To fight in a far distant land,Your tears for my absence soon ceasing to flow,
Some other will court you, and you will bestow
On a wealthier suitor your hand.’”
“Rebecca, you can’t THINK how your voice carries! I believe mother can hear it over to my house!”
“Then, if she can, I must sing the third verse, just to clear your reputation from the cloud cast upon it in the second,” laughed her tormentor, going on with the song:
“‘Oh, hush these suspicions!’ Fair Emmajane said, ‘So hurtful to love and to me! For if you be living, or if you be dead, I swear, my Abijah, that none in your stead, Shall the husband of Emmajane be!’”
After ending the third verse Rebecca wheeled around on the piano stool and confronted her friend, who was carefully closing the parlor windows:—
“Emma Jane Perkins, it is an ordinary Thursday afternoon at four o’clock and you have on your new blue barege, although there is not even a church sociable in prospect this evening. What does this mean? Is Abijah the Brave coming at last?”
“I don’t know certainly, but it will be some time this week.”
“And of course you’d rather be dressed up and not seen, than seen when not dressed up. Right, my Fair Emmajane; so would I. Not that it makes any difference to poor me, wearing my fourth best black and white calico and expecting nobody.
“Oh, well, YOU! There’s something inside of you that does instead of pretty dresses,” cried Emma Jane, whose adoration of her friend had never altered nor lessened since they met at the age of eleven. “You know you are as different from anybody else in Riverboro as a princess in a fairy story. Libby Moses says they would notice you in Lowell, Massachusetts!”
“Would they? I wonder,” speculated Rebecca, rendered almost speechless by this tribute to her charms. “Well, if Lowell, Massachusetts, could see me, or if you could see me, in my new lavender muslin with the violet sash, it would die of envy, and so would you!”
“If I had been going to be envious of you, Rebecca, I should have died years ago. Come, let’s go out on the steps where it’s shady and cool.”
“And where we can see the Perkins front gate and the road running both ways,” teased Rebecca, and then, softening her tone, she said: “How is it getting on, Emmy? Tell me what’s happened since I’ve been in Brunswick.”
“Nothing much,” confessed Emma Jane. “He writes to me, but I don’t write to him, you know. I don’t dare to, till he comes to the house.”
“Are his letters still in Latin?” asked Rebecca, with a twinkling eye.
“Oh, no! Not now, because—well, because there are things you can’t seem to write in Latin. I saw him at the Masonic picnic in the grove, but he won’t say anything REAL to me till he gets more pay and dares to speak to mother and father. He IS brave in all other ways, but I ain’t sure he’ll ever have the courage for that, he’s so afraid of them and always has been. Just remember what’s in his mind all the time, Rebecca, that my folks know all about what his mother was, and how he was born on the poor-farm. Not that I care; look how he’s educated and worked himself up! I think he’s perfectly elegant, and I shouldn’t mind if he had been born in the bulrushes, like Moses.”
Emma Jane’s every-day vocabulary was pretty much what it had been before she went to the expensive Wareham Female Seminary. She had acquired a certain amount of information concerning the art of speech, but in moments of strong feeling she lapsed into the vernacular. She grew slowly in all directions, did Emma Jane, and, to use Rebecca’s favorite nautilus figure, she had left comparatively few outgrown shells on the shores of “life’s unresting sea.”
“Moses wasn’t born in the bulrushes, Emmy dear,” corrected Rebecca laughingly. “Pharaoh’s daughter found him there. It wasn’t quite as romantic a scene—Squire Bean’s wife taking little Abijah Flagg from the poorhouse when his girl-mother died, but, oh, I think Abijah’s splendid! Mr. Ladd says Riverboro’ll be proud of him yet, and I shouldn’t wonder, Emmy dear, if you had a three-story house with a cupola on it, some day; and sitting down at your mahogany desk inlaid with garnets, you will write notes stating that Mrs. Abijah Flagg requests the pleasure of Miss Rebecca Randall’s company to tea, and that the Hon. Abijah Flagg, M.C., will call for her on his way from the station with a span of horses and the turquoise carryall!”
Emma Jane laughed at the ridiculous prophecy, and answered: “If I ever write the invitation I shan’t be addressing it to Miss Randall, I’m sure of that; it’ll be to Mrs.——-”
“Don’t!” cried Rebecca impetuously, changing color and putting her hand over Emma Jane’s lips. “If you won’t I’ll stop teasing. I couldn’t bear a name put to anything, I couldn’t, Emmy dear! I wouldn’t tease you, either, if it weren’t something we’ve both known ever so long—something that you have always consulted me about of your own accord, and Abijah too.”
“Don’t get excited,” replied Emma Jane, “I was only going to say you were sure to be Mrs. Somebody in course of time.”
“Oh,” said Rebecca with a relieved sigh, her color coming back; “if that’s all you meant, just nonsense; but I thought, I thought—I don’t really know just what I thought!”
“I think you thought something you didn’t want me to think you thought,” said Emma Jane with unusual felicity.
“No, it’s not that; but somehow, today, I have been remembering things. Perhaps it was because at breakfast Aunt Jane and mother reminded me of my coming birthday and said that Squire Bean would give me the deed of the brick house. That made me feel very old and responsible; and when I came out on the steps this afternoon it was just as if pictures of the old years were moving up and down the road. Everything is so beautiful today! Doesn’t the sky look as if it had been dyed blue and the fields painted pink and green and yellow this very minute?”
“It’s a perfectly elegant day!” responded Emma Jane with a sigh. “If only my mind was at rest! That’s the difference between being young and grown-up. We never used to think and worry.”
“Indeed we didn’t! Look, Emmy, there’s the very spot where Uncle Jerry Cobb stopped the stage and I stepped out with my pink parasol and my bouquet of purple lilacs, and you were watching me from your bedroom window and wondering what I had in mother’s little hair trunk strapped on behind. Poor Aunt Miranda didn’t love me at first sight, and oh, how cross she was the first two years! But now every hard thought I ever had comes back to me and cuts like a knife!”
“She was dreadful hard to get along with, and I used to hate her like poison,” confessed Emma Jane; “but I am sorry now. She was kinder toward the last, anyway, and then, you see children know so little! We never suspected she was sick or that she was worrying over that lost interest money.”
“That’s the trouble. People seem hard and unreasonable and unjust, and we can’t help being hurt at the time, but if they die we forget everything but our own angry speeches; somehow we never remember theirs. And oh, Emma Jane, there’s another such a sweet little picture out there in the road. The next day after I came to Riverboro, do you remember, I stole out of the brick house crying, and leaned against the front gate. You pushed your little fat pink-and-white
