I
“A warrior so bold and a maiden so bright
Conversed as they sat on the green.
They gazed at each other in tender delight.
Alonzo the brave was the name of the knight,
And the maid was the fair Imogene.
“'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.'
“'Oh, hush these suspicions!' Fair Imogene said,
'So hurtful to love and to me!
For if you be living, or if you be dead,
I swear by the Virgin that none in your stead
Shall the husband of Imogene be!'”
Ever since she was eight years old Rebecca had wished to be eighteen,
but now that she was within a month of that awe-inspiring and
long-desired age she wondered if, after all, it was destined to be a
turning-point in her quiet existence. Her eleventh year, for instance,
had been a real turning-point, since it was then that she had left
Sunnybrook Farm and come to her 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 passion of 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 perfectly elegant, 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 ridiculous prophecy, 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 perfectly elegant 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!”
“She was dreadful hard to get along with, and I used to hate her like
poison,” confessed Emma Jane; “but I am sorry now. She was kinder toward
the last, anyway, and then, you see children know so little! We never
suspected she was sick or that she was worrying over that lost interest
money.”
“That's the trouble. People seem hard and unreasonable and unjust,
and we can't help being hurt at the time, but if they die we forget
everything but our own angry speeches; somehow we never remember theirs.
And oh, Emma Jane, there's another such a sweet little picture out there
in the road. The next day after I came to Riverboro, do you remember, I
stole out of the brick house crying, and leaned against the front gate.
You pushed your little fat pink-and-white face through the pickets and
said: 'Don't cry! I'll kiss you if you will me!'”
Lumps rose suddenly in Emma Jane's throat, and she put her arm around
Rebecca's waist as they sat together side by side.
“Oh, I do remember,” she said in a choking voice. “And I can see the two
of us driving over to North Riverboro and selling soap to Mr. Adam
Ladd; and lighting up the premium banquet lamp at the Simpson party; and
laying the daisies round Jacky Winslow's mother when she was dead in
the cabin; and trundling Jacky up and down the street in our old baby
carriage!”
“And I remember you,” continued Rebecca, “being chased down the hill
by Jacob Moody, when we were being Daughters of Zion and you had been
chosen to convert him!”
“And I remember you, getting the flag back from Mr. Simpson; and how you
looked when you spoke your verses at the flag-raising.”
“And have you forgotten the week I refused to speak to Abijah Flagg
because he fished my turban with the porcupine quills out of the river
when I hoped at last that I had lost it! Oh, Emma Jane, we had dear good
times together in the little harbor.'”
“I always thought that was an elegant composition of yours--that
farewell to the class,” said Emma Jane.
“The strong tide bears us on, out of the little harbor of childhood into
the unknown seas,” recalled Rebecca. “It is bearing you almost out of
my sight, Emmy, these last days, when you put on a new dress in the
afternoon and look out of the window instead of coming across the
street. Abijah Flagg never used to be in the little harbor with the rest
of us; when did he first sail in, Emmy?”
Emma Jane grew a deeper pink and her button-hole of a mouth quivered
with delicious excitement.
“It was last year at the seminary, when he wrote me his first Latin
letter from Limerick Academy,” she said in a half whisper.
“I remember,” laughed Rebecca. “You suddenly began the study of the dead
languages, and the Latin dictionary took the place of the crochet needle
in your affections. It was cruel of you never to show me that letter,
Emmy!”
“I know every word of it by heart,” said the blushing Emma Jane, “and
I think I really ought to say it to you, because it's the only way you
will ever know how perfectly elegant Abijah is. Look the other way,
Rebecca. Shall I have to translate it for you, do you think, because it
seems to me I could not bear to do that!”
“It depends upon Abijah's Latin and your pronunciation,” teased Rebecca.
“Go on; I will turn my eyes toward the orchard.”
The Fair Emmajane, looking none too old still for the “little harbor,”
but almost too young for the “unknown seas,” gathered up her courage and
recited like a tremulous parrot the boyish love letter that had so fired
her youthful imagination.
“Vale, carissima, carissima puella!” repeated Rebecca in her musical
voice. “Oh, how beautiful it sounds! I don't wonder it altered your
feeling for Abijah! Upon my word, Emma Jane,” she cried with a sudden
change of tone, “if I had suspected for an instant that Abijah the Brave
had that Latin letter in him I should have tried to get him to write it
to me; and then it would be I who would sit down at my mahogany desk and
ask Miss Perkins to come to tea with Mrs. Flagg.”
Emma Jane paled and shuddered openly. “I speak as a church member,
Rebecca,” she said, “when I tell you I've always thanked the Lord that
you never looked at Abijah Flagg and he never looked at you. If either
of you ever had, there never would have been a chance for me, and I've
always known it!”