maiden aunts in Riverboro. Aurelia Randall may have been doubtful
as to the effect upon her spinster sisters of the irrepressible
child, but she was
hopeful from the first that the larger
opportunities of Riverboro would be the "making" of Rebecca
herself.
The next turning-point was her fourteenth year, when she left the
district school for the Wareham Female Seminary, then in the
hey-day of its local fame. Graduation (next to marriage, perhaps,
the most thrilling
episode in the life of a little country girl)
happened at seventeen, and not long afterward her Aunt Miranda's
death, sudden and
unexpected, changed not only all the outward
activities and conditions of her life, but played its own part in
her development.
The brick house looked very homelike and pleasant on a June
morning nowadays with children's faces smiling at the windows and
youthful footsteps sounding through the halls; and the brass
knocker on the red-painted front door might have remembered
Rebecca's prayer of a year before, when she leaned against its
sun-warmed
brightness and whispered: "God bless Aunt Miranda; God
bless the brick house that was; God bless the brick house that's
going to be!"
All the doors and blinds were open to the sun and air as they had
never been in Miss Miranda Sawyer's time. The hollyhock bed that
had been her chief pride was never neglected, and Rebecca liked
to hear the neighbors say that there was no such row of beautiful
plants and no such
variety of beautiful colors in Riverboro as
those that climbed up and peeped in at the kitchen windows where
old Miss Miranda used to sit.
Now that the place was her very own Rebecca felt a
passion of
pride in its
smoothly mown fields, its carefully thinned-out
woods, its
blooming garden spots, and its well-weeded vegetable
patch; felt, too
whenever she looked at any part of it, a
passionof
gratitude to the stern old aunt who had looked upon her as the
future head of the family, as well as a
passion of desire to be
worthy of that trust.
It had been a very difficult year for a girl fresh from school:
the death of her aunt, the nursing of Miss Jane, prematurely
enfeebled by the shock, the
removal of her own
invalid mother and
the rest of the little family from Sunnybrook Farm. But all had
gone
smoothly; and when once the Randall fortunes had taken an
upward turn nothing seemed able to stop their intrepid ascent.
Aurelia Randall renewed her youth in the
companionship of her
sister Jane and the comforts by which her children were
surrounded; the
mortgage was no longer a daily
terror, for
Sunnybrook had been sold to the new railroad; Hannah, now Mrs.
Will Melville, was happily
situated; John, at last, was studying
medicine; Mark, the
boisterous and
unlucky brother, had broken no
bones for several months; while Jenny and Fanny were doing well
at the district school under Miss Libby Moses, Miss Dearborn's
successor.
"I don't feel very safe," thought Rebecca, remembering all these
unaccustomed mercies as she sat on the front doorsteps, with her
tatting shuttle flying in and out of the fine cotton like a
hummingbird. "It's just like one of those too beautiful July days
that winds up with a
thundershower before night! Still, when you
remember that the Randalls never had anything but
thunder and
lightning, rain, snow, and hail, in their family history for
twelve or fifteen years, perhaps it is only natural that they
should enjoy a little spell of settled weather. If it really
turns out to BE settled, now that Aunt Jane and mother are strong
again I must be looking up one of what Mr. Aladdin calls my
cast-off careers."--There comes Emma Jane Perkins through her
front gate; she will be here in a minute, and I'll tease her!"
and Rebecca ran in the door and seated herself at the old piano
that stood between the open windows in the parlor.
Peeping from behind the
muslin curtains, she waited until Emma
Jane was on the very
threshold and then began singing her version
of an old
ballad, made that morning while she was dressing. The
ballad was a great favorite of hers, and she counted on doing
telling
execution with it in the present
instance by the simple
subterfuge of removing the original hero and
heroine, Alonzo and
Imogene, and substituting Abijah the Brave and the Fair Emmajane,
leaving the circumstances in the first three verses unaltered,
because in truth they seemed to require no alteration.
Her high, clear voice, quivering with
merriment, floated through
the windows into the still summer air:
"'A
warrior so bold and a
maiden so bright
Conversed as they sat on the green.
They gazed at each other in tender delight.
Abijah the Brave was the name of the knight,
And the maid was the Fair Emmajane.'"
"Rebecca Randall, stop! Somebody'll hear you!"
"No, they won't--they're making jelly in the kitchen, miles
away."
"'Alas!' said the youth, since tomorrow I go
To fight in a far distant land,
Your tears for my
absence soon ceasing to flow,
Some other will court you, and you will bestow
On a wealthier
suitor your hand.'"
"Rebecca, you can't THINK how your voice carries! I believe
mother can hear it over to my house!"
"Then, if she can, I must sing the third verse, just to clear
your
reputation from the cloud cast upon it in the second,"
laughed her tormentor, going on with the song:
"'Oh, hush these suspicions!' Fair Emmajane said,
'So hurtful to love and to me!
For if you be living, or if you be dead,
I swear, my Abijah, that none in your stead,
Shall the husband of Emmajane be!'"
After
ending the third verse Rebecca wheeled around on the piano
stool and confronted her friend, who was carefully closing the
parlor windows:--
"Emma Jane Perkins, it is an ordinary Thursday afternoon at four
o'clock and you have on your new blue barege, although there is
not even a church sociable in
prospect this evening. What does
this mean? Is Abijah the Brave coming at last?"
"I don't know certainly, but it will be some time this week."
"And of course you'd rather be dressed up and not seen, than seen
when not dressed up. Right, my Fair Emmajane; so would I. Not
that it makes any difference to poor me, wearing my fourth best
black and white
calico and expecting nobody.
"Oh, well, YOU! There's something inside of you that does instead
of pretty dresses," cried Emma Jane, whose
adoration of her
friend had never altered nor lessened since they met at the age
of eleven. "You know you are as different from anybody else in
Riverboro as a
princess in a fairy story. Libby Moses says they
would notice you in Lowell, Massachusetts!"
"Would they? I wonder," speculated Rebecca, rendered almost
speechless by this
tribute to her charms. "Well, if Lowell,
Massachusetts, could see me, or if you could see me, in my new
lavender
muslin with the
violet sash, it would die of envy, and
so would you!"
"If I had been going to be
envious of you, Rebecca, I should have
died years ago. Come, let's go out on the steps where it's shady
and cool."
"And where we can see the Perkins front gate and the road running
both ways," teased Rebecca, and then, softening her tone, she
said: "How is it getting on, Emmy? Tell me what's happened since
I've been in Brunswick."
"Nothing much," confessed Emma Jane. "He writes to me, but I
don't write to him, you know. I don't dare to, till he comes to
the house."
"Are his letters still in Latin?" asked Rebecca, with a twinkling
eye.
"Oh, no! Not now, because--well, because there are things you
can't seem to write in Latin. I saw him at the Masonic
picnic in
the grove, but he won't say anything REAL to me till he gets more
pay and dares to speak to mother and father. He IS brave in all
other ways, but I ain't sure he'll ever have the courage for
that, he's so afraid of them and always has been. Just remember
what's in his mind all the time, Rebecca, that my folks know all
about what his mother was, and how he was born on the poor-farm.
Not that I care; look how he's educated and worked himself up! I
think he's
perfectlyelegant, and I shouldn't mind if he had been
born in the bulrushes, like Moses."
Emma Jane's every-day
vocabulary was pretty much what it had been
before she went to the
expensive Wareham Female Seminary. She had
acquired a certain
amount of information
concerning the art of
speech, but in moments of strong feeling she lapsed into the
vernacular. She grew slowly in all directions, did Emma Jane,
and, to use Rebecca's favorite nautilus figure, she had left
comparatively few outgrown shells on the shores of "life's
unresting sea."
"Moses wasn't born in the bulrushes, Emmy dear," corrected
Rebecca laughingly. "Pharaoh's daughter found him there. It
wasn't quite as
romantic a scene--Squire Bean's wife taking
little Abijah Flagg from the poorhouse when his girl-mother died,
but, oh, I think Abijah's splendid! Mr. Ladd says Riverboro'll be
proud of him yet, and I shouldn't wonder, Emmy dear, if you had a
three-story house with a cupola on it, some day; and sitting down
at your
mahogany desk inlaid with garnets, you will write notes
stating that Mrs. Abijah Flagg requests the pleasure of Miss
Rebecca Randall's company to tea, and that the Hon. Abijah Flagg,
M.C., will call for her on his way from the station with a span
of horses and the turquoise carryall!"
Emma Jane laughed at the
ridiculousprophecy, and answered: "If I
ever write the
invitation I shan't be addressing it to Miss
Randall, I'm sure of that; it'll be to Mrs.-----"
"Don't!" cried Rebecca impetuously, changing color and putting
her hand over Emma Jane's lips. "If you won't I'll stop teasing.
I couldn't bear a name put to anything, I couldn't, Emmy dear! I
wouldn't tease you, either, if it weren't something we've both
known ever so long--something that you have always consulted me
about of your own
accord, and Abijah too."
"Don't get excited," replied Emma Jane, "I was only going to say
you were sure to be Mrs. Somebody in course of time."
"Oh," said Rebecca with a relieved sigh, her color coming back;
"if that's all you meant, just
nonsense; but I thought, I
thought--I don't really know just what I thought!"
"I think you thought something you didn't want me to think you
thought," said Emma Jane with
unusual felicity.
"No, it's not that; but somehow, today, I have been remembering
things. Perhaps it was because at breakfast Aunt Jane and mother
reminded me of my coming birthday and said that Squire Bean would
give me the deed of the brick house. That made me feel very old
and
responsible; and when I came out on the steps this afternoon
it was just as if pictures of the old years were moving up and
down the road. Everything is so beautiful today! Doesn't the sky
look as if it had been dyed blue and the fields painted pink and
green and yellow this very minute?"
"It's a
perfectlyelegant day!" responded Emma Jane with a sigh.
"If only my mind was at rest! That's the difference between being
young and
grown-up. We never used to think and worry."
"Indeed we didn't!" Look, Emmy, there's the very spot where Uncle
Jerry Cobb stopped the stage and I stepped out with my pink
parasol and my
bouquet of
purple lilacs, and you were watching me
from your bedroom window and wondering what I had in mother's
little hair trunk strapped on behind. Poor Aunt Miranda didn't
love me at first sight, and oh, how cross she was the first two
years! But now every hard thought I ever had comes back to me and
cuts like a knife!"