NEW BEGINNINGS
The very worst of it was, there was nothing Janice could do! She must
wait, and to contemplate that passive state, almost drove her mad!
Day after day passed without bringing any further news. She read the
papers just as eagerly as before; but the center of military activity
in Mexico had suddenly shifted to an entirely different part of the
country. There was absolutely no news in the papers from the district
where the mine was situated.
Mr. Buchanan wrote once again, but even more briefly. He was a busy
man, and had done all that he could. If he heard from, or of, Mr. Day
he would telegraph Janice at once, and if _she_ heard she was to let
him know by the same means.
That was the way the matter stood. It seemed as though the State
Department could, or would, do nothing. Mr. Day, like other citizens
of the United States, had been warned of the danger he was in while he
remained in a country torn by civil strife. The consequences were upon
his own head.
The folks who knew about Janice's trouble tried to be good to her.
Walky Dexter drove around to invite the girl to go with him whenever he
had a job that took him out of town with the spring wagon. Janice
loved to jog over the hilly roads, and she saw a good bit of the
country with Dexter.
"I'd love to own just a little automobile that I could run myself," she
said once.
"Why don't you borry Nelse Haley's gasoline bike?" demanded Walky, with
a grin. "Or, mebbe he'll put a back-saddle on fer yer. I've seen 'em
ride double at Middletown."
"I don't like motorcycles. I want a wide seat and more comfort," said
Janice. "Daddy said that, perhaps, if things went well with him down
there in Mexico, I could have an auto runabout," and she sighed.
"Now, Miss Janice!" exclaimed the man, "don't you take on none. Mr.
Broxton Day'll come out all right. I remember him as a boy, and he was
jest as much diff'rent from Jason as chalk is from cheese! Yes,
sir-ree!"
This implied a compliment for her father, Janice knew, so she was
pleased. Walky Dexter meant well.
Little Miss Scattergood was Janice's greatest comfort during this time
of trial. She did not discuss the girl's trouble, but she showed her
sympathy in other ways. Old Mrs. Scattergood always wanted to discuss
the horrors of the Mexican War, whenever she caught sight of Janice,
which was not pleasant. So Miss 'Rill and Janice arranged to meet more
often at Hopewell Drugg's, and little Lottie received better care those
days than ever before.
Miss 'Rill was not a bad seamstress, and the two friends began to make
Lottie little frocks; and, as Hopewell only had to supply the material
out of the store, Lottie was more prettily dressed--and for less
money--than previously.
As Janice and the ex-schoolmistress sat sewing in the big Drugg
kitchen, Hopewell would often linger in the shed room with his violin,
when there were no customers, and play the few pieces he had, in all
these years, managed to "pick out" upon his father's old instrument.
"Silver Threads Among the Gold" was the favorite--especially with
Lottie. She would dance and clap her hands when she felt the vibration
of certain minor chords, and come running to the visitors and attract
their attention to the sounds that she could "hear."
"He-a! he-a! he-a!" she shouted in that shrill toneless voice of hers.
Janice noticed that she talked less than formerly. Gradually the power
of speech was going from her because of disuse. It is almost always so
with the very young who are deprived of hearing.
Such a pitiful, pitiful case! Sometimes Janice could not think of
little Lottie without weeping. It seemed so awful that merely a matter
of money--a few hundred dollars--should keep this child from obtaining
the surgical help and the training that might aid her to become a
happy, normal girl.
It was from Mr. Middler--rather, through a certain conversation with
the minister--that Janice received the greatest help during these weeks
when her father's fate remained uncertain.
She could not spend all her time at Hopewell Drugg's, or with Walky
Dexter, or even about the old Day house. Autumn had come, and the
mornings were frosty. The woods were aflame with the sapless leaves.
Ice skimmed the quiet pools before the later-rising sun kissed them.
Janice had sometimes met the minister when she tramped over the
hillside--and especially up toward the Shower Bath in Jason Day's wood
lot. One glowing, warm October afternoon the girl and the gentle
little parson met on the cow path through Mr. Day's upper pasture.
"Ah, my dear!" he said, shaking hands. "Where are you bound for?"
"I don't know whether I had better tell you, or not, sir," she
returned, smiling, yet with some gravity. "You see, I was going to get
comfort."
"Comfort?"
"Yes, sir. You see, sometimes I get to thinking of--of Daddy so much
that the whole world seems just made up of _my_ trouble!" said Janice,
with a sob. "Do you know what I mean, sir? Just as though me and my
troubles were the most important things in existence--the _only_
things, in fact."
"Ah--yes. I see--I see," whispered Mr. Middler, patting her shoulder,
but looking away from her tear-streaked face. "We are all that
way--sometimes, Janice. All that way."
"And then I go somewhere to get out of myself,--to--to get comfort."
"I see."
"And so I am going now to the place I call The Overlook. It's a great
rock up yonder. I scramble up on top of it, and from that place I can
see so much of the world that, by and by, I begin to realize just how
small I really am, and how small, in comparison, my troubles must be in
the whole great scheme of things. I begin to understand, then," she
added, softly, "that God has so much to 'tend to in the Universe that
He can't give me first chance _always_. I've got to wait my turn."
"Oh, but my dear!" murmured the doctrinarian. "I wouldn't limit the
power of the Almighty--even in my thoughts."
"No-o. But--but God does just seem more _human_ and close to me if I
think of Him as very busy--yet thoughtful and kind for us all.
Just--just like my Daddy, only on a bigger scale, Mr. Middler."
The minister looked at her gravely for a moment and then took her hand
again. "Suppose you show me that place of comfort?" he suggested,
quietly.
They went on together through the pasture and up into the wood lot.
They came out upon an unexpected opening in the wood, at the beginning
of a great gash in the hillside. At the center of this opening was a
huge boulder, surrounded by hazel-nut bushes, to which the brown leaves
still clung.
"You can climb up easily from the back. Let me show you," said Janice,
who had by now got control of her tears, and was more like her smiling,
cheerful self.
She ran up the incline, sure-footed as a goat; but at the more
difficult place she gave the minister her hand. He was much more
breathless than she when they stood together upon the overhanging rock.
Below them was the steep, wooded hillside, and the broken pastures and
scattered houses north of Poketown, along the shore of the lake. This
spot was on the promontory that flanked the bay upon one side. From
this point it seemed that all of the great lake, with both its near and
distant shores, lay spread at their feet!
In the northwest frowned the half-ruined fortress, so heroic a landmark
of pre-Revolutionary times. Nearer lay the wooded, rocky isle where a
celebrated Indian chief had made his last stand against the encroaching
whites. Yonder was the spot where certain of those bold pioneers and
fighters, the Green Mountain Boys, embarked under their famous leaders,
Allen and Warner, upon an expedition that historians will never cease
to write of.
It was a noble, as well as a beautiful, view. God's world _did_ look
bigger and greater from The Overlook. Sitting by her side, the
minister held the girl's hand, and listened to her artless expressions.
She told him quite frankly what all this view meant to her,--how it
helped and soothed her worried spirit, brought comfort to her grieving
heart. Here were many square miles of God's Footstool under her gaze;
and there were many, many thousands of other spots like this between
her and the Mexican mountains in which her father was held a prisoner.
And God had the same care over one bit of landscape as he did over
another!
"Then," she said, softly, in conclusion, "then I just seem to grasp the
idea of God's _bigness_--and how much He has to do. I won't complain.
I'll wait. And meanwhile I'll do, if I can, what Daddy told me to."
"What is that, Janice?" asked the minister, still gazing out over the
vast outlook himself.
"I must _do something_,--keep to work, you know. Try and make things
better. You know: 'Each in his small corner.' And there's so much to
be done in Poketown!"
"So much--in Poketown?" ejaculated the minister, suddenly brought out
of his reverie.
"Yes, sir."
"But I thought Poketown was a particularly satisfactory place. There
really is very little to do here. We have a very clean political
government, remarkably so. Of course, that fact would not so much
interest you, Janice. But the life of the church is very
spiritual--very. We have no saloons; we seldom have an arrest----"
"Oh, I never thought of those things," admitted Janice. "There isn't
really anything for young people to do in the Poketown Church, I know.
But outside----"
"And what can be done outside?" asked the minister, and perhaps he
winced a little at the confidence in Janice's voice when she spoke of
the church system which kept the young people at a distance.
"Why, you know, there are the boys. Boys like Marty--my cousin. He
goes to school now, it's true; but he's down town just as much as ever
at night. And there's no good place for the boys to go--to congregate,
I mean."
"Humph! I thought once of opening the church basement to them,"
murmured Mr. Middler. "But--but there was opposition. Some thought
the boys might take advantage of our good nature and be ill-behaved."
"So they continue to hang around the hotel sheds and the stores,"
pursued Janice, thoughtfully, without meaning to be critical. "Boys
_will_ get together in a club, or gang. Daddy used to say they were
naturally gregarious, like some birds."
"Yes," said the minister, slowly.
"They ought to have a nice, warm, well-lighted room where they could
go, and play games, and read,--with a circulating library attached. Of
course, a gymnasium would be too much to even _dream_ of, at first!
Why! wouldn't that be fine? And isn't it practical? _Do_ say it is!"
"I do not know whether it is practicable or not, Janice," said the
minister, slowly, yet smiling at her. "But the thought is inspired.
You shall have all the help I can give you. It _ought_ to be in the
church----"
"No. That would scare the boys away," interposed Janice, with finality.
"Why, my dear? You speak as though the church was a bogey!"
"Well--but--dear Mr. Middler! Just ask the boys themselves. How many
of them love to go to church--even to Sunday School? I mean the boys
that hang about the village stores at night."
"It is so--it is so," he admitted, with a sigh.
From this sprang the idea of the Poketown Free Library. It was of slow
growth, and there is much more to be said about it; but Janice found
her personal troubles much easier to bear when she began trying to
interest the people of Poketown in the reading-room idea.
And didn't Mr. Middler bear something of his own away from that visit
to The Overlook--something that glowed in his heart? He preached quite
a different kind of a sermon that next Sunday, and the text was one of
the most helpful and living in all the New Testament.
Some of the older members of his congregation shook their heads over
it. It was not "strong meat," they said; there was nothing to argue
about! But a dozen troubled, needy members who heard the sermon, felt
new hope in their hearts, and they got through the following
week--trials and all!--much easier than usual.