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New Chronicles of Rebecca

K >> Kate Douglas Wiggin >> New Chronicles of Rebecca



This etext was typed by Theresa Armao of Albany, NY.





NEW CHRONICLES OF REBECCA
by Kate Douglas Wiggin

CONTENTS

First Chronicle
Jack O'Lantern

Second Chronicle
Daughters of Zion

Third Chronicle
Rebecca's Thought Book

Fourth Chronicle
A Tragedy in Millinery

Fifth Chronicle
The Saving of the Colors

Sixth Chronicle
The State of Maine Girl

Seventh Chronicle
The Little Prophet

Eighth Chronicle
Abner Simpson's New Leaf

Ninth Chronicle
The Green Isle

Tenth Chronicle
Rebecca's Reminiscences

Eleventh Chronicle
Abijah the Brave and the Fair Emma Jane



First Chronicle
JACK O'LANTERN

I

Miss Miranda Sawyer's old-fashioned garden was the pleasantest
spot in Riverboro on a sunny July morning. The rich color of the
brick house gleamed and glowed through the shade of the elms and
maples. Luxuriant hop-vines clambered up the lightning rods and
water spouts, hanging their delicate clusters here and there in
graceful profusion. Woodbine transformed the old shed and tool
house to things of beauty, and the flower beds themselves were
the prettiest and most fragrant in all the countryside. A row of
dahlias ran directly around the garden spot,--dahlias scarlet,
gold, and variegated. In the very centre was a round plot where
the upturned faces of a thousand pansies smiled amid their
leaves, and in the four corners were triangular blocks of sweet
phlox over which the butterflies fluttered unceasingly. In the
spaces between ran a riot of portulaca and nasturtiums, while in
the more regular, shell-bordered beds grew spirea and
gillyflowers, mignonette, marigolds, and clove pinks.

Back of the barn and encroaching on the edge of the hay field was
a grove of sweet clover whose white feathery tips fairly bent
under the assaults of the bees, while banks of aromatic mint and
thyme drank in the sunshine and sent it out again into the summer
air, warm, and deliciously odorous.

The hollyhocks were Miss Sawyer's pride, and they grew in a
stately line beneath the four kitchen windows, their tapering
tips set thickly with gay satin circlets of pink or lavender or
crimson.

"They grow something like steeples," thought little Rebecca
Randall, who was weeding the bed, "and the flat, round flowers
are like rosettes; but steeples wouldn't be studded with
rosettes, so if you were writing about them in a composition
you'd have to give up one or the other, and I think I'll give up
the steeples:--

Gay little hollyhock
Lifting your head,
Sweetly rosetted
Out from your bed.

It's a pity the hollyhock isn't really little, instead of
steepling up to the window top, but I can't say, 'Gay TALL
hollyhock.' . . . I might have it 'Lines to a Hollyhock in May,'
for then it would be small; but oh, no! I forgot; in May it
wouldn't be blooming, and it's so pretty to say that its head is
'sweetly rosetted' . . . I wish the teacher wasn't away; she
would like 'sweetly rosetted,' and she would like to hear me
recite 'Roll on, thou deep and dark blue ocean, roll!' that I
learned out of Aunt Jane's Byron; the rolls come booming out of
it just like the waves at the beach. . . . I could make nice
compositions now, everything is blooming so, and it's so warm and
sunny and happy outdoors. Miss Dearborn told me to write
something in my thought book every single day, and I'll begin
this very night when I go to bed."

Rebecca Rowena Randall, the little niece of the brick-house
ladies, and at present sojourning there for purposes of board,
lodging, education, and incidentally such discipline and
chastening as might ultimately produce moral excellence,--Rebecca
Randall had a passion for the rhyme and rhythm of poetry. From
her earliest childhood words had always been to her what dolls
and toys are to other children, and now at twelve she amused
herself with phrases and sentences and images as her schoolmates
played with the pieces of their dissected puzzles. If the heroine
of a story took a "cursory glance" about her "apartment," Rebecca
would shortly ask her Aunt Jane to take a "cursory glance" at her
oversewing or hemming; if the villain "aided and abetted" someone
in committing a crime, she would before long request the pleasure
of "aiding and abetting" in dishwashing or bedmaking. Sometimes
she used the borrowed phrases unconsciously; sometimes she
brought them into the conversation with an intense sense of
pleasure in their harmony or appropriateness; for a beautiful
word or sentence had the same effect upon her imagination as a
fragrant nosegay, a strain of music, or a brilliant sunset.

"How are you gettin' on, Rebecca Rowena?" called a peremptory
voice from within.

"Pretty good, Aunt Miranda; only I wish flowers would ever come
up as thick as this pigweed and plantain and sorrel. What MAKES
weeds be thick and flowers be thin?--I just happened to be
stopping to think a minute when you looked out."

"You think considerable more than you weed, I guess, by
appearances. How many times have you peeked into that humming
bird's nest? Why don't you work all to once and play all to once,
like other folks?"

"I don't know," the child answered, confounded by the question,
and still more by the apparent logic back of it. "I don't know,
Aunt Miranda, but when I'm working outdoors such a Saturday
morning as this, the whole creation just screams to me to stop it
and come and play."

"Well, you needn't go if it does!" responded her aunt sharply.
"It don't scream to me when I'm rollin' out these doughnuts, and
it wouldn't to you if your mind was on your duty."

Rebecca's little brown hands flew in and out among the weeds as
she thought rebelliously: "Creation WOULDN'T scream to Aunt
Miranda; it would know she wouldn't come.

Scream on, thou bright and gay creation, scream!
'Tis not Miranda that will hear thy cry!

Oh, such funny, nice things come into my head out here by myself,
I do wish I could run up and put them down in my thought book
before I forget them, but Aunt Miranda wouldn't like me to leave
off weeding:--

Rebecca was weeding the hollyhock bed
When wonderful thoughts came into her head.
Her aunt was occupied with the rolling pin
And the thoughts of her mind were common and thin.

That wouldn't do because it's mean to Aunt Miranda, and anyway it
isn't good. I MUST crawl under the syringa shade a minute, it's
so hot, and anybody has to stop working once in a while, just to
get their breath, even if they weren't making poetry.

Rebecca was weeding the hollyhock bed When marvelous thoughts
came into her head. Miranda was wielding the rolling pin And
thoughts at such times seemed to her as a sin.

How pretty the hollyhock rosettes look from down here on the
sweet, smelly ground!

"Let me see what would go with rosetting. AIDING AND ABETTING,
PETTING, HEN-SETTING, FRETTING,--there's nothing very nice, but I
can make fretting' do.

Cheered by Rowena's petting,
The flowers are rosetting,
But Aunt Miranda's fretting
Doth somewhat cloud the day."

Suddenly the sound of wagon wheels broke the silence and then a
voice called out--a voice that could not wait until the feet that
belonged to it reached the spot: "Miss Saw-YER! Father's got to
drive over to North Riverboro on an errand, and please can
Rebecca go, too, as it's Saturday morning and vacation besides?"

Rebecca sprang out from under the syringa bush, eyes flashing
with delight as only Rebecca's eyes COULD flash, her face one
luminous circle of joyous anticipation. She clapped her grubby
hands, and dancing up and down, cried: "May I, Aunt Miranda--can
I, Aunt Jane--can I, Aunt Miranda-Jane? I'm more than half
through the bed."

"If you finish your weeding tonight before sundown I s'pose you
can go, so long as Mr. Perkins has been good enough to ask you,"
responded Miss Sawyer reluctantly. "Take off that gingham apron
and wash your hands clean at the pump. You ain't be'n out o' bed
but two hours an' your head looks as rough as if you'd slep' in
it. That comes from layin' on the ground same as a caterpillar.
Smooth your hair down with your hands an' p'r'aps Emma Jane can
braid it as you go along the road. Run up and get your
second-best hair ribbon out o' your upper drawer and put on your
shade hat. No, you can't wear your coral chain--jewelry ain't
appropriate in the morning. How long do you cal'late to be gone,
Emma Jane?"

"I don't know. Father's just been sent for to see about a sick
woman over to North Riverboro. She's got to go to the poor
farm."

This fragment of news speedily brought Miss Sawyer, and her
sister Jane as well, to the door, which commanded a view of Mr.
Perkins and his wagon. Mr. Perkins, the father of Rebecca's bosom
friend, was primarily a blacksmith, and secondarily a selectman
and an overseer of the poor, a man therefore possessed of wide
and varied information.

"Who is it that's sick?" inquired Miranda.

"A woman over to North Riverboro."

"What's the trouble?"

"Can't say."

"Stranger?'

"Yes, and no; she's that wild daughter of old Nate Perry that
used to live up towards Moderation. You remember she ran away to
work in the factory at Milltown and married a do--nothin' fellow
by the name o' John Winslow?"

"Yes; well, where is he? Why don't he take care of her?"

"They ain't worked well in double harness. They've been rovin'
round the country, livin' a month here and a month there wherever
they could get work and house-room. They quarreled a couple o'
weeks ago and he left her. She and the little boy kind o' camped
out in an old loggin' cabin back in the woods and she took in
washin' for a spell; then she got terrible sick and ain't
expected to live."

"Who's been nursing her?" inquired Miss Jane.

"Lizy Ann Dennett, that lives nearest neighbor to the cabin; but
I guess she's tired out bein' good Samaritan. Anyways, she sent
word this mornin' that nobody can't seem to find John Winslow;
that there ain't no relations, and the town's got to be
responsible, so I'm goin' over to see how the land lays. Climb
in, Rebecca. You an' Emmy Jane crowd back on the cushion an' I'll
set forrard. That's the trick! Now we're off!"

"Dear, dear!" sighed Jane Sawyer as the sisters walked back into
the brick house. "I remember once seeing Sally Perry at meeting.
She was a handsome girl, and I'm sorry she's come to grief."

"If she'd kep' on goin' to meetin' an' hadn't looked at the men
folks she might a' be'n earnin' an honest livin' this minute,"
said Miranda. "Men folks are at the bottom of everything wrong in
this world," she continued, unconsciously reversing the verdict
of history.

"Then we ought to be a happy and contented community here in
Riverboro," replied Jane, "as there's six women to one man."

"If 't was sixteen to one we'd be all the safer," responded
Miranda grimly, putting the doughnuts in a brown crock in the
cellar-way and slamming the door.


II

The Perkins horse and wagon rumbled along over the dusty country
road, and after a discreet silence, maintained as long as human
flesh could endure, Rebecca remarked sedately:

"It's a sad errand for such a shiny morning, isn't it, Mr.
Perkins?"

"Plenty o' trouble in the world, Rebecky, shiny mornin's an'
all," that good man replied. "If you want a bed to lay on, a roof
over your head, an' food to eat, you've got to work for em. If I
hadn't a' labored early an' late, learned my trade, an' denied
myself when I was young, I might a' be'n a pauper layin' sick in
a loggin' cabin, stead o' bein' an overseer o' the poor an'
selectman drivin' along to take the pauper to the poor farm."

"People that are mortgaged don't have to go to the poor farm, do
they, Mr. Perkins?" asked Rebecca, with a shiver of fear as she
remembered her home farm at Sunnybrook and the debt upon it; a
debt which had lain like a shadow over her childhood.

"Bless your soul, no; not unless they fail to pay up; but Sal
Perry an' her husband hadn't got fur enough along in life to BE
mortgaged. You have to own something before you can mortgage it."

Rebecca's heart bounded as she learned that a mortgage
represented a certain stage in worldly prosperity.

"Well," she said, sniffing in the fragrance of the new-mown hay
and growing hopeful as she did so; "maybe the sick woman will be
better such a beautiful day, and maybe the husband will come back
to make it up and say he's sorry, and sweet content will reign in
the humble habitation that was once the scene of poverty, grief,
and despair. That's how it came out in a story I'm reading."

"I hain't noticed that life comes out like stories very much,"
responded the pessimistic blacksmith, who, as Rebecca privately
thought, had read less than half a dozen books in his long and
prosperous career.

A drive of three or four miles brought the party to a patch of
woodland where many of the tall pines had been hewn the previous
winter. The roof of a ramshackle hut was outlined against a
background of young birches, and a rough path made in hauling the
logs to the main road led directly to its door.

As they drew near the figure of a woman approached--Mrs. Lizy Ann
Dennett, in a gingham dress, with a calico apron over her head.

"Good morning, Mr. Perkins," said the woman, who looked tired and
irritable. "I'm real glad you come right over, for she took worse
after I sent you word, and she's dead."

Dead! The word struck heavily and mysteriously on the children's
ears. Dead! And their young lives, just begun, stretched on and
on, all decked, like hope, in living green. Dead! And all the
rest of the world reveling in strength. Dead! With all the
daisies and buttercups waving in the fields and the men heaping
the mown grass into fragrant cocks or tossing it into heavily
laden carts. Dead! With the brooks tinkling after the summer
showers, with the potatoes and corn blossoming, the birds singing
for joy, and every little insect humming and chirping, adding its
note to the blithe chorus of warm, throbbing life.

"I was all alone with her. She passed away suddenly jest about
break o' day," said Lizy Ann Dennett.

"Her soul passed upward to its God Just at the break of day."

These words came suddenly into Rebecca's mind from a tiny chamber
where such things were wont to lie quietly until something
brought them to the surface. She could not remember whether she
had heard them at a funeral or read them in the hymn book or made
them up "out of her own head," but she was so thrilled with the
idea of dying just as the dawn was breaking that she scarcely
heard Mrs. Dennett's conversation.

"I sent for Aunt Beulah Day, an' she's be'n here an' laid her
out," continued the long suffering Lizy Ann. "She ain't got any
folks, an' John Winslow ain't never had any as far back as I can
remember. She belongs to your town and you'll have to bury her
and take care of Jacky--that's the boy. He's seventeen months
old, a bright little feller, the image o' John, but I can't keep
him another day. I'm all wore out; my own baby's sick, mother's
rheumatiz is extry bad, and my husband's comin' home tonight from
his week's work. If he finds a child o' John Winslow's under his
roof I can't say what would happen; you'll have to take him back
with you to the poor farm."

"I can't take him up there this afternoon," objected Mr. Perkins.

"Well, then, keep him over Sunday yourself; he's good as a
kitten. John Winslow'll hear o' Sal's death sooner or later,
unless he's gone out of the state altogether, an' when he knows
the boy's at the poor farm, I kind o' think he'll come and claim
him. Could you drive me over to the village to see about the
coffin, and would you children be afraid to stay here alone for a
spell?" she asked, turning to the girls.

"Afraid?" they both echoed uncomprehendingly.

Lizy Ann and Mr. Perkins, perceiving that the fear of a dead
presence had not entered the minds of Rebecca or Emma Jane, said
nothing, but drove off together, counseling them not to stray far
away from the cabin and promising to be back in an hour.

There was not a house within sight, either looking up or down the
shady road, and the two girls stood hand in hand, watching the
wagon out of sight; then they sat down quietly under a tree,
feeling all at once a nameless depression hanging over their gay
summer-morning spirits.

It was very still in the woods; just the chirp of a grasshopper
now and then, or the note of a bird, or the click of a
far-distant mowing machine.

"We're WATCHING!" whispered Emma Jane. "They watched with Gran'pa
Perkins, and there was a great funeral and two ministers. He left
two thousand dollars in the bank and a store full of goods, and a
paper thing you could cut tickets off of twice a year, and they
were just like money."

"They watched with my little sister Mira, too," said Rebecca.
"You remember when she died, and I went home to Sunnybrook Farm?
It was winter time, but she was covered with evergreen and white
pinks, and there was singing."

"There won't be any funeral or ministers or singing here, will
there? Isn't that awful?"

"I s'pose not; and oh, Emma Jane, no flowers either. We might get
those for her if there's nobody else to do it."

"Would you dare put them on to her?" asked Emma Jane, in a hushed
voice.

"I don't know; I can't tell; it makes me shiver, but, of course,
we COULD do it if we were the only friends she had. Let's look
into the cabin first and be perfectly sure that there aren't any.
Are you afraid?"

"N-no; I guess not. I looked at Gran'pa Perkins, and he was just
the same as ever."

At the door of the hut Emma Jane's courage suddenly departed. She
held back shuddering and refused either to enter or look in.
Rebecca shuddered too, but kept on, drawn by an insatiable
curiosity about life and death, an overmastering desire to know
and feel and understand the mysteries of existence, a hunger for
knowledge and experience at all hazards and at any cost.

Emma Jane hurried softly away from the felt terrors of the cabin,
and after two or three minutes of utter silence Rebecca issued
from the open door, her sensitive face pale and woe-begone, the
ever-ready tears raining down her cheeks. She ran toward the edge
of the wood, sinking down by Emma Jane's side, and covering her
eyes, sobbed with excitement:

"Oh, Emma Jane, she hasn't got a flower, and she's so tired and
sad-looking, as if she'd been hurt and hurt and never had any
good times, and there's a weeny, weeny baby side of her. Oh, I
wish I hadn't gone in!"

Emma Jane blenched for an instant. "Mrs. Dennett never said THERE
WAS TWO DEAD ONES! ISN'T THAT DREADFUL? But," she continued, her
practical common sense coming to the rescue, "you've been in once
and it's all over; it won't be so bad when you take in the
flowers because you'll be used to it. The goldenrod hasn't begun
to bud, so there's nothing to pick but daisies. Shall I make a
long rope of them, as I did for the schoolroom?"

"Yes," said Rebecca, wiping her eyes and still sobbing. "Yes,
that's the prettiest, and if we put it all round her like a
frame, the undertaker couldn't be so cruel as to throw it away,
even if she is a pauper, because it will look so beautiful. From
what the Sunday school lessons say, she's only asleep now, and
when she wakes up she'll be in heaven."

"THERE'S ANOTHER PLACE," said Emma Jane, in an orthodox and
sepulchral whisper, as she took her ever-present ball of crochet
cotton from her pocket and began to twine the whiteweed blossoms
into a rope.

"Oh, well!" Rebecca replied with the easy theology that belonged
to her temperament. "They simply couldn't send her DOWN THERE
with that little weeny baby. Who'd take care of it? You know
page six of the catechism says the only companions of the wicked
after death are their father the devil and all the other evil
angels; it wouldn't be any place to bring up a baby."

"Whenever and wherever she wakes up, I hope she won't know that
the big baby is going to the poor farm. I wonder where he is?"

"Perhaps over to Mrs. Dennett's house. She didn't seem sorry a
bit, did she?"

"No, but I suppose she's tired sitting up and nursing a stranger.
Mother wasn't sorry when Gran'pa Perkins died; she couldn't be,
for he was cross all the time and had to be fed like a child.
Why ARE you crying again, Rebecca?"

"Oh, I don't know, I can't tell, Emma Jane! Only I don't want to
die and have no funeral or singing and nobody sorry for me! I
just couldn't bear it!"

"Neither could I," Emma Jane responded sympathetically; "but
p'r'aps if we're real good and die young before we have to be
fed, they will be sorry. I do wish you could write some poetry
for her as you did for Alice Robinson's canary bird, only still
better, of course, like that you read me out of your thought
book."

"I could, easy enough," exclaimed Rebecca, somewhat consoled by
the idea that her rhyming faculty could be of any use in such an
emergency. "Though I don't know but it would be kind of bold to
do it. I'm all puzzled about how people get to heaven after
they're buried. I can't understand it a bit; but if the poetry is
on her, what if that should go, too? And how could I write
anything good enough to be read out loud in heaven?"

"A little piece of paper couldn't get to heaven; it just
couldn't," asserted Emma Jane decisively. "It would be all blown
to pieces and dried up. And nobody knows that the angels can read
writing, anyway."

"They must be as educated as we are, and more so, too," agreed
Rebecca. "They must be more than just dead people, or else why
should they have wings? But I'll go off and write something while
you finish the rope; it's lucky you brought your crochet cotton
and I my lead pencil."

In fifteen or twenty minutes she returned with some lines written
on a scrap of brown wrapping paper. Standing soberly by Emma
Jane, she said, preparing to read them aloud: "They're not good;
I was afraid your father'd come back before I finished, and the
first verse sounds exactly like the funeral hymns in the church
book. I couldn't call her Sally Winslow; it didn't seem nice when
I didn't know her and she is dead, so I thought if I said friend'
it would show she had somebody to be sorry.

"This friend of ours has died and gone
From us to heaven to live.
If she has sinned against Thee, Lord,
We pray Thee, Lord, forgive.

"Her husband runneth far away
And knoweth not she's dead.
Oh, bring him back--ere tis too late--
To mourn beside her bed.

"And if perchance it can't be so,
Be to the children kind;
The weeny one that goes with her,
The other left behind."

"I think that's perfectly elegant!" exclaimed Emma Jane, kissing
Rebecca fervently. "You are the smartest girl in the whole State
of Maine, and it sounds like a minister's prayer. I wish we could
save up and buy a printing machine. Then I could learn to print
what you write and we'd be partners like father and Bill Moses.
Shall you sign it with your name like we do our school
compositions?"

"No," said Rebecca soberly. "I certainly shan't sign it, not
knowing where it's going or who'll read it. I shall just hide it
in the flowers, and whoever finds it will guess that there wasn't
any minister or singing, or gravestone, or anything, so somebody
just did the best they could."


III

The tired mother with the "weeny baby" on her arm lay on a long
carpenter's bench, her earthly journey over, and when Rebecca
stole in and placed the flowery garland all along the edge of the
rude bier, death suddenly took on a more gracious and benign
aspect. It was only a child's sympathy and intuition that
softened the rigors of the sad moment, but poor, wild Sal
Winslow, in her frame of daisies, looked as if she were missed a
little by an unfriendly world; while the weeny baby, whose heart
had fallen asleep almost as soon as it had learned to beat, the
weeny baby, with Emma Jane's nosegay of buttercups in its tiny
wrinkled hand, smiled as if it might have been loved and longed
for and mourned.

"We've done all we can now without a minister," whispered
Rebecca. "We could sing, God is ever good' out of the Sunday
school song book, but I'm afraid somebody would hear us and think
we were gay and happy. What's that?"

A strange sound broke the stillness; a gurgle, a yawn, a merry
little call. The two girls ran in the direction from which it
came, and there, on an old coat, in a clump of goldenrod bushes,
lay a child just waking from a refreshing nap.

"It's the other baby that Lizy Ann Dennett told about!" cried
Emma Jane.

"Isn't he beautiful!" exclaimed Rebecca. "Come straight to me!"
and she stretched out her arms.

The child struggled to its feet, and tottered, wavering, toward
the warm welcome of the voice and eyes. Rebecca was all mother,
and her maternal instincts had been well developed in the large
family in which she was next to the eldest. She had always
confessed that there were perhaps a trifle too many babies at
Sunnybrook Farm, but, nevertheless, had she ever heard it, she
would have stood loyally by the Japanese proverb: "Whether
brought forth upon the mountain or in the field, it matters
nothing; more than a treasure of one thousand ryo a baby precious
is."

"You darling thing!" she crooned, as she caught and lifted the
child. "You look just like a Jack-o'-lantern."

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