She had not her sister Hannah’s patience or her brother John’s sturdy staying power. Her will was sometimes willfulness, and the ease with which she did most things led her to be impatient of hard tasks or long ones. But whatever else there was or was not, there was freedom at Randall’s farm. The children grew, worked, fought, ate what and slept where they could; loved one another and their parents pretty well, but with no tropical passion; and educated themselves for nine months of the year, each one in his own way.
As a result of this method Hannah, who could only have been developed by forces applied from without, was painstaking, humdrum, and limited; while Rebecca, who apparently needed nothing but space to develop in, and a knowledge of terms in which to express herself, grew and grew and grew, always from within outward. Her forces of one sort and another had seemingly been set in motion when she was born; they needed no daily spur, but moved of their own accord—towards what no one knew, least of all Rebecca herself. The field for the exhibition of her creative instinct was painfully small, and the only use she had made of it as yet was to leave eggs out of the corn bread one day and milk another, to see how it would turn out; to part Fanny’s hair sometimes in the middle, sometimes on the right, and sometimes on the left side; and to play all sorts of fantastic pranks with the children, occasionally bringing them to the table as fictitious or historical characters found in her favorite books. Rebecca amused her mother and her family generally, but she never was counted of serious importance, and though considered “smart” and old for her age, she was never thought superior in any way. Aurelia’s experience of genius, as exemplified in the deceased Lorenzo de Medici led her into a greater admiration of plain, every-day common sense, a quality in which Rebecca, it must be confessed, seemed sometimes painfully deficient.
Hannah was her mother’s favorite, so far as Aurelia could indulge herself in such recreations as partiality. The parent who is obliged to feed and clothe seven children on an income of fifteen dollars a month seldom has time to discriminate carefully between the various members of her brood, but Hannah at fourteen was at once companion and partner in all her mother’s problems. She it was who kept the house while Aurelia busied herself in barn and field. Rebecca was capable of certain set tasks, such as keeping the small children from killing themselves and one another, feeding the poultry, picking up chips, hulling strawberries, wiping dishes; but she was thought irresponsible, and Aurelia, needing somebody to lean on (having never enjoyed that luxury with the gifted Lorenzo), leaned on Hannah. Hannah showed the result of this attitude somewhat, being a trifle careworn in face and sharp in manner; but she was a self-contained, well-behaved, dependable child, and that is the reason her aunts had invited her to Riverboro to be a member of their family and participate in all the advantages of their loftier position in the world. It was several years since Miranda and Jane had seen the children, but they remembered with pleasure that Hannah had not spoken a word during the interview, and it was for this reason that they had asked for the pleasure of her company. Rebecca, on the other hand, had dressed up the dog in John’s clothes, and being requested to get the three younger children ready for dinner, she had held them under the pump and then proceeded to “smack” their hair flat to their heads by vigorous brushing, bringing them to the table in such a moist and hideous state of shininess that their mother was ashamed of their appearance. Rebecca’s own black locks were commonly pushed smoothly off her forehead, but on this occasion she formed what I must perforce call by its only name, a spit-curl, directly in the centre of her brow, an ornament which she was allowed to wear a very short time, only in fact till Hannah was able to call her mother’s attention to it, when she was sent into the next room to remove it and to come back looking like a Christian. This command she interpreted somewhat too literally perhaps, because she contrived in a space of two minutes an extremely pious style of hairdressing, fully as effective if not as startling as the first. These antics were solely the result of nervous irritation, a mood born of Miss Miranda Sawyer’s stiff, grim, and martial attitude. The remembrance of Rebecca was so vivid that their sister Aurelia’s letter was something of a shock to the quiet, elderly spinsters of the brick house; for it said that Hannah could not possibly be spared for a few years yet, but that Rebecca would come as soon as she could be made ready; that the offer was most thankfully appreciated, and that the regular schooling and church privileges, as well as the influence of the Sawyer home, would doubtless be “the making of Rebecca.”
Chapter III.
A Difference in Hearts
“I don’ know as I cal’lated to be the makin’ of any child,” Miranda had said as she folded Aurelia’s letter and laid it in the light-stand drawer. “I s’posed, of course, Aurelia would send us the one we asked for, but it’s just like her to palm off that wild young one on somebody else.”
“You remember we said that Rebecca or even Jenny might come, in case Hannah couldn’t,” interposed Jane.
“I know we did, but we hadn’t any notion it would turn out that way,” grumbled Miranda.
“She was a mite of a thing when we saw her three years ago,” ventured Jane; “she’s had time to improve.”
“And time to grow worse!”
“Won’t it be kind of a privilege to put her on the right track?” asked Jane timidly.
“I don’ know about the privilege part; it’ll be considerable of a chore, I guess. If her mother hain’t got her on the right track by now, she won’t take to it herself all of a sudden.”
This depressed and depressing frame of mind had lasted until the eventful day dawned on which Rebecca was to arrive.
“If she makes as much work after she comes as she has before, we might as well give up hope of ever gettin’ any rest,” sighed Miranda as she hung the dish towels on the barberry bushes at the side door.
“But we should have had to clean house, Rebecca or no Rebecca,” urged Jane; “and I can’t see why you’ve scrubbed and washed and baked as you have for that one child, nor why you’ve about bought out Watson’s stock of dry goods.”
“I know Aurelia if you don’t,” responded Miranda. “I’ve seen her house, and I’ve seen that batch o’ children, wearin’ one another’s clothes and never carin’ whether they had ‘em on right sid’ out or not; I know what they’ve had to live and dress on, and so do you. That child will like as not come here with a passel o’ things borrowed from the rest o’ the family. She’ll have Hannah’s shoes and John’s undershirts and Mark’s socks most likely. I suppose she never had a thimble on her finger in her life, but she’ll know the feelin’ o’ one before she’s ben here many days. I’ve bought a piece of unbleached muslin and a piece o’ brown gingham for her to make up; that’ll keep her busy. Of course she won’t pick up anything after herself; she probably never see a duster, and she’ll be as hard to train into our ways as if she was a heathen.”
“She’ll make a dif’rence,” acknowledged Jane, “but she may turn out more biddable ‘n we think.”
“She’ll mind when she’s spoken to, biddable or not,” remarked Miranda with a shake of the last towel.
Miranda Sawyer had a heart, of course, but she had never used it for any other purpose than the pumping and circulating of blood. She was just, conscientious, economical, industrious; a regular attendant at church and Sunday-school, and a member of the State Missionary and Bible societies, but in the presence of all these chilly virtues you longed for one warm little fault, or lacking that, one likable failing, something to make you sure she was thoroughly alive. She had never had any education other than that of the neighborhood district school, for her desires and ambitions
