The day before Rebecca started for the South with Miss Maxwell she was
in the library with Emma Jane and Huldah, consulting dictionaries and
encyclopaedias. As they were leaving they passed the locked cases
containing the library of fiction, open to the teachers and
townspeople, but forbidden to the students.
They looked longingly through the glass, getting some little comfort
from the titles of the volumes, as hungry children imbibe emotional
nourishment from the pies and tarts inside a confectioner's window.
Rebecca's eyes fell upon a new book in the corner, and she read the
name aloud with delight: "_The Rose of Joy_. Listen, girls; isn't that
lovely? _The Rose of Joy_. It looks beautiful, and it sounds beautiful.
What does it mean, I wonder?"
"I guess everybody has a different rose," said Huldah shrewdly. "I know
what mine would be, and I'm not ashamed to own it. I'd like a year in a
city, with just as much money as I wanted to spend, horses and splendid
clothes and amusements every minute of the day; and I'd like above
everything to live with people that wear low necks." (Poor Huldah never
took off her dress without bewailing the fact that her lot was cast in
Riverboro, where her pretty white shoulders could never be seen.)
"That would be fun, for a while anyway," Emma Jane remarked. "But
wouldn't that be pleasure more than joy? Oh, I've got an idea!"
"Don't shriek so!" said the startled Huldah. "I thought it was a mouse."
"I don't have them very often," apologized Emma Jane,--"ideas, I mean;
this one shook me like a stroke of lightning. Rebecca, couldn't it be
success?"
"That's good," mused Rebecca; "I can see that success would be a joy,
but it doesn't seem to me like a rose, somehow. I was wondering if it
could be love?"
"I wish we could have a peep at the book! It must be perfectly
elergant!" said Emma Jane. "But now you say it is love, I think that's
the best guess yet."
All day long the four words haunted and possessed Rebecca; she said
them over to herself continually. Even the prosaic Emma Jane was
affected by them, for in the evening she said, "I don't expect you to
believe it, but I have another idea,--that's two in one day; I had it
while I was putting cologne on your head. The rose of joy might be
helpfulness."
"If it is, then it is always blooming in your dear little heart, you
darlingest, kind Emmie, taking such good care of your troublesome
Becky!"
"Don't dare to call yourself troublesome! You're--you're--you're my
rose of joy, that's what you are!" And the two girls hugged each other
affectionately.
In the middle of the night Rebecca touched Emma Jane on the shoulder
softly. "Are you very fast asleep, Emmie?" she whispered.
"Not so very," answered Emma Jane drowsily.
"I've thought of something new. If you sang or painted or wrote,--not a
little, but beautifully, you know,--wouldn't the doing of it, just as
much as you wanted, give you the rose of joy?"
"It might if it was a real talent," answered Emma Jane, "though I don't
like it so well as love. If you have another thought, Becky, keep it
till morning."
"I did have one more inspiration," said Rebecca when they were dressing
next morning, "but I didn't wake you. I wondered if the rose of joy
could be sacrifice? But I think sacrifice would be a lily, not a rose;
don't you?"
The journey southward, the first glimpse of the ocean, the strange new
scenes, the ease and delicious freedom, the intimacy with Miss Maxwell,
almost intoxicated Rebecca. In three days she was not only herself
again, she was another self, thrilling with delight, anticipation, and
realization. She had always had such eager hunger for knowledge, such
thirst for love, such passionate longing for the music, the beauty, the
poetry of existence! She had always been straining to make the outward
world conform to her inward dreams, and now life had grown all at once
rich and sweet, wide and full. She was using all her natural, God-given
outlets; and Emily Maxwell marveled daily at the inexhaustible way in
which the girl poured out and gathered in the treasures of thought and
experience that belonged to her. She was a lifegiver, altering the
whole scheme of any picture she made a part of, by contributing new
values. Have you never seen the dull blues and greens of a room
changed, transfigured by a burst of sunshine? That seemed to Miss
Maxwell the effect of Rebecca on the groups of people with whom they
now and then mingled; but they were commonly alone, reading to each
other and having quiet talks. The prize essay was very much on
Rebecca's mind. Secretly she thought she could never be happy unless
she won it. She cared nothing for the value of it, and in this case
almost nothing for the honor; she wanted to please Mr. Aladdin and
justify his belief in her.
"If I ever succeed in choosing a subject, I must ask if you think I can
write well on it; and then I suppose I must work in silence and secret,
never even reading the essay to you, nor talking about it."
Miss Maxwell and Rebecca were sitting by a little brook on a sunny
spring day. They had been in a stretch of wood by the sea since
breakfast, going every now and then for a bask on the warm white sand,
and returning to their shady solitude when tired of the sun's glare.
"The subject is very important," said Miss Maxwell, "but I do not dare
choose for you. Have you decided on anything yet?"
"No," Rebecca answered; "I plan a new essay every night. I've begun one
on What is Failure? and another on He and She. That would be a dialogue
between a boy and girl just as they were leaving school, and would tell
their ideals of life. Then do you remember you said to me one day,
'Follow your Saint'? I'd love to write about that. I didn't have a
single thought in Wareham, and now I have a new one every minute, so I
must try and write the essay here; think it out, at any rate, while I
am so happy and free and rested. Look at the pebbles in the bottom of
the pool, Miss Emily, so round and smooth and shining."
"Yes, but where did they get that beautiful polish, that satin skin,
that lovely shape, Rebecca? Not in the still pool lying on the sands.
It was never there that their angles were rubbed off and their rough
surfaces polished, but in the strife and warfare of running waters.
They have jostled against other pebbles, dashed against sharp rocks,
and now we look at them and call them beautiful."
"If Fate had not made somebody a teacher,
She might have been, oh! such a splendid preacher!"
rhymed Rebecca. "Oh! if I could only think and speak as you do!" she
sighed. "I am so afraid I shall never get education enough to make a
good writer."
"You could worry about plenty of other things to better advantage,"
said Miss Maxwell, a little scornfully. "Be afraid, for instance, that
you won't understand human nature; that you won't realize the beauty of
the outer world; that you may lack sympathy, and thus never be able to
read a heart; that your faculty of expression may not keep pace with
your ideas,--a thousand things, every one of them more important to the
writer than the knowledge that is found in books. AEsop was a Greek
slave who could not even write down his wonderful fables; yet all the
world reads them."
"I didn't know that," said Rebecca, with a half sob. "I didn't know
anything until I met you!"
"You will only have had a high school course, but the most famous
universities do not always succeed in making men and women. When I long
to go abroad and study, I always remember that there were three great
schools in Athens and two in Jerusalem, but the Teacher of all teachers
came out of Nazareth, a little village hidden away from the bigger,
busier world."
"Mr. Ladd says that you are almost wasted on Wareham," said Rebecca
thoughtfully.
"He is wrong; my talent is not a great one, but no talent is wholly
wasted unless its owner chooses to hide it in a napkin. Remember that
of your own gifts, Rebecca; they may not be praised of men, but they
may cheer, console, inspire, perhaps, when and where you least expect.
The brimming glass that overflows its own rim moistens the earth about
it."
"Did you ever hear of The Rose of Joy?" asked Rebecca, after a long
silence.
"Yes, of course; where did you see it?"
"On the outside of a book in the library."
"I saw it on the inside of a book in the library," smiled Miss Maxwell.
"It is from Emerson, but I'm afraid you haven't quite grown up to it,
Rebecca, and it is one of the things impossible to explain."
"Oh, try me, dear Miss Maxwell!" pleaded Rebecca. "Perhaps by thinking
hard I can guess a little bit what it means."
"'In the actual--this painful kingdom of time and chance--are Care,
Canker, and Sorrow; with thought, with the Ideal, is immortal
hilarity--the rose of Joy; round it all the Muses sing,'" quoted Miss
Maxwell.
Rebecca repeated it over and over again until she had learned it by
heart; then she said, "I don't want to be conceited, but I almost
believe I do understand it, Miss Maxwell. Not altogether, perhaps,
because it is puzzling and difficult; but a little, enough to go on
with. It's as if a splendid shape galloped past you on horseback; you
are so surprised and your eyes move so slowly you cannot half see it,
but you just catch a glimpse as it whisks by, and you know it is
beautiful. It's all settled. My essay is going to be called The Rose of
Joy. I've just decided. It hasn't any beginning, nor any middle, but
there will be a thrilling ending, something like this: let me see; joy,
boy, toy, ahoy, decoy, alloy:--
Then come what will of weal or woe
(Since all gold hath alloy),
Thou 'lt bloom unwithered in this heart,
My Rose of Joy!
Now I'm going to tuck you up in the shawl and give you the fir pillow,
and while you sleep I am going down on the shore and write a fairy
story for you. It's one of our 'supposing' kind; it flies far, far into
the future, and makes beautiful things happen that may never really all
come to pass; but some of them will,--you'll see! and then you'll take
out the little fairy story from your desk and remember Rebecca."
"I wonder why these young things always choose subjects that would tax
the powers of a great essayist!" thought Miss Maxwell, as she tried to
sleep. "Are they dazzled, captivated, taken possession of, by the
splendor of the theme, and do they fancy they can write up to it? Poor
little innocents, hitching their toy wagons to the stars! How pretty
this particular innocent looks under her new sunshade!"
Adam Ladd had been driving through Boston streets on a cold spring day
when nature and the fashion-mongers were holding out promises which
seemed far from performance. Suddenly his vision was assailed by the
sight of a rose-colored parasol gayly unfurled in a shop window,
signaling the passer-by and setting him to dream of summer sunshine. It
reminded Adam of a New England apple-tree in full bloom, the outer
covering of deep pink shining through the thin white lining, and a
fluffy, fringe-like edge of mingled rose and cream dropping over the
green handle. All at once he remembered one of Rebecca's early
confidences,--the little pink sunshade that had given her the only peep
into the gay world of fashion that her childhood had ever known; her
adoration of the flimsy bit of finery and its tragic and sacrificial
end. He entered the shop, bought the extravagant bauble, and expressed
it to Wareham at once, not a single doubt of its appropriateness
crossing the darkness of his masculine mind. He thought only of the joy
in Rebecca's eyes; of the poise of her head under the apple-blossom
canopy. It was a trifle embarrassing to return an hour later and buy a
blue parasol for Emma Jane Perkins, but it seemed increasingly
difficult, as the years went on, to remember her existence at all the
proper times and seasons.
This is Rebecca's fairy story, copied the next day and given to Emily
Maxwell just as she was going to her room for the night. She read it
with tears in her eyes and then sent it to Adam Ladd, thinking he had
earned a share in it, and that he deserved a glimpse of the girl's
budding imagination, as well as of her grateful young heart.