had no more to do than several others, but she was somehow in the foreground. It transpired afterwards at various village entertainments that Rebecca couldn’t be kept in the background; it positively refused to hold her. Her worst enemy could not have called her pushing. She was ready and willing and never shy; but she sought for no chances of display and was, indeed, remarkably lacking in self-consciousness, as well as eager to bring others into whatever fun or entertainment there was. If wherever the MacGregor sat was the head of the table, so in the same way wherever Rebecca stood was the centre of the stage. Her clear high treble soared above all the rest in the choruses, and somehow everybody watched her, took note of her gestures, her whole-souled singing, her irrepressible enthusiasm.
Finally it was all over, and it seemed to Rebecca as if she should never be cool and calm again, as she loitered on the homeward path. There would be no lessons to learn to-night, and the vision of helping with the preserves on the morrow had no terrors for her—fears could not draw breath in the radiance that flooded her soul. There were thick gathering clouds in the sky, but she took no note of them save to be glad that she could raise her sunshade. She did not tread the solid ground at all, or have any sense of belonging to the common human family, until she entered the side yard of the brick house and saw her aunt Miranda standing in the open doorway. Then with a rush she came back to earth.
Chapter IX.
Ashes of Roses
“There she is, over an hour late; a little more an’ she’d ‘a’ been caught in a thunder shower, but she’d never look ahead,” said Miranda to Jane; “and added to all her other iniquities, if she ain’t rigged out in that new dress, steppin’ along with her father’s dancin’-school steps, and swingin’ her parasol for all the world as if she was play-actin’. Now I’m the oldest, Jane, an’ I intend to have my say out; if you don’t like it you can go into the kitchen till it’s over. Step right in here, Rebecca; I want to talk to you. What did you put on that good new dress for, on a school day, without permission?”
“I had intended to ask you at noontime, but you weren’t at home, so I couldn’t,” began Rebecca.
“You did no such a thing; you put it on because you was left alone, though you knew well enough I wouldn’t have let you.”
“If I’d been CERTAIN you wouldn’t have let me I’d never have done it,” said Rebecca, trying to be truthful; “but I wasn’t CERTAIN, and it was worth risking. I thought perhaps you might, if you knew it was almost a real exhibition at school.”
“Exhibition!” exclaimed Miranda scornfully; “you are exhibition enough by yourself, I should say. Was you exhibitin’ your parasol?”
“The parasol WAS silly,” confessed Rebecca, hanging her head; “but it’s the only time in my whole life when I had anything to match it, and it looked so beautiful with the pink dress! Emma Jane and I spoke a dialogue about a city girl and a country girl, and it came to me just the minute before I started how nice it would come in for the city girl; and it did. I haven’t hurt my dress a mite, aunt Mirandy.”
“It’s the craftiness and underhandedness of your actions that’s the worst,” said Miranda coldly. “And look at the other things you’ve done! It seems as if Satan possessed you! You went up the front stairs to your room, but you didn’t hide your tracks, for you dropped your handkerchief on the way up. You left the screen out of your bedroom window for the flies to come in all over the house. You never cleared away your lunch nor set away a dish, AND YOU LEFT THE SIDE DOOR UNLOCKED from half past twelve to three o’clock, so ‘t anybody could ‘a’ come in and stolen what they liked!”
Rebecca sat down heavily in her chair as she heard the list of her transgressions. How could she have been so careless? The tears began to flow now as she attempted to explain sins that never could be explained or justified.
“Oh, I’m so sorry!” she faltered. “I was trimming the schoolroom, and got belated, and ran all the way home. It was hard getting into my dress alone, and I hadn’t time to eat but a mouthful, and just at the last minute, when I honestly—HONESTLY—would have thought about clearing away and locking up, I looked at the clock and knew I could hardly get back to school in time to form in the line; and I thought how dreadful it would be to go in late and get my first black mark on a Friday afternoon, with the minister’s wife and the doctor’s wife and the school committee all there!”
“Don’t wail and carry on now; it’s no good cryin’ over spilt milk,” answered Miranda. “An ounce of good behavior is worth a pound of repentance. Instead of tryin’ to see how little trouble you can make in a house that ain’t your own home, it seems as if you tried to see how much you could put us out. Take that rose out o’ your dress and let me see the spot it’s made on your yoke, an’ the rusty holes where the wet pin went in. No, it ain’t; but it’s more by luck than forethought. I ain’t got any patience with your flowers and frizzled-out hair and furbelows an’ airs an’ graces, for all the world like your Miss-Nancy father.”
Rebecca lifted her head in a flash. “Look here, aunt Mirandy, I’ll be as good as I know how to be. I’ll mind quick when I’m spoken to and never leave the door unlocked again, but I won’t have my father called names. He was a p-perfectly l-lovely father, that’s what he was, and it’s MEAN to call him Miss Nancy!”
“Don’t you dare answer me back that imperdent way, Rebecca, tellin’ me I’m mean; your father was a vain, foolish, shiftless man, an’ you might as well hear it from me as anybody else; he spent your mother’s money and left her with seven children to provide for.”
“It’s s-something to leave s-seven nice children,” sobbed Rebecca.
“Not when other folks have to help feed, clothe, and educate ‘em,” responded Miranda. “Now you step upstairs, put on your nightgown, go to bed, and stay there till to-morrow mornin’. You’ll find a bowl o’ crackers an’ milk on your bureau, an’ I don’t want to hear a sound from you till breakfast time. Jane, run an’ take the dish towels off the line and shut the shed doors; we’re goin’ to have a turrible shower.”
“We’ve had it, I should think,” said Jane quietly, as she went to do her sister’s bidding. “I don’t often speak my mind, Mirandy; but you ought not to have said what you did about Lorenzo. He was what he was, and can’t be made any different; but he was Rebecca’s father, and Aurelia always says he was a good husband.”
Miranda had never heard the proverbial phrase about the only “good Indian,” but her mind worked in the conventional manner when she said grimly, “Yes, I’ve noticed that dead husbands are usually good ones; but the truth needs an airin’ now and then, and that child will never amount to a hill o’ beans till she gets some of her father trounced out of her. I’m glad I said just what I did.”
“I daresay you are,” remarked Jane, with what might be described as one of her annual bursts of courage; “but all the same, Mirandy, it wasn’t good manners, and it wasn’t good religion!”
The clap of thunder that shook the house just at that moment made no such peal in Miranda Sawyer’s ears as Jane’s remark made when it fell with a deafening roar on her conscience.
Perhaps after all it is just as well to speak only once a year and then speak to the purpose.
Rebecca mounted the back stairs wearily, closed the door of her bedroom, and took off the beloved pink gingham with trembling
