New Chronicles of Rebecca Part 5

Rebecca's heart sank at this frank confession, which only corroborated her own fears.

"I'm sorry, Emmy, dear," she said, "but our only excuse for drawing lots at all would be to have it sacred. We must think of it as a kind of a sign, almost like G.o.d speaking to Moses in the burning bush."

"Oh, I WISH there was a burning bush right here!" cried the distracted and recalcitrant missionary. "How quick I'd step into it without even stopping to take off my garnet ring!"

"Don't be such a scare-cat, Emma Jane!" exclaimed Candace bracingly.

"Jacob Moody can't kill you, even if he has an awful temper. Trot right along now before you get more frightened. Shall we go cross lots with her, Rebecca, and wait at the pasture gate? Then whatever happens Alice can put it down in the minutes of the meeting."

In these terrible crises of life time gallops with such incredible velocity that it seemed to Emma Jane only a breath before she was being dragged through the fields by the other Daughters of Zion, the guileless little Thirza panting in the rear.

At the entrance to the pasture Rebecca gave her an impa.s.sioned embrace, and whispering, "WHATEVER YOU DO, BE CAREFUL HOW YOU LEAD UP," lifted off the top rail and pushed her through the bars. Then the girls turned their backs reluctantly on the pathetic figure, and each sought a tree under whose friendly shade she could watch, and perhaps pray, until the missionary should return from her field of labor.

Alice Robinson, whose compositions were always marked 96 or 97,--100 symbolizing such perfection as could be attained in the mortal world of Riverboro,--Alice, not only Daughter, but Scribe of Zion, sharpened her pencil and wrote a few well-chosen words of introduction, to be used when the records of the afternoon had been made by Emma Jane Perkins and Jacob Moody.

Rebecca's heart beat tumultuously under her gingham dress. She felt that a drama was being enacted, and though unfortunately she was not the central figure, she had at least a modest part in it. The short lot had not fallen to the properest Daughter, that she quite realized; yet would any one of them succeed in winning Jacob Moody's attention, in engaging him in pleasant conversation, and finally in bringing him to a realization of his mistaken way of life? She doubted, but at the same moment her spirits rose at the thought of the difficulties involved in the undertaking.

Difficulties always spurred Rebecca on, but they daunted poor Emma Jane, who had no little thrills of excitement and wonder and fear and longing to sustain her lagging soul. That her interview was to be entered as "minutes" by a secretary seemed to her the last straw. Her blue eyes looked lighter than usual and had the glaze of china saucers; her usually pink cheeks were pale, but she pressed on, determined to be a faithful Daughter of Zion, and above all to be worthy of Rebecca's admiration and respect.

"Rebecca can do anything," she thought, with enthusiastic loyalty, "and I mustn't be any stupider than I can help, or she'll choose one of the other girls for her most intimate friend." So, mustering all her courage, she turned into Jacob Moody's dooryard, where he was chopping wood.

"It's a pleasant afternoon, Mr. Moody," she said in a polite but hoa.r.s.e whisper, Rebecca's words, "LEAD UP! LEAD UP!" ringing in clarion tones through her brain.

Jacob Moody looked at her curiously. "Good enough, I guess," he growled; "but I don't never have time to look at afternoons."

Emma Jane seated herself timorously on the end of a large log near the chopping block, supposing that Jacob, like other hosts, would pause in his tasks and chat.

"The block is kind of like an idol," she thought; "I wish I could take it away from him, and then perhaps he'd talk."

At this moment Jacob raised his axe and came down on the block with such a stunning blow that Emma Jane fairly leaped into the air.

"You'd better look out, Sissy, or you'll git chips in the eye!" said Moody, grimly going on with his work.

The Daughter of Zion sent up a silent prayer for inspiration, but none came, and she sat silent, giving nervous jumps in spite of herself whenever the axe fell upon the log Jacob was cutting.

Finally, the host became tired of his dumb visitor, and leaning on his axe he said, "Look here, Sis, what have you come for? What's your errant? Do you want apples? Or cider? Or what? Speak out, or GIT out, one or t'other."

Emma Jane, who had wrung her handkerchief into a clammy ball, gave it a last despairing wrench, and faltered: "Wouldn't you like--hadn't you better--don't you think you'd ought to be more constant at meeting and Sabbath school?"

Jacob's axe almost dropped from his nerveless hand, and he regarded the Daughter of Zion with unspeakable rage and disdain. Then, the blood mounting in his face, he gathered himself together, and shouted: "You take yourself off that log and out o' this dooryard double-quick, you imperdent sanct'omus young one! You just let me ketch Bill Perkins'

child trying to teach me where I shall go, at my age! Scuttle, I tell ye! And if I see your pious cantin' little mug inside my fence ag'in on sech a business I'll chase ye down the hill or set the dog on ye! SCOOT, I TELL YE!"

Emma Jane obeyed orders summarily, taking herself off the log, out the dooryard, and otherwise scuttling and scooting down the hill at a pace never contemplated even by Jacob Moody, who stood regarding her flying heels with a sardonic grin.

Down she stumbled, the tears coursing over her cheeks and mingling with the dust of her flight; blighted hope, shame, fear, rage, all tearing her bosom in turn, till with a hysterical shriek she fell over the bars and into Rebecca's arms outstretched to receive her. The other Daughters wiped her eyes and supported her almost fainting form, while Thirza, thoroughly frightened, burst into sympathetic tears, and refused to be comforted.

No questions were asked, for it was felt by all parties that Emma Jane's demeanor was answering them before they could be framed.

"He threatened to set the dog on me!" she wailed presently, when, as they neared the Sawyer pasture, she was able to control her voice. "He called me a pious, cantin' young one, and said he'd chase me out o' the dooryard if I ever came again! And he'll tell my father--I know he will, for he hates him like poison."

All at once the adult point of view dawned upon Rebecca. She never saw it until it was too obvious to be ignored. Had they done wrong in interviewing Jacob Moody? Would Aunt Miranda be angry, as well as Mr.

Perkins?

"Why was he so dreadful, Emmy?" she questioned tenderly. "What did you say first? How did you lead up to it?"

Emma Jane sobbed more convulsively, and wiped her nose and eyes impartially as she tried to think.

"I guess I never led up at all; not a mite. I didn't know what you meant. I was sent on an errant, and I went and done it the best I could!

(Emma Jane's grammar always lapsed in moments of excitement.) And then Jake roared at me like Squire Wins.h.i.+p's bull.... And he called my face a mug.... You shut up that secretary book, Alice Robinson! If you write down a single word I'll never speak to you again.... And I don't want to be a member' another minute for fear of drawing another short lot. I've got enough of the Daughters or Zion to last me the rest o' my life! I don't care who goes to meetin' and who don't."

The girls were at the Perkins's gate by this time, and Emma Jane went sadly into the empty house to remove all traces of the tragedy from her person before her mother should come home from the church.

The others wended their way slowly down the street, feeling that their promising missionary branch had died almost as soon as it had budded.

"Goodby," said Rebecca, swallowing lumps of disappointment and chagrin as she saw the whole inspiring plan break and vanish into thin air like an iridescent bubble. "It's all over and we won't ever try it again.

I'm going in to do overcasting as hard as I can, because I hate that the worst. Aunt Jane must write to Mrs. Burch that we don't want to be home missionaries. Perhaps we're not big enough, anyway. I'm perfectly certain it's nicer to convert people when they're yellow or brown or any color but white; and I believe it must be easier to save their souls than it is to make them go to meeting."

Third Chronicle. REBECCA'S THOUGHT BOOK

I

The "Sawyer girls'" barn still had its haymow in Rebecca's time, although the hay was a dozen years old or more, and, in the opinion of the occasional visiting horse, sadly juiceless and wanting in flavor.

It still sheltered, too, old Deacon Israel Sawyer's carryall and mowing-machine, with his pung, his sleigh, and a dozen other survivals of an earlier era, when the broad acres of the brick house went to make one of the finest farms in Riverboro.

There were no horses or cows in the stalls nowadays; no pig grunting comfortably of future spare ribs in the sty; no hens to peck the plants in the cherished garden patch. The Sawyer girls were getting on in years, and, mindful that care once killed a cat, they ordered their lives with the view of escaping that particular doom, at least, and succeeded fairly well until Rebecca's advent made existence a trifle more sensational.

Once a month for years upon years, Miss Miranda and Miss Jane had put towels over their heads and made a solemn visit to the barn, taking off the enameled cloth coverings (occasionally called "emmanuel covers" in Riverboro), dusting the ancient implements, and sometimes sweeping the heaviest of the cobwebs from the corners, or giving a brush to the floor.

Deacon Israel's tottering ladder still stood in its accustomed place, propped against the haymow, and the heavenly stairway leading to eternal glory scarcely looked fairer to Jacob of old than this to Rebecca. By means of its dusty rounds she mounted, mounted, mounted far away from time and care and maiden aunts, far away from childish tasks and childish troubles, to the barn chamber, a place so full of golden dreams, happy reveries, and vague longings, that, as her little brown hands clung to the sides of the ladder and her feet trod the rounds cautiously in her ascent, her heart almost stopped beating in the sheer joy of antic.i.p.ation.

Once having gained the heights, the next thing was to unlatch the heavy doors and give them a gentle swing outward. Then, oh, ever new Paradise!

Then, oh, ever lovely green and growing world! For Rebecca had that something in her soul that

"Gives to seas and sunset skies The unspent beauty of surprise."

At the top of Guide Board hill she could see Alice Robinson's barn with its s.h.i.+ning weather vane, a huge burnished fish that swam with the wind and foretold the day to all Riverboro. The meadow, with its sunny slopes stretching up to the pine woods, was sometimes a flowing sheet of s.h.i.+mmering gra.s.s, sometimes--when daisies and b.u.t.tercups were blooming--a vision of white and gold. Sometimes the shorn stubble would be dotted with "the happy hills of hay," and a little later the rock maple on the edge of the pines would stand out like a golden ball against the green; its neighbor, the sugar maple, glowing beside it, brave in scarlet.

It was on one of these autumn days with a wintry nip in the air that Adam Ladd (Rebecca's favorite "Mr. Aladdin"), after searching for her in field and garden, suddenly noticed the open doors of the barn chamber, and called to her. At the sound of his vice she dropped her precious diary, and flew to the edge of the haymow. He never forgot the vision of the startled little poetess, book in one mittened hand, pencil in the other, dark hair all ruffled, with the picturesque addition of an occasional glade of straw, her cheeks crimson, her eyes s.h.i.+ning.

"A Sappho in mittens!" he cried laughingly, and at her eager question told her to look up the unknown lady in the school encyclopedia, when she was admitted to the Female Seminary at Wareham.

Now, all being ready, Rebecca went to a corner of the haymow, and withdrew a thick blank-book with mottled covers. Out of her gingham ap.r.o.n pocket came a pencil, a bit of rubber, and some pieces of brown paper; then she seated herself gravely on the floor, and drew an inverted soapbox nearer to her for a table.

The book was reverently opened, and there was a serious reading of the extracts already carefully copied therein. Most of them were apparently to the writer's liking, for dimples of pleasure showed themselves now and then, and smiles of obvious delight played about her face; but once in a while there was a knitting of the brows and a sigh of discouragement, showing that the artist in the child was not wholly satisfied.