This was boy and girl love, calf love, perhaps, though even that may
develop into something larger, truer, and finer; but not so far away
were other and very different hearts growing and budding, each in its
own way. There was little Miss Dearborn, the pretty school teacher,
drifting into a foolish alliance because she did not agree with her
stepmother at home; there was Herbert Dunn, valedictorian of his class,
dazzled by Huldah Meserve, who like a glowworm “shone afar off bright,
but looked at near, had neither heat nor light.”
There was sweet Emily Maxwell, less than thirty still, with most of her
heart bestowed in the wrong quarter. She was toiling on at the Wareham
school, living as unselfish a life as a nun in a convent; lavishing the
mind and soul of her, the heart and body of her, on her chosen work.
How many women give themselves thus, consciously and unconsciously;
and, though they themselves miss the joys and compensations of mothering
their own little twos and threes, God must be grateful to them for
their mothering of the hundreds which make them so precious in His
regenerating purposes.
Then there was Adam Ladd, waiting at thirty-five for a girl to grow a
little older, simply because he could not find one already grown who
suited his somewhat fastidious and exacting tastes.
“I'll not call Rebecca perfection,” he quoted once, in a letter to Emily
Maxwell,--“I'll not call her perfection, for that's a post, afraid to
move. But she's a dancing sprig of the tree next it.”
When first she appeared on his aunt's piazza in North Riverboro and
insisted on selling him a large quantity of very inferior soap in order
that her friends, the Simpsons, might possess a premium in the shape of
a greatly needed banquet lamp, she had riveted his attention. He thought
all the time that he enjoyed talking with her more than with any woman
alive, and he had never changed his opinion. She always caught what
he said as if it were a ball tossed to her, and sometimes her mind, as
through it his thoughts came back to him, seemed like a prism which had
dyed them with deeper colors.
Adam Ladd always called Rebecca in his heart his little Spring. His
boyhood had been lonely and unhappy. That was the part of life he had
missed, and although it was the full summer of success and prosperity
with him now, he found his lost youth only in her.
She was to him--how shall I describe it?
Do you remember an early day in May with budding leaf, warm earth,
tremulous air, and changing, willful sky--how new it seemed? How fresh
and joyous beyond all explaining?
Have you lain with half-closed eyes where the flickering of sunlight
through young leaves, the song of birds and brook and the fragrance of
wild flowers combined to charm your senses, and you felt the sweetness
and grace of nature as never before?
Rebecca was springtide to Adam's thirsty heart. She was blithe youth
incarnate; she was music--an Aeolian harp that every passing breeze
woke to some whispering little tune; she was a changing, iridescent
joy-bubble; she was the shadow of a leaf dancing across a dusty floor.
No bough of his thought could be so bare but she somehow built a nest in
it and evoked life where none was before.
And Rebecca herself?
She had been quite unconscious of all this until very lately, and even
now she was but half awakened; searching among her childish instincts
and her girlish dreams for some Ariadne thread that should guide her
safely through the labyrinth of her new sensations.
For the moment she was absorbed, or thought she was, in the little love
story of Abijah and Emma Jane, but in reality, had she realized it, that
love story served chiefly as a basis of comparison for a possible one of
her own, later on.
She liked and respected Abijah Flagg, and loving Emma Jane was a habit
contracted early in life; but everything that they did or said, or
thought or wrote, or hoped or feared, seemed so inadequate, so painfully
short of what might be done or said, or thought or written, or hoped or
feared, under easily conceivable circumstances, that she almost felt a
disposition to smile gently at the fancy of the ignorant young couple
that they had caught a glimpse of the great vision.
She was sitting under the sweet apple tree at twilight. Supper was over;
Mark's restless feet were quiet, Fanny and Jenny were tucked safely in
bed; her aunt and her mother were stemming currants on the side porch.
A blue spot at one of the Perkins windows showed that in one vestal
bosom hope was not dead yet, although it was seven o'clock.
Suddenly there was the sound of a horse's feet coming up the quiet road;
plainly a steed hired from some metropolis like Milltown or Wareham,
as Riverboro horses when through with their day's work never disported
themselves so gayly.
A little open vehicle came in sight, and in it sat Abijah Flagg. The
wagon was so freshly painted and so shiny that Rebecca thought that he
must have alighted at the bridge and given it a last polish. The creases
in his trousers, too, had an air of having been pressed in only a few
minutes before. The whip was new and had a yellow ribbon on it; the
gray suit of clothes was new, and the coat flourished a flower in its
button-hole. The hat was the latest thing in hats, and the intrepid
swain wore a seal-ring on the little finger of his right hand. As
Rebecca remembered that she had guided it in making capital G's in his
copy-book, she felt positively maternal, although she was two years
younger than Abijah the Brave.
He drove up to the Perkins gate and was so long about hitching the horse
that Rebecca's heart beat tumultuously at the thought of Emma Jane's
heart waiting under the blue barege. Then he brushed an imaginary speck
off his sleeve, then he drew on a pair of buff kid gloves, then he went
up the path, rapped at the knocker, and went in.
“Not all the heroes go to the wars,” thought Rebecca. “Abijah has laid
the ghost of his father and redeemed the memory of his mother, for no
one will dare say again that Abbie Flagg's son could never amount to
anything!”
The minutes went by, and more minutes, and more. The tranquil dusk
settled down over the little village street and the young moon came out
just behind the top of the Perkins pine tree.
The Perkins front door opened and Abijah the Brave came out hand in hand
with his Fair Emmajane.
They walked through the orchard, the eyes of the old couple following
them from the window, and just as they disappeared down the green slope
that led to the riverside the gray coat sleeve encircled the blue barege
waist.
Rebecca, quivering with instant sympathy and comprehension, hid her face
in her hands.
“Emmy has sailed away and I am all alone in the little harbor,” she
thought.
It was as if childhood, like a thing real and visible, were slipping
down the grassy river banks, after Abijah and Emma Jane, and
disappearing like them into the moon-lit shadows of the summer night.
“I am all alone in the little harbor,” she repeated; “and oh, I wonder,
I wonder, shall I be afraid to leave it, if anybody ever comes to carry
me out to sea!”