my joy this term when, without any violent effort at shell-splitting, I came upon a rare pearl; a black one, but of satin skin and beautiful lustre! Her name is Rebecca, and she looks not unlike Rebekah at the Well in our family Bible; her hair and eyes being so dark as to suggest a strain of Italian or Spanish blood. She is nobody in particular. Man has done nothing for her; she has no family to speak of, no money, no education worthy the name, has had no advantages of any sort; but Dame Nature flung herself into the breach and said:–

“This child I to myself will take;
She shall be mine and I will make
A Lady of my own.”

Blessed Wordsworth! How he makes us understand! And the pearl never heard of him until now! Think of reading Lucy to a class, and when you finish, seeing a fourteen-year-old pair of lips quivering with delight, and a pair of eyes brimming with comprehending tears!

You poor darling! You, too, know the
discouragement of sowing lovely seed in rocky earth, in sand, in water, and (it almost seems sometimes) in mud; knowing that if anything comes up at all it will be some poor starveling plant. Fancy the joy of finding a real mind; of dropping seed in a soil so warm, so fertile, that one knows there are sure to be foliage, blossoms, and fruit all in good time! I wish I were not so impatient and so greedy of results! I am not fit to be a teacher; no one is who is so scornful of stupidity as I am. . . . The pearl writes quaint countrified little verses, doggerel they are; but somehow or other she always contrives to put in one line, one thought, one image, that shows you she is, quite unconsciously to herself, in possession of the secret. . . . Good-by; I’ll bring Rebecca home with me some Friday, and let you and mother see her for yourselves.

Your affectionate daughter,

Emily.

XXII

CLOVER BLOSSOMS AND SUNFLOWERS

How d’ ye do, girls?” said Huldah Meserve, peeping in at the door. “Can you
stop studying a minute and show me your room? Say, I’ve just been down to the store and bought me these gloves, for I was bound I wouldn’t wear mittens this winter; they’re simply too countrified. It’s your first year here, and you’re younger than I am, so I s’pose you don’t mind, but I simply suffer if I don’t keep up some kind of style. Say, your room is simply too cute for words! I don’t believe any of the others can begin to compare with it! I don’t know what gives it that simply gorgeous look, whether it’s the full curtains, or that elegant screen, or Rebecca’s lamp; but you certainly do have a faculty for fixing up. I like a pretty room too, but I never have a minute to attend to mine; I’m always so busy on my clothes that half the time I don’t get my bed made up till noon; and after all, having no callers but the girls, it don’t make much difference. When I graduate, I’m going to fix up our parlor at home so it’ll be simply regal. I’ve learned decalcomania, and after I take up lustre painting I shall have it simply stiff with drapes and tidies and placques and sofa pillows, and make mo- ther let me have a fire, and receive my friends there evenings. May I dry my feet at your register? I can’t bear to wear rubbers unless the mud or the slush is simply knee-deep, they make your feet look so awfully big. I had such a fuss getting this pair of French-heeled boots that I don’t intend to spoil the looks of them with rubbers any oftener than I can help. I believe boys notice feet quicker than anything. Elmer Webster stepped on one of mine yesterday when I accidentally had it out in the aisle, and when he apologized after class, he said he wasn’t so much to blame, for the foot was so little he really couldn’t see it! Isn’t he perfectly great? Of course that’s only his way of talking, for after all I only wear a number two, but these French heels and pointed toes do certainly make your foot look smaller, and it’s always said a high instep helps, too. I used to think mine was almost a deformity, but they say it’s a great beauty. Just put your feet beside mine, girls, and look at the difference; not that I care much, but just for fun.”

“My feet are very comfortable where they are,” responded Rebecca dryly. “I can’t stop to measure insteps on algebra days; I’ve noticed your habit of keeping a foot in the aisle ever since you had those new shoes, so I don’t wonder it was stepped on.”

“Perhaps I am a little mite conscious of them, because they’re not so very comfortable at first, till you get them broken in. Say, haven’t you got a lot of new things?”

“Our Christmas presents, you mean,” said Emma Jane. “The pillow-cases are from Mrs. Cobb, the rug from cousin Mary in North Riverboro, the scrap-basket from Living and Dick. We gave each other the bureau and cushion covers, and the screen is mine from Mr. Ladd.”

“Well, you were lucky when you met him! Gracious! I wish I could meet somebody like that. The way he keeps it up, too! It just hides your bed, doesn’t it, and I always say that a bed takes the style off any room–specially when it’s not made up; though you have an alcove, and it’s the only one in the whole building. I don’t see how you managed to get this good room when you’re such new scholars,” she finished discontentedly.

“We shouldn’t have, except that Ruth Berry had to go away suddenly on account of her father’s death. This room was empty, and Miss Maxwell asked if we might have it,” returned Emma Jane.

“The great and only Max is more stiff and standoffish than ever this year,” said Huldah. “I’ve simply given up trying to please her, for there’s no justice in her; she is good to her favorites, but she doesn’t pay the least attention to anybody else, except to make sarcastic speeches about things that are none of her business. I wanted to tell her yesterday it was her place to teach me Latin, not manners.”

“I wish you wouldn’t talk against Miss Maxwell to me,” said Rebecca hotly. “You know how I feel.”

“I know; but I can’t understand how you can abide her.”

“I not only abide, I love her!” exclaimed Rebecca. “I wouldn’t let the sun shine too hot on her, or the wind blow too cold. I’d like to put a marble platform in her class-room and have her sit in a velvet chair behind a golden table!”

“Well, don’t have a fit!–because she can sit where she likes for all of me; I’ve got something better to think of,” and Huldah tossed her head.

“Isn’t this your study hour?” asked Emma Jane, to stop possible discussion.

“Yes, but I lost my Latin grammar yesterday; I left it in the hall half an hour while I was having a regular scene with Herbert Dunn. I haven’t spoken to him for a week and gave him back his class pin. He was simply furious. Then when I came back to the hall, the book was gone. I had to go down town for my gloves and to the principal’s office to see if the grammar had been handed in, and that’s the reason I’m so fine.”

Huldah was wearing a woolen dress that had once been gray, but had been dyed a brilliant blue. She had added three rows of white braid and large white pearl buttons to her gray jacket, in order to make it a little more “dressy.” Her gray felt hat had a white feather on it, and a white tissue veil with large black dots made her delicate skin look brilliant. Rebecca thought how lovely the knot of red hair looked under the hat behind, and how the color of the front had been dulled by incessant frizzing with curling irons. Her open jacket disclosed a galaxy of souvenirs pinned to the background of bright blue,–a small American flag, a button of the Wareham Rowing Club, and one or two society pins. These decorations proved her popularity in very much the same way as do the cotillion favors hanging on the bedroom walls of the fashionable belle. She had been pinning and unpinning, arranging and disarranging her veil ever since she entered the room, in the hope that the girls would ask her whose ring she was wearing this week; but although both had noticed the new ornament instantly, wild horses could not have drawn the question from them; her desire to be asked was too obvious. With her gay plumage, her “nods and becks and wreathed smiles,” and her cheerful cackle, Huldah closely resembled the parrot in Wordsworth’s poem:–

“Arch, volatile, a sportive bird,
By social glee inspired;
Ambitious to be seen or heard,
And pleased to be admired!”

“Mr. Morrison thinks the grammar will be returned, and lent me another,” Huldah continued.

“He was rather snippy about my leaving a book in the hall. There was a perfectly elegant gentleman in the office, a stranger to me. I wish he was a new teacher, but there’s no such luck. He was too young to be the father of any of the girls, and too old to be a brother, but he was handsome as a picture and had on an awful stylish suit of clothes. He looked at me about every minute I was in the room. It made me so embarrassed I couldn’t hardly answer Mr. Morrison’s questions straight.”

“You’ll have to wear a mask pretty soon, if you’re going to have any comfort, Huldah,” said Rebecca. “Did he offer to lend you his class pin, or has it been so long since he graduated that he’s left off wearing it? And tell us now whether the principal asked for a lock of your hair to put in his watch?”

This was all said merrily and laughingly, but there were times when Huldah could scarcely make up her mind whether Rebecca was trying to be witty, or whether she was jealous; but she generally decided it was merely the latter feeling, rather natural in a girl who had little attention.

“He wore no jewelry but a cameo scarf pin and a perfectly gorgeous ring,–a queer kind of one that wound round and round his finger. Oh dear, I must run! Where has the hour gone? There’s the study bell!”

Rebecca had pricked up her ears at Huldah’s speech. She remembered a certain strange ring, and it belonged to the only person in the world (save Miss Maxwell) who appealed to her imagination,– Mr. Aladdin. Her feeling for him, and that of Emma Jane, was a mixture of romantic and reverent admiration for the man himself and the liveliest gratitude for his beautiful gifts. Since they first met him not a Christmas had gone by without some remembrance for them both; remembrances chosen with
the rarest taste and forethought. Emma Jane had seen him only twice, but he had called several times at the brick house, and Rebecca had learned to know him better. It was she, too, who always wrote the notes of acknowledgment and thanks, taking infinite pains to make Emma Jane’s quite different from her own. Sometimes he had written from Boston and asked her the news of Riverboro, and she had sent him pages of quaint and childlike gossip, interspersed, on two occasions, with poetry, which he read and reread with infinite relish. If Huldah’s stranger should be Mr. Aladdin, would he come to see her, and could she and Emma Jane show him their beautiful room with so many of his gifts in evidence?

When the girls had established themselves in Wareham as real boarding pupils, it seemed to them existence was as full of joy as it well could hold. This first winter was, in fact, the most tranquilly happy of Rebecca’s school life,–a winter long to be looked back upon. She and Emma Jane were room-mates, and had put their modest possessions together to make their surroundings pretty and homelike. The room had, to begin with, a cheerful red ingrain carpet and a set of maple furniture. As to the rest, Rebecca had furnished the ideas and Emma Jane the materials and labor, a method of dividing responsibilities that seemed to suit the circumstances admirably. Mrs. Perkins’s father had been a storekeeper, and on his death had left the goods of which he was possessed to his married daughter. The molasses, vinegar, and kerosene had lasted the family for five years, and the Perkins attic was still a treasure-house of ginghams, cottons, and “Yankee notions.” So at Rebecca’s instigation Mrs. Perkins had made full curtains and lambrequins of unbleached muslin, which she had trimmed and looped back with bands of Turkey red cotton. There were two table covers to match, and each of the girls had her study corner. Rebecca, after much coaxing, had been allowed to bring over her precious lamp, which would have given a luxurious air to any apartment, and when Mr. Aladdin’s last Christmas presents were added,–the Japanese screen for Emma Jane and the little shelf of English Poets for Rebecca,–they declared that it was all quite as much fun as being married and going to housekeeping.

The day of Huldah’s call was Friday, and on Fridays from three to half past four Rebecca was free to take a pleasure to which she looked forward the entire week. She always ran down the snowy path through the pine woods at the back of the seminary, and coming out on a quiet village street, went directly to the large white house where Miss Maxwell lived. The maid-of-all-work answered her knock; she took off her hat and cape and hung them in the hall, put her rubber shoes and umbrella carefully in the corner, and then opened the door of paradise. Miss Maxwell’s sitting-room was lined on two sides with bookshelves, and Rebecca was allowed to sit before the fire and browse among the books to her heart’s delight for an hour or more. Then Miss Maxwell would come back from her class, and there would be a precious half hour of chat before Rebecca had to meet Emma Jane at the station and take the train for Riverboro, where her Saturdays and Sundays were
spent, and where she was washed, ironed, mended, and examined, approved and reproved, warned and advised in quite sufficient quantity to last her the succeeding week.

On this Friday she buried her face in the blooming geraniums on Miss Maxwell’s plant-stand, selected Romola from one of the bookcases, and sank into a seat by the window with a sigh of infinite content, She glanced at the clock now and then, remembering the day on which she had been so immersed in David Copperfield that the Riverboro train had no place in her mind. The distracted Emma Jane had refused to leave without her, and had run from the station to look for her at Miss Maxwell’s. There was but one later train, and that went only to a place three miles the other side of Riverboro, so that the two girls appeared at their respective homes long after dark, having had a weary walk in the snow.

When she had read for half an hour she glanced out of the window and saw two figures issuing from the path through the woods. The knot of bright hair and the coquettish hat could belong to but one person; and her companion, as the couple approached, proved to be none other than Mr. Aladdin. Huldah was lifting her skirts daintily and picking safe stepping-places for the high-heeled shoes, her cheeks glowing, her eyes sparkling under the black and white veil.

Rebecca slipped from her post by the window to the rug before the bright fire and leaned her head on the seat of the great easy-chair. She was frightened at the storm in her heart; at the suddenness with which it had come on, as well as at the strangeness of an entirely new sensation. She felt all at once as if she could not bear to give up her share of Mr. Aladdin’s friendship to Huldah: Huldah so bright, saucy, and pretty; so gay and ready, and such good company! She had always joyfully admitted Emma Jane into the precious partnership, but perhaps unconsciously to herself she had realized that Emma Jane had never held anything but a secondary place in Mr. Aladdin’s regard; yet who was she herself, after all, that she could hope to be first?

Suddenly the door opened softly and somebody looked in, somebody who said: “Miss Maxwell told me I should find Miss Rebecca Randall here.”

Rebecca started at the sound and sprang to her feet, saying joyfully, “Mr. Aladdin! Oh! I knew you were in Wareham, and I was afraid you wouldn’t have time to come and see us.”

“Who is `us’? The aunts are not here, are they? Oh, you mean the rich blacksmith’s daughter, whose name I can never remember. Is she
here?”

“Yes, and my room-mate,” answered Rebecca, who thought her own knell of doom had sounded, if he had forgotten Emma Jane’s name.

The light in the room grew softer, the fire crackled cheerily, and they talked of many things, until the old sweet sense of friendliness and familiarity crept back into Rebecca’s heart. Adam had not seen her for several months, and there was much to be learned about school matters as viewed from her own standpoint; he had already inquired concerning her progress from Mr. Morrison.

“Well, little Miss Rebecca,” he said, rousing himself at length, “I must be thinking of my drive to Portland. There is a meeting of railway directors there to-morrow, and I always take this opportunity of visiting the school and giving my valuable advice concerning its affairs, educational and financial.”

“It seems funny for you to be a school trustee,” said Rebecca contemplatively. “I can’t seem to make it fit.”

“You are a remarkably wise young person and I quite agree with you,” he answered; “the fact is,” he added soberly, “I accepted the trusteeship in memory of my poor little mother, whose last happy years were spent here.”

“That was a long time ago!”

“Let me see, I am thirty-two; only thirty-two, despite an occasional gray hair. My mother was married a month after she graduated, and she lived only until I was ten; yes, it is a long way back to my mother’s time here, though the school was fifteen or twenty years old then, I believe. Would you like to see my mother, Miss Rebecca?”

The girl took the leather case gently and opened it to find an innocent, pink-and-white daisy of a face, so confiding, so sensitive, that it went straight to the heart. It made Rebecca feel old, experienced, and maternal. She longed on the instant to comfort and strengthen such a tender young thing.

“Oh, what a sweet, sweet, flowery face!” she whispered softly.

“The flower had to bear all sorts of storms,” said Adam gravely. “The bitter weather of the world bent its slender stalk, bowed its head, and dragged it to the earth. I was only a child and could do nothing to protect and nourish it, and there was no one else to stand between it and trouble. Now I have success and money and power, all that would have kept her alive and happy, and it is too late. She died for lack of love and care, nursing and cherishing, and I can never forget it. All that has come to me seems now and then so useless, since I cannot share it with her!”

This was a new Mr. Aladdin, and Rebecca’s heart gave a throb of sympathy and comprehension. This explained the tired look in his eyes, the look that peeped out now and then, under all his gay speech and laughter.

“I’m so glad I know,” she said, “and so glad I could see her just as she was when she tied that white muslin hat under her chin and saw her yellow curls and her sky-blue eyes in the glass. Mustn’t she have been happy! I wish she could have been kept so, and had lived to see you grow up strong and good. My mother is always sad and busy, but once when she looked at John I heard her say, `He makes up for everything.’ That’s what your mother would have thought about you if she had lived, and perhaps she does as it is.”

“You are a comforting little person, Rebecca,” said Adam, rising from his chair.

As Rebecca rose, the tears still trembling on her lashes, he looked at her suddenly as with new vision.

“Good-by!” he said, taking her slim brown hands in his, adding, as if he saw her for the first time, “Why, little Rose-Red-Snow-White is making way for a new girl! Burning the midnight oil and doing four years’ work in three is supposed to dull the eye and blanch the cheek, yet Rebecca’s eyes are bright and she has a rosy color! Her long braids are looped one on the other so that they make a black letter U behind, and they are tied with grand bows at the top! She is so tall that she reaches almost to my shoulder. This will never do in the world! How will Mr. Aladdin get on without his comforting little friend! He doesn’t like grown-up young ladies in long trains and wonderful fine clothes; they frighten and bore him!”

“Oh, Mr. Aladdin!” cried Rebecca eagerly, taking his jest quite seriously; “I am not fifteen yet, and it will be three years before I’m a young lady; please don’t give me up until you have to!”

“I won’t; I promise you that,” said Adam. “Rebecca,” he continued, after a moment’s pause, “who is that young girl with a lot of pretty red hair and very citified manners? She escorted me down the hill; do you know whom I mean?”

“It must be Huldah Meserve; she is from Riverboro.”

Adam put a finger under Rebecca’s chin and looked into her eyes; eyes as soft, as clear, as unconscious, and childlike as they had been when she was ten. He remembered the other pair of challenging blue ones that had darted coquettish glances through half-dropped lids, shot arrowy beams from under archly lifted brows, and said gravely, “Don’t form yourself on her, Rebecca; clover blossoms that grow in the fields beside Sunnybrook mustn’t be tied in the same bouquet with gaudy sunflowers; they are too sweet and fragrant and wholesome.”

XXIII

THE HILL DIFFICULTY

The first happy year at Wareham, with its widened sky-line, its larger vision, its greater opportunity, was over and gone.
Rebecca had studied during the summer vacation, and had passed, on her return in the autumn, certain examinations which would enable her, if she carried out the same programme the next season, to complete the course in three instead of four years. She came off with no flying colors,–that would have been impossible in consideration of her inadequate training; but she did wonderfully well in some of the required subjects, and so brilliantly in others that the average was respectable. She would never have been a remarkable scholar under any circumstances, perhaps, and she was easily out- stripped in mathematics and the natural sciences by a dozen girls, but in some inexplicable way she became, as the months went on, the foremost figure in the school. When she had entirely forgotten the facts which would enable her to answer a question fully and conclusively, she commonly had some original theory to expound; it was not always correct, but it was generally unique and sometimes amusing. She was only fair in Latin or French grammar, but when it came to translation, her freedom, her choice of words, and her sympathetic understanding of the spirit of the text made her the delight of her teachers and the despair of her rivals.

“She can be perfectly ignorant of a subject,’ said Miss Maxwell to Adam Ladd, “but entirely intelligent the moment she has a clue. Most of the other girls are full of information and as stupid as sheep.”

Rebecca’s gifts had not been discovered save by the few, during the first year, when she was adjusting herself quietly to the situation. She was distinctly one of the poorer girls; she had no fine dresses to attract attention, no visitors, no friends in the town. She had more study hours, and less time, therefore, for the companionship of other girls, gladly as she would have welcomed the gayety of that side of school life. Still, water will find its own level in some way, and by the spring of the second year she had naturally settled into the same sort of leadership which had been hers in the smaller community of Riverboro. She was unanimously elected assistant editor of the Wareham School Pilot, being the first girl to assume that enviable, though somewhat arduous and thankless position, and when her maiden number went to the Cobbs, uncle Jerry and aunt Sarah could hardly eat or sleep for pride.

“She’ll always get votes,” said Huldah Meserve, when discussing the election, “for whether she knows anything or not, she looks as if she did, and whether she’s capable of filling an office or not, she looks as if she was. I only wish I was tall and dark and had the gift of making people believe I was great things, like Rebecca Randall. There’s one thing: though the boys call her handsome, you notice they don’t trouble her with much attention.”

It was a fact that Rebecca’s attitude towards the opposite sex was still somewhat indifferent and oblivious, even for fifteen and a half! No one could look at her and doubt that she had potentialities of attraction latent within her somewhere, but that side of her nature was happily biding its time. A human being is capable only of a certain amount of activity at a given moment, and it will inevitably satisfy first its most pressing needs, its most ardent desires, its chief ambitions. Rebecca was full of small anxieties and fears, for matters were not going well at the brick house and were anything but hopeful at the home farm. She was overbusy and overtaxed, and her thoughts were naturally drawn towards the difficult problems of daily living.

It had seemed to her during the autumn and winter of that year as if her aunt Miranda had never been, save at the very first, so censorious and so fault-finding. One Saturday Rebecca ran upstairs and, bursting into a flood of tears, exclaimed, “Aunt Jane, it seems as if I never could stand her continual scoldings. Nothing I can do suits aunt Miranda; she’s just said it will take me my whole life to get the Randall out of me, and I’m not convinced that I want it all out, so there we are!”

Aunt Jane, never demonstrative, cried with Rebecca as she attempted to soothe her.

“You must be patient,” she said, wiping first her own eyes and then Rebecca’s. “I haven’t told you, for it isn’t fair you should be troubled when you’re studying so hard, but your aunt Miranda isn’t well. One Monday morning about a month ago, she had a kind of faint spell; it wasn’t bad, but the doctor is afraid it was a shock, and if so, it’s the beginning of the end. Seems to me she’s failing right along, and that’s what makes her so fretful and easy vexed. She has other troubles too, that you don’t know anything about, and if you’re not kind to your aunt Miranda now, child, you’ll be dreadful sorry some time.”

All the temper faded from Rebecca’s face, and she stopped crying to say penitently, “Oh! the poor dear thing! I won’t mind a bit what she says now. She’s just asked me for some milk toast and I was dreading to take it to her, but this will make everything different. Don’t worry yet, aunt Jane, for perhaps it won’t be as bad as you think.”

So when she carried the toast to her aunt a little later, it was in the best gilt-edged china bowl, with a fringed napkin on the tray and a sprig of geranium lying across the salt cellar.

“Now, aunt Miranda,” she said cheerily, “I expect you to smack your lips and say this is good; it’s not Randall, but Sawyer milk toast.”

“You’ve tried all kinds on me, one time an’ another,” Miranda answered. “This tastes real kind o’ good; but I wish you hadn’t wasted that nice geranium.”

“You can’t tell what’s wasted,” said Rebecca philosophically; “perhaps that geranium has been hoping this long time it could brighten somebody’s supper, so don’t disappoint it by making believe you don’t like it. I’ve seen geraniums cry,–in the very early morning!”

The mysterious trouble to which Jane had alluded was a very real one, but it was held in profound secrecy. Twenty-five hundred dollars of the small Sawyer property had been invested in the business of a friend of their father’s, and had returned them a regular annual income of a hundred dollars. The family friend had been dead for some five years, but his son had succeeded to his interests and all went on as formerly. Suddenly there came a letter saying that the firm had gone into bankruptcy, that the business had been completely wrecked, and that the Sawyer money had been swept away with everything else.

The loss of one hundred dollars a year is a very trifling matter, but it made all the difference between comfort and self-denial to the two old spinsters Their manner of life had been so rigid and careful that it was difficult to economize any further, and the blow had fallen just when it was most inconvenient, for Rebecca’s school and boarding expenses, small as they were, had to be paid promptly and in cash.

“Can we possibly go on doing it? Shan’t we have to give up and tell her why?” asked Jane tearfully of the elder sister.

“We have put our hand to the plough, and we can’t turn back,” answered Miranda in her grimmest tone; “we’ve taken her away from her mother and offered her an education, and we’ve got to keep our word. She’s Aurelia’s only hope for years to come, to my way o’ thinkin’. Hannah’s beau takes all her time ‘n’ thought, and when she gits a husband her mother’ll be out o’ sight and out o’ mind. John, instead of farmin’, thinks he must be a doctor,– as if folks wasn’t gettin’ unhealthy enough these days, without turnin’ out more young doctors to help ’em into their graves. No, Jane; we’ll skimp ‘n’ do without, ‘n’ plan to git along on our interest money somehow, but we won’t break into our principal, whatever happens.”

“Breaking into the principal” was, in the minds of most thrifty New England women, a sin only second to arson, theft, or murder; and, though the rule was occasionally carried too far for common sense,–as in this case, where two elderly women of sixty might reasonably have drawn something from their little hoard in time of special need,–it doubtless wrought more of good than evil in the community.

Rebecca, who knew nothing of their business affairs, merely saw her aunts grow more and more saving, pinching here and there, cutting off this and that relentlessly. Less meat and fish were bought; the woman who had lately been coming two days a week for washing, ironing, and scrubbing was dismissed; the old bonnets of the season before were brushed up and retrimmed; there were no drives to Moderation or trips to Portland. Economy was carried to its very extreme; but though Miranda was well-nigh as gloomy and uncompromising in her manner and conversation as a woman could well be, she at least never twitted her niece of being a burden; so Rebecca’s share of the Sawyers’ misfortunes consisted only in wearing her old dresses, hats, and jackets, without any apparent hope of a change.

There was, however, no concealing the state of things at Sunnybrook, where chapters of accidents had unfolded themselves in a sort of serial story that had run through the year. The potato crop had failed; there were no apples to speak of; the hay had been poor; Aurelia had turns of dizziness in her head; Mark had broken his ankle. As this was his fourth offense, Miranda inquired how many bones there were in the human body, “so ‘t they’d know when Mark got through breakin’ ’em.” The time for paying the interest on the mortgage, that incubus that had crushed all the joy out of the Randall household, had come and gone, and there was no possibility, for the first time in fourteen years, of paying the required forty-eight dollars. The only bright spot in the horizon was Hannah’s engagement to Will Melville,–a young farmer whose land joined Sunnybrook, who had a good house, was alone in the world, and his own master. Hannah was so satisfied with her own unexpectedly radiant prospects that she hardly realized her mother’s anxieties; for there are natures which flourish, in adversity, and deteriorate when exposed to sudden prosperity. She had made a visit of a week at the brick house; and Miranda’s impression, conveyed in privacy to Jane, was that Hannah was close as the bark of a tree, and consid’able selfish too; that when she’d clim’ as fur as she could in the world, she’d kick the ladder out from under her, everlastin’ quick; that, on being sounded as to her ability to be of use to the younger children in the future, she said she guessed she’d done her share a’ready, and she wan’t goin’ to burden Will with her poor relations. “She’s Susan Randall through and through!” ejaculated Miranda. “I was glad to see her face turned towards Temperance. If that mortgage is ever cleared from the farm, ‘t won’t be Hannah that’ll do it; it’ll be Rebecca or me!”

XXIV

ALADDIN RUBS HIS LAMP

Your esteemed contribution entitled Wareham Wildflowers has been accepted for
The Pilot, Miss Perkins,” said Rebecca, entering the room where Emma Jane was darning the firm’s stockings. “I stayed to tea with Miss Maxwell, but came home early to tell you.”

“You are joking, Becky!” faltered Emma Jane, looking up from her work.

“Not a bit; the senior editor read it and thought it highly instructive; it appears in the next issue.”

“Not in the same number with your poem about the golden gates that close behind us when we leave school?”–and Emma Jane held her breath as she awaited the reply.

“Even so, Miss Perkins.”

“Rebecca,” said Emma Jane, with the nearest approach to tragedy that her nature would permit, “I don’t know as I shall be able to bear it, and if anything happens to me, I ask you solemnly to bury that number of The Pilot with me.”

Rebecca did not seem to think this the expression of an exaggerated state of feeling, inasmuch as she replied, “I know; that’s just the way it seemed to me at first, and even now, whenever I’m alone and take out the Pilot back numbers to read over my contributions, I almost burst with pleasure; and it’s not that they are good either, for they look worse to me every time I read them.”

“If you would only live with me in some little house when we get older,” mused Emma Jane, as with her darning needle poised in air she regarded the opposite wall dreamily, “I would do the housework and cooking, and copy all your poems and stories, and take them to the post-office, and you needn’t do anything but write. It would be perfectly elergant!”

“I’d like nothing better, if I hadn’t promised to keep house for John,” replied Rebecca.

“He won’t have a house for a good many years, will he?”

“No,” sighed Rebecca ruefully, flinging herself down by the table and resting her head on her hand. “Not unless we can contrive to pay off that detestable mortgage. The day grows farther off instead of nearer now that we haven’t paid the interest this year.”

She pulled a piece of paper towards her, and scribbling idly on it read aloud in a moment or two:–

“Will you pay a little faster?” said the mortgage to the farm; “I confess I’m very tired of this place.” “The weariness is mutual,” Rebecca Randall cried; “I would I’d never gazed upon your face!”

“A note has a `face,'” observed Emma Jane, who was gifted in arithmetic. “I didn’t know that a mortgage had.”

“Our mortgage has,” said Rebecca revengefully. “I should know him if I met him in the dark. Wait and I’ll draw him for you. It will be good for you to know how he looks, and then when you have a husband and seven children, you won’t allow him to come anywhere within a mile of your farm.”

The sketch when completed was of a sort to be shunned by a timid person on the verge of slumber. There was a tiny house on the right, and a weeping family gathered in front of it. The mortgage was depicted as a cross between a fiend and an ogre, and held an axe uplifted in his red right hand. A figure with streaming black locks was staying the blow, and this, Rebecca explained complacently, was intended as a likeness of herself, though she was rather vague as to the method she should use in attaining her end.

“He’s terrible,” said Emma Jane, “but awfully wizened and small.”

“It’s only a twelve hundred dollar mortgage,” said Rebecca, “and that’s called a small one. John saw a man once that was mortgaged for twelve thousand.”

“Shall you be a writer or an editor?” asked Emma Jane presently, as if one had only to choose and the thing were done.

“I shall have to do what turns up first, I suppose.”

“Why not go out as a missionary to Syria, as the Burches are always coaxing you to? The Board would pay your expenses.”

“I can’t make up my mind to be a missionary,”