“Who comes to God an inch through doubtings dim,
In blazing light God will advance a mile to him.”
—From the Persian.
Aunt Rody gave Judith a nudge. The nudge startled the absorbed reader
into dropping, with a thud, the book she held in her hand upon the
carpeted floor of the pew; with a crimsoned face Judith stooped and
picked up the book; after a moment of deliberation and a defiant flash
toward Aunt Rody, stiff and straight in the end of the pew, she
re-opened her book and was again lost in the fascinating story. Aunt
Rody glared at her, but she turned a page, only half conscious of the
wrath that was being heaped up against her; this time it was not a
nudge, but a large hand that startled her; the large hand, brown,
strong, was laid across the page.
Judith gave a glance, not defiant, into the kindly, grave eyes, then
shut the book, straightened herself and tried hard to listen to the
minister.
The figure at the other end of the pew, the man’s figure, settled back
comfortably to listen, and listened without trying hard.
The kindly, grave eyes under the shaggy black brows never stirred from
the minister’s face; once in a while the brown, strong hand stroked
the long white beard; Judith watched him as he listened, and then she
watched Aunt Rody, unbending, alert, with her deep-set black eyes, her
hard-working hands very still in her new, black kid gloves.
When the sermon was ended Judith gave a sigh of relief; she could sit
still, she had sat still; but her mind had not followed the minister.
She wished she could like sermons. She liked the Bible. This sermon
was not like the Bible.
As she stood in the church doorway, waiting for Aunt Rody, who always
had something to tell, or something to ask in the crowd in the aisle,
she overheard a loud whisper behind her: “Oh, that’s Judith Mackenzie.
She has come to stay with the Sparrow girls. Her mother was their
niece. Father died long ago; mother last winter.” To escape further
details, the listener stepped forward and down one step; there was a
stir and some one stood beside her, a tall young man, not like any one
else in Bensalem: she knew without raising her eyes that he was the
new minister. She flushed, thinking that he had noticed that she was
reading her Sunday School book in church.
“Would you like to be a Christian?” he asked, with something in his
tone that made it hard for her to keep the tears back.
This was worse than a rebuke for reading; she might have excused
herself for that; for this she had no words. The voice was very low;
perhaps no one heard beside herself.
Too startled to speak at first, she kept silent; then, too truthful to
speak one word that she was not sure was true, and thinking that she
hardly knew what it was to _be_ a Christian, she could not say “Yes”;
not daring to say “No,” she stood silent.
“Pray for the Holy Spirit,” he said, moving away.
She knew how to pray; she had prayed all her life; but she had never
once prayed for the Holy Spirit. She was afraid to do that.
What would happen to her if she did, she wondered, as she walked down
the paved path to the gate; would a tongue of flame come down from
heaven and settle on her head? Would she speak with tongues, right
there, before them all, in the crowd? Would she heal the sick by
prayer and anointing with oil? Would she pray in prayer-meeting, and
go about from house to house talking about the Lord Jesus, whose dear,
sacred name she seldom took upon her lips?
What a strange thing to say to a girl of thirteen!
There were no young disciples in the Bible; they were all grown up and
old.
Just now all she wanted to do was to tell Jesus and his Father
everything that troubled her, and everything she was glad of, and read
the Bible, and,—“Come Judith,” interrupted Aunt Rody’s shrill voice.
She sat on the back seat of the carriage with Aunt Rody; Mr. Brush sat
alone on the front seat; Aunt Affy had not come to church to-day; it
was her turn to stay at home.
Aunt Rody insisted that some one should always stay at home; there was
the silver, and her will, and a great many other things to be guarded
from Sunday marauders.
“Judith Grey Mackenzie,” began Aunt Rody, in her most revengeful
voice, “you must behave in church or stay at home.”
“I was behaving—I read to help behave; when I cannot understand I
think everyday thoughts; isn’t that worse than reading?”
“Nothing is so bad behaved as reading. And all the folks seeing you.
What do you suppose the new minister thinks of you?”
“He thinks I am not—”
Her shy lips could not frame the words “a Christian.”
“Not very well brought up,” tartly finished Aunt Rody.
“I brought myself up, that’s the reason then,” replied Judith, her
eyes filling with resentful tears. “Mother was always too sick. Cousin
Don said my mother was the sweetest mother in the world.”
“You act like a sick mother; but you’ve got an aunt that isn’t sick;
and if I ever see you read again in church you shall not go to church
for six months. Tell your Cousin Don that.”
“I wouldn’t mind church,” replied Judith.
“To Sunday School then, if that hurts more.”
“Oh, tut, tut,” came good humoredly from the front seat. “Don’t forget
your own young days, Rody.”
“I never had any. Just as I shall never have any old age. I’ve never
had time to be young or old.”
Judith laughed. Aunt Rody was eighty-four years old.
“Don’t you deceive me about the book, Judith, for I don’t always go to
church.”
“Aunt Rody,” with girlish dignity, “I never deceived any one in my
life.”
“That’s a good deal to say.”
“I haven’t lived to be eighty-four, but I think I never _shall_
deceive. I would rather _die_ than not be true,” she burst out.
“H’m, you haven’t been tried.”
Judith thought she had; did not this grim, hard old woman try her
every day of her life?
The long village street was lined with maples and locusts; inside the
yards were horse-chestnut trees, lilacs, and syringas.
All over the beautiful country the fruit trees were in blossom; Judith
revelled in the fragrance and delicate tints of the apple-blossom; she
called it her apple-blossom spring.
The story and a half red farmhouse, with its slanting roof and long
piazza, marked the “Sparrow place”; it had been the Sparrow place one
hundred and fifty years. The red farmhouse was built one hundred years
ago; the Sparrow girls, the eight sisters, were all born there long
before many of the village people could remember.
As Judith stepped up on the piazza the bowed gray head at the window
was lifted; the girl went to the open window and stood; Aunt Affy took
off her spectacles and laid them in the book she was reading.
Judith thought Aunt Affy read but one book. How could anyone be wise
and read only one book?
“Well, dear,” said Aunt Affy in her welcoming tones. To Aunt Affy
Judith Grey Mackenzie was the sweetest picture of girlhood in all the
world; she was as fresh as the dew, tinted like an apple-blossom, as
natural as a wild rose. To everyone else she was a girl of thirteen,
with the faults, the forgetfulness, the impetuosity, the
thoughtlessness, and above all, the selfishness of girlhood. Her
yellow hair fell in long curls to her waist, because her mother had
loved it so; her eyes of deepest blue were frank and truth-telling; in
her lips, flexible, yet strong, was revealed a world of loving; a
world that she had not yet learned herself.
She was impatient, passionate, rebellious; but never was it in face,
voice, or attitude when under the witchery of Aunt Affy’s
appreciation.
“Aunt Affy, I’ve been wicked,” she confessed in a humiliated voice.
“So have I. I’ve been sitting here grumbling, when I should be the
happiest old sinner in the world.”
“I’ve been wickeder than that.”
“How much wickeder?”
“I borrowed a Sunday-school book to take to church because I do not
understand Mr. Kenney.”
“Did that help you understand him?”
“I did try at first,” Judith explained, laughing at Aunt Affy’s
serious question, “but it was about the things in Revelation, the hard
things—”
“Did he not say anything you _could_ understand?”
“No—” said Judith, thinking that his message to her, her own private
message, was the hardest of all to understand.
“You were very rude.”
“How was it rude?” Judith questioned, surprised.
“He was speaking to you, and you refused to listen.”
“I was listening to someone else,” said Judith, troubled.
“That was more rude still. That was premeditated rudeness.”
“I hope he did not notice it.”
“You may trust him for that.”
“But I cannot tell him I am sorry; it would choke me to death.”
“And another thing—if he is Christ’s ambassador, and you refused to
listen—”
The girl’s eyes filled, and her lips trembled; was it _that_ she had
done?
“It’s time to set the table,” were Aunt Affy’s next words, in an
unconcerned tone, polishing her glasses with a corner of her white
apron. That small, clean old kitchen; how Judith loved it. She loved
every kind of work that was done in it, even the wash-tubs, the smell
of the suds was exhilarating, and baking and ironing days were her
delight. Every nerve and muscle responded to the call to labor.
The south door opened on a flagged walk that led to Aunt Affy’s flower
garden, the north door led you out into a deep, square, grassy yard,
where the clothes were hung and bleached; a tall, shaggy pine stood
sentinel at one side of the door, on the other side ran the bench upon
which the milk-pans shone in a row; beyond the grass rose a stone
wall, and then there were fields and woods; woods in which the thrush
hid, and the whip-poor-will; a brook started from a spring in the
woods and tumbled over the pebbles down into the meadows, then out,
below the flower garden and across the road, where it was bridged with
a stone arch.
In the kitchen was a brick oven, its iron door stood out black among
the white-washed bricks; the uneven boards of the kitchen were always
scrubbed clean, the stove was brushed into a shining blackness every
day, the two tables were as spotless as sand, the scrubbing-brush and
Aunt Affy’s strong hands could make them.
Out of the three windows were pictures of which the city-bred girl
never wearied. Her apple-blossom spring was the spring of her new
birth.
“Aunt Rody, please excuse me,” Judith said, rising from the dinner
table.
“You haven’t eaten your custard, and you like it with crab-apple
jelly.”
The yellow custard in the big coffee-cup with a broken handle, and the
generous spoonful of jelly quivering on top was a temptation; she
looked at it, then pushed it away. Nobody would ever know that she was
punishing herself for being “rude” in church; it was easier to punish
herself than to apologize to Mr. Kenney; and something had to be done.
“I want to study my Sunday-school lesson,” she evaded, and then her
heart sank at her deception; she had not told Aunt Rody all the truth.
She fled into the parlor with a question from Aunt Rody pursuing her;
her cheeks were burning, and she was trembling with shame and anger.
Why couldn’t Aunt Rody leave her alone? Sometimes she almost hated
Aunt Rody. A corner of the stiff, long, horse-hair sofa was her
retreat; it was often her retreat; she called it her valley of
humiliation.
In her lesson to-day she found the loveliest thing. Aunt Affy was
teaching her that the Bible was a treasure-house.
“By this shall all men know that ye are my disciples, if ye have love
one to another.”
All men know—just by loving—not by doing any great hard thing—by
loving—but that was hard, if it meant bearing with Aunt Rody’s
misunderstanding and sharpness and fault-finding, and being always on
the watch to find evil in you.
But “all men know” was the comfort of it; she need not pray in prayer
meeting as Miss Kenney did, nor do the wonderful things the disciples
did; all men would know that she wanted to be a Christian, if she
tried to be loving.
She repeated the words of Christ in a soft monotone, her small Bible
in her hand, and her head pillowed on her hair on the hard sofa-arm.
Aunt Affy pushed the door wider and entered, bringing a glass half
filled with crab-apple jelly.
“I saved your custard—it’s on the hanging shelf in the cellar,” she
said, opening the door of the chimney cupboard to set the glass in its
own space in the row of jelly glasses.
“Aunt Affy,” lifting her tumbled head, and with grave eyes asking her
question: “what is—who is a disciple?”
“A disciple is one who learns. You are my disciple when you learn of
me. The disciple of Christ is the man, or woman, or child who learns
of him. When you are about the farm with Cephas, you are his disciple,
in sewing and mending you are Aunt Rody’s, in housekeeping generally
you are my disciple.”
Aunt Affy went out, and the tumbled head dropped back to the hard
sofa-arm again. Would Christ let her be a “disciple” a little while,
and then be a Christian when she grew up, she pondered.
She wanted to learn of him; she would read the Gospels through and
through and through. She would learn them by heart. For her lesson
to-day she would learn these seven verses he had spoken to his own,
real, grown-up disciples.
That afternoon in Sunday-school, after the lesson was ended, the new
minister left his class of boys and came to the pulpit stairs and
stood and talked to the children; his opening sentence thrilled one
small listener:—
“_The disciples were called Christians_ first at Antioch.”
If you were a disciple, only a disciple, learning and loving, you were
called a Christian. Then he spoke of the Holy Spirit; he was the very
heart and will of Christ; he spoke in a low, sweet voice to children,
a constraining voice, making known the things Christ the Lord would
have them do; he showed them the things of Christ.
Had she dared she would have stepped out of her pew and gone up the
aisle to the new minister and told him that she _did_ want to be a
Christian, and she would not be afraid to ask the Holy Spirit to tell
her all the things Christ wanted her to do. Miss Kenney, her teacher
and the minister’s sister, noticed the start and flush, the hesitancy,
the eager look, as the minister came down the aisle and paused to
speak to her girls; she saw Judith’s eyes drop as he took her hand,
and then her shy withdrawal of herself.
Suddenly the girl turned, and with the flash of decision in her voice,
said bravely, detaining the minister with her trembling little hand:—
“I am sorry I read in church this morning; I will never do it again,
even if I don’t understand. Please excuse me.”
“I saw you,” he said, smiling, and taking the brave little hand into
both his own; “I will try to talk to _you_ next Sunday. Thank you for
the lesson.”
Then shy Judith slipped away, and never told even Aunt Affy that she
had apologized to the new minister.
That evening in the twilight, sitting on the piazza alone, she wrote
on the fly-leaf of her small Bible, in pencil:—
Judith Grey Mackenzie; A Disciple.
And the date, May 15, 18—.
She thought she would like to tell somebody that she was a disciple.
But if they should ask how it happened, she could not tell. It had
happened as still as a leaf fluttering in the wind, as softly as the
apple-blossoms came; nobody could tell about that. She thought the
Holy Spirit must know how it happened.