can’t think of the word!” chimed in Rebecca. “What’s the female of hero? Whatever it is, that’s what Mrs. Baxter called her!”
“Clara Belle’s the female of Simpson; that’s what she is,” Miss Miranda asserted; “but she’s been brought up to use her wits, and I ain’t sayin’ but she used em.”
“I should say she did!” exclaimed Miss Jane; “to put that screaming, suffering child in the baby-carriage and run all the way to the doctor’s when there wasn’t a soul on hand to advise her! Two or three more such actions would make the Simpson name sound consid’rable sweeter in this neighborhood.”
“Simpson will always sound like Simpson to me!” vouchsafed the elder sister, “but we’ve talked enough about em an’ to spare. You can go along, Rebecca; but remember that a child is known by the company she keeps.”
“All right, Aunt Miranda; thank you!” cried Rebecca, leaping from the chair on which she had been twisting nervously for five minutes. “And how does this strike you? Would you be in favor of my taking Clara Belle a company-tart?”
“Don’t Mrs. Fogg feed the young one, now she’s taken her right into the family?”
“Oh, yes,” Rebecca answered, “she has lovely things to eat, and Mrs. Fogg won’t even let her drink skim milk; but I always feel that taking a present lets the person know you’ve been thinking about them and are extra glad to see them. Besides, unless we have company soon, those tarts will have to be eaten by the family, and a new batch made; you remember the one I had when I was rewarding myself last week? That was queer—but nice,” she added hastily.
“Mebbe you could think of something of your own you could give away without taking my tarts!” responded Miranda tersely; the joints of her armor having been pierced by the fatally keen tongue of her niece, who had insinuated that company-tarts lasted a long time in the brick house. This was a fact; indeed, the company-tart was so named, not from any idea that it would ever be eaten by guests, but because it was too good for every-day use.
Rebecca’s face crimsoned with shame that she had drifted into an impolite and, what was worse, an apparently ungrateful speech.
“I didn’t mean to say anything not nice, Aunt Miranda,” she stammered. “Truly the tart was splendid, but not exactly like new, that’s all. And oh! I know what I can take Clara Belle! A few chocolate drops out of the box Mr. Ladd gave me on my birthday.”
“You go down cellar and get that tart, same as I told you,” commanded
Miranda, “and when you fill it don’t uncover a new tumbler of jelly; there’s some dried-apple preserves open that’ll do. Wear your rubbers and your thick jacket. After runnin’ all the way down there—for your legs never seem to be rigged for walkin’ like other girls’—you’ll set down on some damp stone or other and ketch your death o’ cold, an’ your
Aunt Jane n’ I’ll be kep’ up nights nursin’ you and luggin’ your meals upstairs to you on a waiter.”
Here Miranda leaned her head against the back of her rocking chair, dropped her knitting and closed her eyes wearily, for when the immovable body is opposed by the irresistible force there is a certain amount of jar and disturbance involved in the operation.
Rebecca moved toward the side door, shooting a questioning glance at Aunt Jane as she passed. The look was full of mysterious suggestion and was accompanied by an almost imperceptible gesture. Miss Jane knew that certain articles were kept in the entry closet, and by this time she had become sufficiently expert in telegraphy to know that Rebecca’s unspoken query meant: “COULD YOU PERMIT THE HAT WITH THE RED WINGS, IT BEING SATURDAY, FINE SETTLED WEATHER, AND A PLEASURE EXCURSION?”
These confidential requests, though fraught with embarrassment when Miranda was in the room, gave Jane much secret joy; there was something about them that stirred her spinster heart—they were so gay, so appealing, so un-Sawyer-, un-Riverboro-like. The longer Rebecca lived in the brick house the more her Aunt Jane marveled at the child. What made her so different from everybody else. Could it be that her graceless popinjay of a father, Lorenzo de Medici Randall, had bequeathed her some strange combination of gifts instead of fortune? Her eyes, her brows, the color of her lips, the shape of her face, as well as her ways and words, proclaimed her a changeling in the Sawyer tribe; but what an enchanting changeling; bringing wit and nonsense and color and delight into the gray monotony of the dragging years!
There was frost in the air, but a bright cheery sun, as Rebecca walked decorously out of the brick house yard. Emma Jane Perkins was away over Sunday on a visit to a cousin in Moderation; Alice Robinson and Candace Milliken were having measles, and Riverboro was very quiet. Still, life was seldom anything but a gay adventure to Rebecca, and she started afresh every morning to its conquest. She was not exacting; the Asmodean feat of spinning a sand heap into twine was, poetically speaking, always in her power, so the mile walk to the pink-house gate, and the tryst with freckled, red-haired Clara Belle Simpson, whose face Miss Miranda said looked like a raw pie in a brick oven, these commonplace incidents were sufficiently exhilarating to brighten her eye and quicken her step.
As the great bare horse-chestnut near the pink-house gate loomed into view, the red linsey-woolsey speck going down the road spied the blue linsey-woolsey speck coming up, and both specks flew over the intervening distance and, meeting, embraced each other ardently, somewhat to the injury of the company-tart.
“Didn’t it come out splendidly?” exclaimed Rebecca. “I was so afraid the fishman wouldn’t tell you to start exactly at two, or that one of us would walk faster than the other; but we met at the very spot! It was a very uncommon idea, wasn’t it? Almost romantic!”
“And what do you think?” asked Clara Belle proudly. “Look at this! Mrs. Fogg lent me her watch to come home by!”
“Oh, Clara Belle, how wonderful! Mrs. Fogg gets kinder and kinder to you, doesn’t she? You’re not homesick any more, are you?”
“No-o; not really; only when I remember there’s only little Susan to manage the twins; though they’re getting on real well without me. But I kind of think, Rebecca, that I’m going to be given away to the Foggs for good.”
“Do you mean adopted?”
“Yes; I think father’s going to sign papers. You see we can’t tell how many years it’ll be before the poor baby outgrows its burns, and Mrs. Fogg’ll never be the same again, and she must have somebody to help her.”
“You’ll be their real daughter, then, won’t you, Clara Belle? And Mr. Fogg is a deacon, and a selectman, and a road commissioner, and everything splendid.”
“Yes; I’ll have board, and clothes, and school, and be named Fogg, and” (here her voice sank to an awed whisper) “the upper farm if I should ever get married; Miss Dearborn told me that herself, when she was persuading me not to mind being given away.”
“Clara Belle Simpson!” exclaimed Rebecca in a transport. “Who’d have thought you’d be a female hero and an heiress besides? It’s just like a book story, and it happened in Riverboro. I’ll make Uncle Jerry Cobb allow there CAN be Riverboro stories, you see if I don’t.”
“Of course I know it’s all right,” Clara Belle replied soberly. “I’ll have a good home and father can’t keep us all; but it’s kind of dreadful to be given away, like a piano or a horse and carriage!”
Rebecca’s hand went out sympathetically to Clara Belle’s
