“I remember the lessons of childhood, you see,
And the horn book I learned on my poor mother’s knee.
In truth, I suspect little else do we learn
From this great book of life, which so shrewdly we turn,
Saving how to apply, with a good or bad grace,
What we learned in the horn book of childhood.”
—Owen Meredith.
Judith’s mother sat in her invalid chair before the grate; she looked
very pretty to Judith with her hair curling back from her face, and
the color of her eyes and cheeks brought out by the becoming wrapper;
the firelight shone upon the mother; the fading light in the west
shone upon the girl in the bay-window, the yellow head, the blue
shoulders bent over the letter she was writing.
“Judith, come and tell me pictures.”
About five o’clock in the afternoon, her mother’s weariest-time,
Judith often told her mother pictures.
The picture-telling began when Judith was a little girl; one afternoon
she said: “Mother, I’ll tell you a picture; shut your eyes.”
It was in this very room; her mother leaned back in her wheel-chair,
lifted her feet to the fender, shut her eyes, and a small
seven-year-old “told” her “picture.”
Telling pictures had been the amusement of the one, and the rest of
the other, many, many weary times since.
As the child grew, her pictures grew.
“Yes, mother,” said the girl in the bay window, “I’ve just finished my
letter; I’ve written Aunt Affy the longest letter and told her all you
said.”
“Read it to me, please?”
Standing near the window to catch the light, Judith read aloud the
letter.
At times it was quaint and unchildish; then, forgetting herself,
Judith had run on with her ready pen, and, with pretty phrases, told
Aunt Affy the exciting events in her own life, and the quiet story of
her mother’s days.
“We are coming as soon as spring comes,” she ended, “mother is coming
to get strong, and I am coming to help you and learn about your
village. Beautiful Bensalem. Mother says I am learning the lessons
taught out of school; but how I would like to go to school with Jean
Draper in your big, queer school-room.” As she turned towards her
mother, the firelight and the light in her face were all the lights in
the room.
The home of these two people was in two rooms; one was the kitchen,
the other was bed-room, school-room, parlor. It was a month since her
mother had walked through the two rooms; several times a day Judith
pushed the wheel-chair through the rooms. She called these times her
mother’s excursions. Last winter her mother wiped dishes, sewed a
little, and once she made cake; this winter she had done little
besides teach Judith. The child was such an apt scholar that her
mother said she needed no teacher—she always taught herself.
Judith loved housekeeping; she loved everything she had to do, she
loved everything she was growing up to do; her mother she loved best
of all.
She lived all day long in a very busy world; the pictures helped fill
it.
“Now, mother, shut your eyes,” she began, gleefully.
[Illustration: “Now, mother, shut your eyes,” said Judith gleefully.]
The eyes shut themselves, the restless hands held themselves still;
there would not be many more weary days, but Judith did not know that.
Judith waited a moment until she could think.
“Mother, how do pictures come?”
“Bring me that paper Don brought last night; I saw something to show
you, then forgot it.”
Her mother turned the leaves of the paper and indicated the paragraph
with her finger. Judith read it aloud:—
“Some years ago I chanced to meet Sir Noël Paton on the shores of a
beautiful Scottish loch, all alone, with an open Bible in his hand. He
put his finger between his pages, as he rose to greet me, and still
kept it there as we talked. Supposing he might be devoting a quiet
hour to devotional reading in the secluded spot, I made no remark on
the nature of his studies; but after a few minutes he observed, with a
glance downwards, ‘You see, I am getting a new picture.’ He then
proceeded to explain that it was his habit, before settling down to
his winter’s work, to walk about in the neighborhood of his summer
residence, wherever that might be, with his Bible in his hand, seeking
for an inspiration. Sometimes the inspiration came almost immediately;
at others, he was weeks before he could please himself. The following
spring appeared ‘The Good Shepherd,’ one of the finest of his works.”
Her mother made no remark; she often waited for Judith’s thought.
“I think Aunt Affy sees things through the Bible, mother,” said
Judith, speaking her first thought.
“I know she does.”
“I see a face,” began the picture-teller, dropping down on the rug,
and resting her head against the padded arm of the chair.
“You love faces,” was the quick response.
“And voices, and hands, and hair. This face I see is a _good_
face—but, then, I do not often see ugly faces—the eyes tell the truth,
the lips tell the truth; perhaps it isn’t a handsome face; the
forehead is low, rather square, the eye-brows dark and heavy; the eyes
underneath are a kind of grayish blue, not _blue_ blue, like
mine, and they are looking at me very seriously; the nose is quite a
large nose, and the mouth large, too, with such splendid teeth; the
upper lip is smooth, and the cheeks and chin all shaven; the hair is
blackest black; now the eyes smile, and it looks like another face; I
do not know which face I like better. What is the name of my picture?”
“Strong and true.”
“That is a good name,” said the picture-teller, satisfied, “and who is
it?”
“Our dear Cousin Don,” was the reply with loving intonation.
“You always guess.”
“Because your pictures are so true. I like to look at people and
places through your eyes.”
Judith smiled, and looking a moment into the fire, began again: “A
fence, an old fence, and a terrace, not green, but rather dried up,
then a lawn, with a horse-chestnut, a big, big horse-chestnut tree on
each side the brick path, and then up three steps to a long piazza:
the house is painted white, with white shutters instead of blinds, and
there are three dormer windows in the roof; these windows make the
third story. I wish I could see inside, but I never did. Perhaps I
shall some day. ‘Some day’ is my fairyland, and may you be there to
see. That day Cousin Don came to take me walking he took me past the
place; he said some day when you could spare me longer he would take
me in, he wanted me to see the brown girl who lives there; but there
she stood on the piazza, the door was open and she was going in; she
_was_ a brown girl, all in brown with a brown hat and brown
feather; a brown face too—I love browns; she happened to turn and she
tossed a laugh down to Cousin Don. It was a pretty laugh, with
something in it I didn’t understand; it was a
laugh—that—didn’t—tell—everything. I told Don so. He said: ‘Nonsense!’
I don’t know what he meant.”
“That was Marion Kenney, and the old house on Summer Avenue,” guessed
Judith’s mother, who knew the story of the brown girl from Don’s
enthusiastic recitals.
Her mother’s voice was more rested; Judith pondered again.
“That was a city picture; this is a country picture. It is the
beautiful, beautiful country, even if the grass is dead, and the trees
bare; it is the February country in New Jersey; there are clouds, and
clouds, and clouds overhead; and a brook with the sun shining on it,
and a bridge with a stone wall on each side, a little bit of a stone
wall, and stone arches where the water flows through; perhaps it
rushes because the snow is melting so fast; there’s a garden with no
flowers in it yet, but there are flower stalks, and bushes, and
bushes; and a path up to the kitchen door, for the garden is down in a
hollow; the kitchen shines, it is so clean, and _smells_, oh, how
it does smell of graham bread, and hot molasses cake, and cup
custards, and apple pie—but we can’t _smell_ in a picture,” she
laughed.
“I can—in your pictures,” said her mother, echoing the laugh very
softly.
“And the dearest old sitting-room—Aunt Rody will call it ‘the room’ as
if it were the only room in the house; there’s a rag carpet on the
floor—Aunt Rody _dotes_ on rag carpets; so would I if it were not
for the endless sewing of the rags—and there’s a chair with rockers,
and on the top of the back of it a gilded house and trees almost
rubbed off, and on the back a calico cushion tied on with red dress
braid, and a calico cushion in the bottom, and the dearest old lady
sits in it and sews, and talks, and reads the Bible and the magazines;
there’s a chair without rockers for the old lady who never rocks or
does easy pleasant things, and hates it when other people, especially
little girls, do any easy pleasant thing; and there’s another chair,
like an office chair, with a leather cushion for the dear old man with
a rosy face like a rosy apple, and a bald head on the top, and long
white whiskers that he keeps so nice they shine like silver, and make
you never mind when he wants to kiss you; and there’s a high mantel
with a whole world of curious things on it that came out of a hundred
years ago, and a lounge with a shaggy dog on a cushion on one end of
it—how Aunt Rody _lets_ him is a wonder to me—and a round table
with piles of the ‘New York Observer’ on it. And just now the sweetest
lady in the world in her wine-colored wrapper is lying on the lounge
and the little girl in blue is flying about helping Aunt Affy and Aunt
Rody get supper—O, mother,” with a break in her voice, “how I
_ache_ to get you there and take care of you there; Cousin Don
says it is the best place in the world for you and me,—we would grow
fresh and green and send out oxygen like all the green things in
Bensalem. I think I’d like to grow green and send out oxygen.”
“Judith, you and I are always in the best place—for us.”
“Then,” said Judith, laughing, “I’d like a place not quite so good for
us—only just as good as Bensalem.”
“When I was a little girl, thirty years ago, the room was just the
same, only Doodles was another Doodles, and Aunt Affy’s curls were not
gray, and Uncle Cephas was not bald or white—his whiskers were red
then, and he was there off and on—and the other aunties came and
went—and Aunt Becky died—the friskiest Aunt Becky that ever lived. I
want my little girl to grow up in the dear old house, with not a stain
of the world upon her; I want to think of my little girl there with
Uncle Cephas and Aunt Affy.”
Judith understood; her mother had told her she would be there without
her mother; but that was to be years hence—sorrow was a long, long way
off to-night to the girl who must hope or her heart would break; she
brought her mother’s fingers to her lips and kissed them; she did not
worry her mother now-a-days even by kissing her lips or hair.
Cousin Don said to her that afternoon he took her to walk that she
must not hang over her mother, or kiss the life out of her, and above
all, never cry or moan when she talked about leaving her “alone.”
“Nothing makes her so strong as to see you brave,” he said, watching
the effect of his caution upon her listening face.
She had tried to be brave ever since.
“You can make pictures and see me there, mother,” she said brightly,
with a catch in her breath.
“I do—when I lie awake in the night, and give thanks.”
“Tell me over again about when you were a little girl, there,” she
coaxed.
Over and over again she had listened to the ever-new story of her
mother’s childhood and youth in Bensalem; Aunt Rody was the dragon,
Aunt Affy the angel, Uncle Cephas a helper in every difficulty, and
all the village a world where something strange and fascinating was
always happening.
“It was a very happy home for me when my father died and my mother
took me there; she died before I was twelve; and then twelve years I
was Aunt Affy’s girl; then your father took me away,” her mother said
with the memory of the years in her voice and eyes.
“I wonder if somebody will come and take me away, or whether I shall
stay forever and ever like Aunt Affy and Aunt Rody,” Judith wondered
in her expectant voice.
“If somebody comes—if our Father in Heaven sends somebody as good and
gentle and wise as your own father, I shall be glad of it up in
Heaven, I think. You do not remember your father; in his picture he is
like Don—Don is your father’s brother’s son; your fathers were much
alike. Your father was only a clerk, his salary was never large; Don’s
father was a business man, he died rich and left his only son a
fortune; but your father and I never longed for money—Don has always
given me money as his father did; he said you and I had a right to it.
It has never been hard to take money from Don—he will be always kind
to you; he thinks he has a right to you; you are the only children of
the two brothers; they were only two—they never had a sister. Now you
know all about your ancestry on both sides, I think; your grandfather
and grandmother Mackenzie were born in Scotland; they died before you
were born. Aunt Affy will be always telling you about the ‘Sparrow
girls.’ My mother was a Sparrow girl. Just a year ago we were in that
dear old home.”
“I was twelve then—I had my birthday there; perhaps I shall have
another birthday there in April. Aunt Affy wants us to come so much. I
can take better care of you now because I am older and I must not have
lessons to make you tired; we will have a long vacation; I will only
write poems for you and you needn’t even take the trouble to make the
measure right. Aunt Rody said I was a silly baby to be always hanging
about you; but she will see how I have grown up. Don says I am a
little woman. Now I’ll tell you a picture. Shut your eyes, again.”
The tear-blinded eyes were shut again; Judith had been looking into
the fire as she talked; she was afraid to look up into her mother’s
eyes. It was being brave to look into the fire.
“I see a room up-stairs, a room with a slanting roof and only one
window; the window looks down into the garden; it has a green paper
shade tied up with a cord; there is a strip of rag-carpet before the
bed, that is all the carpet there is; and there’s a funny old
wash-stand with a blue bowl sunk down into a hole on the top, and a
towel on the rail of the wash-stand with a red border—in winter a pipe
comes up in the stove-pipe hole from the big stove in the
sitting-room, but there’s ice in the pitcher very often; there’s a
bureau with a cracked looking-glass on the top, an old bureau,
everything is old but the little girl kneeling on the rag-carpet rug
beside the bed, with her head on the red and white quilt, saying her
prayers. That little girl is _you_, mother, a sweet, obedient
little girl, that hasn’t a will of her own, and tempers, and tantrums
like me.”
“I like to think that sweet little girl is you.”
“Then it _is_ me; I’ve grown sweet in a hurry,” Judith laughed,
“and left all my tempers and tantrums far behind.”
“There’s another T to go with them—_temptations_—through which
you grow strong.”
Not seeming to heed, but in reality holding her mother’s thought in
her heart Judith ran merrily on: “And I see a church, with a little
green in front, and posts to hitch the horses, the two church doors
are wide open, for in the picture it is Sunday morning; Aunt Rody is
in the head of a pew in the body of the church, and Aunt Affy sits
next, and Uncle Cephas is next the door, and there’s a girl between
Aunt Affy and Uncle Cephas, a girl fifteen years old and her hair is
braided, not in long, babyish curls—”
“Oh, my little girl, wear your curls as long as you can, because
mother loves them,” her mother urged, bending forward to touch the
soft, bright hair.
“Then her hair _is_ curled, and she is trying to be good and
listen. Perhaps she likes sermons—she looks so; in the picture the
sermon is like the Bible stories you tell me when we read together—I
_wish_ ministers told Bible stories. And there’s the sweetest
singing; it is like Marion Kenney’s singing; she sings like a bird,
Don says; there are girls and boys all over the church, for the
minister in the picture knows how to tell Bible stories to boys and
girls and make them as real as the people and things in Summer Avenue
and Bensalem; just as naughty and just as good. Jean Draper is
there—in the pew behind me. Why, mother,” bringing herself back to the
present and turning to look into her mother’s face, “Jean Draper was
never in the steam cars, or on a ferry-boat in all her life—she has
never been in New York or any where, only to Dunellen, which they call
‘town,’ and she walks there, or rides with her father. She wants to go
somewhere as much as I want to go to boarding-school. It’s the dream
of her life, as boarding-school is my dream.”
“Aunt Affy and Cousin Don will decide about boarding-school. Cousin
Don and I have talked about it, and I will tell Aunt Affy what I think
about it,” her mother decided with an unusual touch of firmness.
“But I wouldn’t leave _you_, mother, for all the boarding-schools
in the world.”
“And I wouldn’t let you for all the schools in the world.”
“Well, it’s only a dream, like Jean Draper’s outing. You like pictures
better than dreams. I think Don’s friend, Roger Kenney, is the
minister in the pulpit; Don said he had preached there almost all
winter, coming home every Tuesday—Monday he visits the people. Don is
sure Bensalem will give him a call. Uncle Cephas likes him so much,
and Uncle Cephas is an elder. Now, here’s another picture: on the same
side of the street as the church, with only the church-yard and the
locust grove between, it is the dear, dainty Queen Anne parsonage—only
two years old, and so new and pretty; Jean Draper went with me through
it—there was nobody there then—and nobody has lived there all this
year; there’s a furnace in the cellar like a city house, and a
bay-window in the study, and a pretty hall with stained-glass windows,
and a cunning kitchen, a cunning sitting-room, and sliding doors into
the parlor, and a piazza in the front, and at the side—and out every
window is the beautiful country. I hope I may go again. Mother, you
like this picture?” she asked earnestly, “that house is another dream
of mine. O, mother,” with a comical little cry, “I’m so full of
dreams, I’m full to bursting.”
“I like that picture. I like to think of Don’s friend there living a
strong life; he has no worldly ambition. Don says it has been wholly
rooted out of him. He was very fine in college, working beyond his
strength—eaten up with ambition. Then he had an experience; Don said
the fountains of the great deep were broken up in him, and he came out
of it another man—as humble and teachable as any child. Don is afraid
he will go there and be satisfied to stay.”
“Now, here’s another face,” said Judith, with a new reverence for
Don’s friend: “brown eyes, and a brown curly beard, and a brown head,
with laughing eyes, unless he is talking about grave things—he doesn’t
make you afraid to be good, but to love to. Still, I am so afraid he
will _talk_ to me some day and ask me questions; I don’t know how
to answer questions. Now, you know, I mean Don’s friend, Mr. Kenney.”
“Your pictures are very cheery. I hope you may tell some to poor old
Aunt Rody.”
“I shall never dare. She snaps at me. She shuts me up and makes me
forget what I want to say. Her eyes go _through_ me. I don’t love
Aunt Rody; I don’t _want_ to love Aunt Rody. She doesn’t like
baby girls,” contended Judith, shaking her yellow head. “She doesn’t
like me and Doodles. We are shaggy and a nuisance.”
“You will not always stay a baby girl.”
“No; I want to grow up faster; I wish I might braid my hair. I want to
write books and paint real pictures on canvas to earn money to take
you to Switzerland. I’m sure you would get well in Switzerland. I see
the pictures I would paint, and I think the books; but I am so slow
about it. Sweeping, and washing dishes, and doing errands, do not help
at all,” she said with a laugh that had no discouragement in it.
“They all help. Every obedient thing helps. You must grow up to your
book and your picture; living a sweet, joyous, truthful, obedient life
is growing up to it. The best books and the best pictures are the
expression of the truest and sweetest life; the strongest and wisest
life; am I talking over your head, dear?”
“No,” laughed Judith, “down into my heart.”
“My little girl has been her mother’s companion all these years; I
fear I sometimes forget that you are only a little girl. But if you
have grown old, you will grow young. I wish I could find a girl friend
for you. But God knows all the girls in the world, and he will find
one for you. If my daughter remembers all her life but one truth her
mother ever said to her, I hope it may be this: The true life is the
life hid with Christ; no other life _is_ life, it is playing at
life; this life is safe, still, hidden away, growing stronger every
day; the expression of it, the making it speak he will take care of
every hour of the day. You cannot understand this now—my words tell
you so little, but they will come back to you.”
“I will write it down,” promised Judith, who loved to write things
down, “and date it February fifteenth. Told in the Firelight. I know
what it means better than I can say it. I often know what things mean,
but I cannot say it.”
“Any more pictures?” suggested her mother, in a voice as bright as
Judith’s own.
“An old face with pink cheeks and a long gray curl behind each ear,
the softest step and the kindest voice—but I always forget and put
sounds in my pictures. Those sounds are always in my picture of Aunt
Affy.”
“You have not made a picture of Aunt Rody.”
“I don’t like to tell a picture of Aunt Rody. She is so old, so
old—and she isn’t happy—and I don’t believe she’s good. If it were not
for Aunt Rody I should think all old people were good; that all you
had to do to be good was to grow up and grow old.”
“She is not happy. Once, years and years ago, so long ago that almost
everybody has forgotten, she had a bitter disappointment.”
“What was it about, mother?” asked the girl, who always wove a
love-story into the stories she planned as she stepped about the
kitchen, or darned and mended the household wear.
“She was ready to be married—she learned that the man she loved—and
Aunt Rody _could_ love in those days—was a very, very bad man; he
deceived her; it did not break her heart, or soften it; it made it
hard. Unless we forgive, our hearts grow hard; she could not forgive;
she has said that she does not know how to forgive. Only in forgiving
do our hearts grow like God’s heart. He is always forgiving.”
“I forgave somebody once,” remembered Judith; “mother,” with a start,
“I do not always forgive Aunt Rody when she is ugly to me; if I do not
will I have a hard heart?”
“Yes. That spot toward Aunt Rody will grow harder and harder. You
cannot love God with the part of your heart that does not forgive.”
“Oh, deary _me_,” groaned Judith, springing up. “Will you like
milk-toast to-night? And prunes? Don says I know how to cook prunes.”
“Perhaps he will come to supper.”
“Then he must have a chop. Mother, I like to keep house. It’s easy.
It’s easier than forgiving,” she said, with her merry little laugh,
and a deep-down heartache.