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“You darling thing!” she crooned, as she caught and lifted the child. “You look just like a Jack-o’-lantern.”
The boy was clad in a yellow cotton dress, very full and stiff. His hair was of such a bright gold, and so sleek and shiny, that he looked like a fair, smooth little pumpkin. He had wide blue eyes full of laughter, a neat little vertical nose, a neat little horizontal mouth with his few neat little teeth showing very plainly, and on the whole Rebecca’s figure of speech was not so wide of the mark.
“Oh, Emma Jane! Isn’t he too lovely to go to the poor farm? If only we were married we could keep him and say nothing and nobody would know the difference! Now that the Simpsons have gone away there isn’t a single baby in Riverboro, and only one in Edgewood. It’s a perfect shame, but I can’t do anything; you remember Aunt Miranda wouldn’t let me have the Simpson baby when I wanted to borrow her just for one rainy Sunday.”
“My mother won’t keep him, so it’s no use to ask her; she says most every day she’s glad we’re grown up, and she thanks the Lord there wasn’t but two of us.”
“And Mrs. Peter Meserve is too nervous,” Rebecca went on, taking the village houses in turn; “and Mrs. Robinson is too neat.”
“People don’t seem to like any but their own babies,” observed Emma Jane.
“Well, I can’t understand it,” Rebecca answered. “A baby’s a baby, I should think, whose ever it is! Miss Dearborn is coming back Monday; I wonder if she’d like it? She has nothing to do out of school, and we could borrow it all the time!”
“I don’t think it would seem very genteel for a young lady like Miss Dearborn, who ‘boards round,’ to take a baby from place to place,” objected Emma Jane.
“Perhaps not,” agreed Rebecca despondently, “but I think if we haven’t got any—any—PRIVATE babies in Riverboro we ought to have one for the town, and all have a share in it. We’ve got a town hall and a town lamp post and a town watering trough. Things are so uneven! One house like mine at Sunnybrook, brimful of children, and the very next one empty! The only way to fix them right would be to let all the babies that ever are belong to all the grown-up people that ever are,—just divide them up, you know, if they’d go round. Oh, I have a thought! Don’t you believe Aunt Sarah Cobb would keep him? She carries flowers to the graveyard every little while, and once she took me with her. There’s a marble cross, and it says: SACRED TO THE MEMORY OF SARAH ELLEN, BELOVED CHILD OF SARAH AND JEREMIAH COBB, AGED 17 MONTHS. Why, that’s another reason; Mrs. Dennett says this one is seventeen months. There’s five of us left at the farm without me, but if we were only nearer to Riverboro, how quick mother would let in one more!”
“We might see what father thinks, and that would settle it,” said Emma Jane. “Father doesn’t think very sudden, but he thinks awful strong. If we don’t bother him, and find a place ourselves for the baby, perhaps he’ll be willing. He’s coming now; I hear the wheels.”
Lizy Ann Dennett volunteered to stay and perform the last rites with the undertaker, and Jack-o’-lantern, with his slender wardrobe tied in a bandanna handkerchief, was lifted into the wagon by the reluctant Mr. Perkins, and jubilantly held by Rebecca in her lap. Mr. Perkins drove off as speedily as possible, being heartily sick of the whole affair, and thinking wisely that the little girls had already seen and heard more than enough of the seamy side of life that morning.
Discussion concerning Jack-o’-lantern’s future was prudently deferred for a quarter of an hour, and then Mr. Perkins was mercilessly pelted with arguments against the choice of the poor farm as a place of residence for a baby.
“His father is sure to come back some time, Mr. Perkins,” urged Rebecca. “He couldn’t leave this beautiful thing forever; and if Emma Jane and I can persuade Mrs. Cobb to keep him a little while, would you care?”
No; on reflection Mr. Perkins did not care. He merely wanted a quiet life and enough time left over from the public service to attend to his blacksmith’s shop; so instead of going home over the same road by which they came he crossed the bridge into Edgewood and dropped the children at the long lane which led to the Cobb house.
Mrs. Cobb, “Aunt Sarah” to the whole village, sat by the window looking for Uncle Jerry, who would soon be seen driving the noon stage to the post office over the hill. She always had an eye out for Rebecca, too, for ever since the child had been a passenger on Mr. Cobb’s stagecoach, making the eventful trip from her home farm to the brick house in Riverboro in his company, she had been a constant visitor and the joy of the quiet household. Emma Jane, too, was a well-known figure in the lane, but the strange baby was in the nature of a surprise—a surprise somewhat modified by the fact that Rebecca was a dramatic personage and more liable to appear in conjunction with curious outriders, comrades, and retainers than the ordinary Riverboro child. She had run away from the too stern discipline of the brick house on one occasion, and had been persuaded to return by Uncle Jerry. She had escorted a wandering organ grinder to their door and begged a lodging for him on a rainy night; so on the whole there was nothing amazing about the coming procession.
The little party toiled up to the hospitable door, and Mrs. Cobb came out to meet them.
Rebecca was spokesman. Emma Jane’s talent did not lie in eloquent speech, but it would have been a valiant and a fluent child indeed who could have usurped Rebecca’s privileges and tendencies in this direction, language being her native element, and words of assorted sizes springing spontaneously to her lips.
“Aunt Sarah, dear,” she said, plumping Jack-o’-lantern down on the grass as she pulled his dress over his feet and smoothed his hair becomingly, “will you please not say a word till I get through—as it’s very important you should know everything before you answer yes or no? This is a baby named Jacky Winslow, and I think he looks like a Jack-o’-lantern. His mother has just died over to North Riverboro, all alone, excepting for Mrs. Lizy Ann Dennett, and there was another little weeny baby that died with her, and Emma Jane and I put flowers around them and did the best we could. The father—that’s John Winslow—quarreled with the mother—that was Sal Perry on the Moderation Road—and ran away and left her. So he doesn’t know his wife and the weeny baby are dead. And the town has got to bury them because they can’t find the father right off quick, and Jacky has got to go to the poor farm this afternoon. And it seems an awful shame to take him up to that lonesome place with those old people that can’t amuse him, and if Emma Jane and Alice Robinson and I take most all the care of him we thought perhaps you and Uncle Jerry would keep him just for a little while. You’ve got a cow and a turn-up bedstead, you know,” she hurried on insinuatingly, “and there’s hardly any pleasure as cheap as more babies where there’s ever been any before, for baby carriages and trundle beds and cradles don’t wear out, and there’s always clothes left over from the old baby to begin the new one on. Of course, we can collect enough things to start Jacky, so he won’t be much trouble or expense; and anyway, he’s past the most troublesome age and you won’t have to be up nights with him, and he isn’t afraid of anybody or anything, as you can see by his just sitting there laughing and sucking his thumb, though he doesn’t know what’s going to become of him. And he’s just seventeen months old like dear little Sarah Ellen in the graveyard, and we thought we ought to give you the refusal of him before he goes to the poor farm, and what do you think about it? Because it’s near my dinner time and Aunt Miranda will keep me in the whole afternoon if I’m late, and I’ve got to finish weeding the hollyhock bed before sundown.”
IV
Mrs. Cobb had enjoyed a considerable period of reflection during this monologue, and Jacky had not used the time unwisely, offering several unconscious arguments and suggestions to the matter under discussion; lurching over on the greensward and righting himself with a chuckle, kicking his bare feet about in delight at the sunshine and groping for his toes with arms too short to reach them, the movement involving an entire upsetting of equilibrium followed by more chuckles.
Coming down the last of the stone steps, Sarah Ellen’s mother regarded the baby with interest and sympathy.
“Poor little mite!” she said; “that doesn’t know what he’s lost and what’s going to happen to him. Seems to me we might keep him a spell till we’re sure his father’s deserted him for good. Want to come to Aunt Sarah, baby?”
Jack-o’-lantern turned from Rebecca and Emma Jane and regarded the kind face gravely; then he held out both his hands and Mrs. Cobb, stooping, gathered him like a harvest. Being lifted into her arms, he at once tore her spectacles from her nose and laughed aloud. Taking them from him gently, she put them on again, and set him in the cushioned rocking chair under the lilac bushes beside the steps. Then she took one of his soft hands in hers and patted it, and fluttered her fingers like birds before his eyes, and snapped them like castanets, remembering all the arts she had lavished upon “Sarah Ellen, aged seventeen months,” years and years ago.
Motherless baby and babyless mother,Bring them together to love one another.Rebecca knew nothing of this couplet, but she saw clearly enough that her case was won.
“The boy must be hungry; when was he fed last?” asked Mrs. Cobb. “Just stay a second longer while I get him some morning’s milk; then you run home to your dinners and I’ll speak to Mr. Cobb this afternoon. Of course, we can keep the baby for a week or two till we see what happens. Land! He ain’t goin’ to be any more trouble than a wax doll! I guess he ain’t been used to much attention, and that kind’s always the easiest to take care of.”
At six o’clock that evening Rebecca and Emma Jane flew up the hill and down the lane again, waving their hands to the dear old couple who were waiting for them in the usual place, the back piazza where they had sat so many summers in a blessed companionship never marred by an unloving word.
“Where’s Jacky?” called Rebecca breathlessly, her voice always outrunning her feet.
“Go up to my chamber, both of you, if you want to see,” smiled Mrs. Cobb, “only don’t wake him up.”
The girls went softly up the stairs into Aunt Sarah’s room. There, in the turn-up bedstead that had been so long empty, slept Jack-o’-lantern, in blissful unconsciousness of the doom he had so lately escaped. His nightgown and pillow case were clean and fragrant with lavender, but they were both as yellow as saffron, for they had belonged to Sarah Ellen.
“I wish his mother could see him!” whispered Emma Jane.
“You can’t tell; it’s all puzzly about heaven, and perhaps she does,” said Rebecca, as they turned reluctantly from the fascinating scene and stole down to the piazza.
It was a beautiful and a happy summer that year, and every day it was filled with blissful plays and still more blissful duties. On the Monday after Jack-o’-lantern’s arrival in Edgewood Rebecca founded the Riverboro Aunts Association. The Aunts were Rebecca, Emma Jane, Alice Robinson, and Minnie Smellie, and each of the first three promised to labor for and amuse the visiting baby for two days a week, Minnie Smellie, who lived at some distance from the Cobbs, making herself responsible for Saturday afternoons.
Minnie Smellie was not a general favorite among the Riverboro girls, and it was only in an unprecedented burst of magnanimity that they admitted her into the rites of fellowship, Rebecca hugging herself secretly at the thought, that as Minnie gave only the leisure time of one day a week, she could not be called a “full” Aunt. There had been long and bitter feuds between the two children during Rebecca’s first summer in Riverboro, but since Mrs. Smellie had told her daughter that one more quarrel would invite a punishment so terrible that it could only be hinted at vaguely, and Miss Miranda Sawyer had remarked that any niece of hers who couldn’t get along peaceable with the neighbors had better go back to the seclusion of a farm where there weren’t any, hostilities had been veiled, and a suave and diplomatic relationship had replaced the former one, which had been wholly primitive, direct, and barbaric. Still, whenever Minnie Smellie, flaxen-haired, pink-nosed, and ferret-eyed, indulged in fluent conversation, Rebecca, remembering the old fairy story, could always see toads hopping out of her mouth. It was really very unpleasant, because Minnie could never see them herself; and what was more amazing, Emma Jane perceived nothing of the sort, being almost as blind, too, to the diamonds that fell continually from Rebecca’s lips; but Emma Jane’s strong point was not her imagination.
A shaky perambulator was found in Mrs. Perkins’s wonderful attic; shoes and stockings were furnished by Mrs. Robinson; Miss Jane Sawyer knitted a blanket and some shirts; Thirza Meserve, though too young for an aunt, coaxed from her mother some dresses and nightgowns, and was presented with a green paper certificate allowing her to wheel Jacky up and down the road for an hour under the superintendence of a full Aunt. Each girl, under the constitution of the association, could call Jacky “hers” for two days in the week, and great, though friendly, was the rivalry between them, as they washed, ironed, and sewed for their adored nephew.
If Mrs. Cobb had not been the most amiable woman in the world she might have had difficulty in managing the aunts, but she always had Jacky to herself the earlier part of the day and after dusk at night.
Meanwhile Jack-o’-lantern grew healthier and heartier and jollier as the weeks slipped away. Uncle Jerry joined the little company of worshipers and slaves, and one fear alone stirred in all their hearts; not, as a sensible and practical person might imagine, the fear that the recreant father might never return to claim his child, but, on the contrary, that he MIGHT do so!
October came at length with its cheery days and frosty nights, its glory of crimson leaves and its golden harvest of pumpkins and ripened corn. Rebecca had been down by the Edgewood side of the river and had come up across the pastures for a good-night play with Jacky. Her literary labors had been somewhat interrupted by the joys and responsibilities of vice-motherhood, and the thought book was less frequently drawn from its hiding place under the old haymow in the barn chamber.
Mrs. Cobb stood behind the screen door with her face pressed against the wire netting, and Rebecca could see that she was wiping her eyes.
All at once the child’s heart gave one prophetic throb and then stood still. She was like a harp that vibrated with every wind of emotion, whether from another’s grief or her own.
She looked down the lane, around the curve of the stone wall, red with woodbine, the lane that would meet the stage road to the station. There, just mounting the crown of the hill and about to disappear on the other side, strode a stranger man, big and tall, with a crop of reddish curly hair showing from under his straw hat. A woman walked by his side, and perched on his shoulder, wearing his most radiant and triumphant mien, as joyous in leaving Edgewood as he had been during every hour of his sojourn there—rode Jack-o’-lantern!
Rebecca gave a cry in which maternal longing and helpless, hopeless jealousy strove for supremacy. Then, with an impetuous movement she started to run after the disappearing trio.
Mrs. Cobb opened the door hastily, calling after her, “Rebecca, Rebecca, come back here! You mustn’t follow where you haven’t any right to go. If there’d been anything to say or do, I’d a’ done it.”
“He’s mine! He’s mine!” stormed Rebecca. “At least he’s yours and mine!”
“He’s his father’s first of all,” faltered Mrs. Cobb; “don’t let’s forget that; and we’d ought to be glad and grateful that John Winslow’s come to his senses an’ remembers he’s brought a child into the world and ought to take care of it. Our loss is his gain and it may make a man of him. Come in, and we’ll put things away all neat before your Uncle Jerry gets home.”
Rebecca sank in a pitiful little heap on Mrs. Cobb’s bedroom floor and sobbed her heart out. “Oh, Aunt Sarah, where shall we get another Jack-o’-lantern, and how shall I break it to Emma Jane? What if his father doesn’t love him, and what if he forgets to strain the milk or lets him go without his nap? That’s the worst of babies that aren’t private—you have to part with them sooner or later!”
“Sometimes you have to part with your own, too,” said Mrs. Cobb sadly; and though there were lines of sadness in her face there was neither rebellion nor repining, as she folded up the sides of the turn-up bedstead preparatory to banishing it a second time to the attic. “I shall miss Sarah Ellen now more’n ever. Still, Rebecca, we mustn’t feel to complain. It’s the Lord that giveth and the Lord that taketh away: Blessed be the name of the Lord.”
Second Chronicle. DAUGHTERS OF ZION
I
Abijah Flagg was driving over to Wareham on an errand for old Squire Winship, whose general chore-boy and farmer’s assistant he had been for some years.
He passed Emma Jane Perkins’s house slowly, as he always did. She was only a little girl of thirteen and he a boy of fifteen or sixteen, but somehow, for no particular reason, he liked to see the sun shine on her thick braids of reddish-brown hair. He admired her china-blue eyes too, and her amiable, friendly expression. He was quite alone in the world, and he always thought that if he had anybody belonging to him he would rather have a sister like Emma Jane Perkins than anything else within the power of Providence to bestow. When she herself suggested this relationship a few years later he cast it aside with scorn, having changed his mind in the interval—but that story belongs to another time and place.
Emma Jane was not to be seen in garden, field, or at the window, and Abijah turned his gaze to the large brick house that came next on the other side of the quiet village street. It might have been closed for a funeral. Neither Miss Miranda nor Miss Jane Sawyer sat at their respective windows knitting, nor was Rebecca Randall’s gypsy face to be discerned. Ordinarily that will-o’-the wispish little person could be seen, heard, or felt wherever she was.
“The village must be abed, I guess,” mused Abijah, as he neared the Robinsons’ yellow cottage, where all the blinds were closed and no sign of life showed on porch or in shed. “No, ‘t aint, neither,” he thought again, as his horse crept cautiously down the hill, for from the direction of the Robinsons’ barn chamber there floated out into the air certain burning sentiments set to the tune of “Antioch.” The words, to a lad brought up in the orthodox faith, were quite distinguishable:
“Daughter of Zion, from the dust, Exalt thy fallen head!”
Even the most religious youth is stronger on first lines than others, but Abijah pulled up his horse and waited till he caught another familiar verse, beginning:
“Rebuild thy walls, thy bounds enlarge, And send thy heralds forth.”
“That’s Rebecca carrying the air, and I can hear Emma Jane’s alto.”
“Say to the North,Give up thy charge,And hold not back, O South,And hold not back, O South,” etc.“Land! ain’t they smart, seesawin’ up and down in that part they learnt in singin’ school! I wonder what they’re actin’ out, singin’ hymn-tunes up in the barn chamber? Some o’ Rebecca’s doins, I’ll be bound! Git dap, Aleck!”
Aleck pursued his serene and steady trot up the hills on the Edgewood side of the river, till at length he approached the green Common where the old Tory Hill meeting-house stood, its white paint and green blinds showing fair and pleasant in the afternoon sun. Both doors were open, and as Abijah turned into the Wareham road the church melodeon pealed out the opening bars of the Missionary Hymn, and presently a score of voices sent the good old tune from the choir-loft out to the dusty road:
“Shall we whose souls are lightedWith Wisdom from on high,Shall we to men benightedThe lamp of life deny?”“Land!” exclaimed Abijah under his breath. “They’re at it up here, too! That explains it all. There’s a missionary meeting at the church, and the girls wa’n’t allowed to come so they held one of their own, and I bate ye it’s the liveliest of the two.”
Abijah Flagg’s shrewd Yankee guesses were not far from the truth, though he was not in possession of all the facts. It will be remembered by those who have been in the way of hearing Rebecca’s experiences in Riverboro, that the Rev. and Mrs. Burch, returned missionaries from the Far East, together with some of their children, “all born under Syrian skies,” as they always explained to interested inquirers, spent a day or two at the brick house, and gave parlor meetings in native costume.
These visitors, coming straight from foreign lands to the little Maine village, brought with them a nameless enchantment to the children, and especially to Rebecca, whose imagination always kindled easily. The romance of that visit had never died in her heart, and among the many careers that dazzled her youthful vision was that of converting such Syrian heathen as might continue in idol worship after the Burches’ efforts in their behalf had ceased. She thought at the age of eighteen she might be suitably equipped for storming some minor citadel of Mohammedanism; and Mrs. Burch had encouraged her in the idea, not, it is to be feared, because Rebecca showed any surplus of virtue or Christian grace, but because her gift of language, her tact and sympathy, and her musical talent seemed to fit her for the work.
It chanced that the quarterly meeting of the Maine Missionary Society had been appointed just at the time when a letter from Mrs. Burch to Miss Jane Sawyer suggested that Rebecca should form a children’s branch in Riverboro. Mrs. Burch’s real idea was that the young people should save their pennies and divert a gentle stream of financial aid into the parent fund, thus learning early in life to be useful in such work, either at home or abroad.
The girls themselves, however, read into her letter no such modest participation in the conversion of the world, and wishing to effect an organization without delay, they chose an afternoon when every house in the village was vacant, and seized upon the Robinsons’ barn chamber as the place of meeting.
Rebecca, Alice Robinson, Emma Jane Perkins, Candace Milliken, and Persis Watson, each with her hymn book, had climbed the ladder leading to the haymow a half hour before Abijah Flagg had heard the strains of “Daughters of Zion” floating out to the road. Rebecca, being an executive person, had carried, besides her hymn book, a silver call-bell and pencil and paper. An animated discussion regarding one of two names for the society, The Junior Heralds or The Daughters of Zion, had resulted in a unanimous vote for the latter, and Rebecca had been elected president at an early stage of the meeting. She had modestly suggested that Alice Robinson, as the granddaughter of a missionary to China, would be much more eligible.
“No,” said Alice, with entire good nature, “whoever is ELECTED president, you WILL be, Rebecca—you’re that kind—so you might as well have the honor; I’d just as lieves be secretary, anyway.”
“If you should want me to be treasurer, I could be, as well as not,” said Persis Watson suggestively; “for you know my father keeps china banks at his store—ones that will hold as much as two dollars if you will let them. I think he’d give us one if I happen to be treasurer.”
The three principal officers were thus elected at one fell swoop and with an entire absence of that red tape which commonly renders organization so tiresome, Candace Milliken suggesting that perhaps she’d better be vice-president, as Emma Jane Perkins was always so bashful.
“We ought to have more members,” she reminded the other girls, “but if we had invited them the first day they’d have all wanted to be officers, especially Minnie Smellie, so it’s just as well not to ask them till another time. Is Thirza Meserve too little to join?”
“I can’t think why anybody named Meserve should have called a baby Thirza,” said Rebecca, somewhat out of order, though the meeting was carried on with small recognition of parliamentary laws. “It always makes me want to say: